Transcription
[Music] The New York Times published a lead column on January 18th, 2025, titled "Are We Sleepwalking Into Autocracy?" The columnist's answer is yes, unless, and I quote, "Defenders of democracy have to stay United, focusing on ensuring that checks and balances remain intact and that crucial democratic watchdog institutions elude capture."
What is absent from the Times article is the complicity of the media, and especially the New York Times, in shutting down coverage of the fight by unions, grassroots movements, whistleblowers, and civic organizations, often led by the consumer advocate and former presidential candidate Ralph Nader, to placate their advertisers. This decision, made by newspapers such as the New York Times four decades ago, essentially erased these popular initiatives from public consciousness. This eraser, done to placate wealthy corporations and oligarchs and boost revenue, bolstered the power of corporations and the government to dominate and shape public discourse, and in the process, saw them become ever more secretive and ever more autocratic.
As Ralph Nader notes, the regular reporting about what activists were doing in the 1960s and 1970s made possible the consumer, environmental, labor, and Freedom of Information laws. Similar efforts now cannot gather momentum with media invisibility. Legislative hearings, prosecutions, and regulatory actions cannot get jumpstarted just by the people insistent on a just and democratic society. How often do you see op-eds from civic labor advocates, Ralph asks? How often do you read reviews of their books? How often do you see profiles of them? How often have the groundbreaking studies by Public Citizen, Common Cause, Center for Science and the Public Interest, Veterans for Peace, Union of Concerned Scientists, etc., received coverage?
This eraser stands in stark contrast to the coverage given over to those on the far right and corporations. Figures like Donald Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Elon Musk get plenty of press. The media landscape is siloed. Media outlets, both the legacy media and the digital media, cater to well-defined demographics. But the power of the legacy media, should it decide to use its power, is to help set the agenda through its reporting. Most digital sites feed off of the reporting of the establishment media, spinning it left or right, and what it does not cover often does not get covered. Legions of reporters, 500 full-time reporters, cover Congress. Hundreds more sit at the feet of the titans of commerce and Wall Street, spitting back to the public official communications and fawning interviews with the powerful, the famous, and the rich. Unless they are deployed outside the halls of Congress and the centers of power, what is left of our democracy, and not much of it is left, will wither and die.
Joining me to discuss our march towards tyranny, the complicity of institutions such as the media and the liberal class, including the Democratic Party, and what we must do to wrest back power is Ralph Nader, who has been fighting corporate power longer, more effectively, and with more integrity than any other American. Ralph, let's go back to where we were, because where we are now is a reaction to what you, at the epicenter of it, built. We can begin with your groundbreaking book, *Unsafe at Any Speed*, which should be taught in every journalism school. It is a masterful piece of investigative reporting. But let's go back to what we had and then how they organized to take it away.
Yeah, thank you, Chris. It's very well-documented, the whole history of it. When I wrote the book, *Unsafe at Any Speed*, a reporter for *Science* magazine picked it up, and then the *New York Times* picked it up off of *Science* magazine, and it made page one. And so that was a good start.
Ralph, I just want to interrupt for people who don't know this, these were cars made by GM that were not safe.
Yeah, well, it was a critique of unsafely designed cars, cars without seat belts, airbags, rollover bars, collapsing steering columns, padded dash panels, all the things we take for granted now. And I led with a chapter on the Corvair, which is uniquely unstable in cornering maneuvers. At any rate, up until then, the press would never cover criticisms of cars by model or by manufacturer. They would refer to the Corvair until we broke the taboo as a middle-sized, rear-engine car, and it wouldn't mention the name. All right, so we broke the taboo, and I began contacting members of Congress because the next step after the book were congressional hearings in the tried-and-true tradition of civics 101. So I lived in a boarding house, and I would call from an outside phone to members of Congress, and they would invariably say when they answered the phone, "Who are you with?" Well, in those days, the only answer you could give was, "I'm with a trade association or corporation or union." There are virtually no citizen groups operating at that time.
So I would go down to Capitol Hill and I would find the staff that was responsive. And there were, for example, Senator Ribicoff's staff, Senator Magnuson's staff. And then we would start having hearings. And before the hearings, I would call The Washington Post, New York Times, AP, UPI, Baltimore Sun, and the Wall Street Journal, and the Detroit papers, because it was on automobiles. And not not long thereafter, I had a whole bevy of reporters who wanted to cover what I was doing up there, wanted to cover the hearings. They didn't just do a feature hoping for a Pulitzer and then leave the subject entirely the way they do now. They did what was called regular reporting, beat reporting. And because I would get in those papers, it would be a recall, it would be widely publicized. Members of Congress began more and more to open their doors to me and to have hearings in the Senate and in the House. And the press feels more comfortable reporting hearings on corporate misbehavior or corporate crime than if citizens had some sort of rally.
Even then, so to make a long story short, in a matter of a few months after the publication of *Unsafe at Any Speed* in November 1965, by September, Congress had passed the first bill ever to regulate the most powerful industry in the country at the time for safety standards, pollution control, and fuel efficiency, three objectives. And they sent it to Lyndon Johnson, who had a signing ceremony, and he invited me there and gave me one of the pens, which I can't find now, by the way. So I was off to the races. So I figured, well, I don't want to be a lone ranger here. There are too many corporate lobbyists. They started beefing up their lobbying in Washington, including the auto industry.
And let me, let me just stop you because, Ralph, you, let's not bypass the fact that GM mounted a pretty, you know, intense and dirty campaign against you.
Yes, they hired a private detective with several former FBI people. That's what happened to a lot of FBI agents when they retired, to go to work for these large corporations, to follow me around the country, try to get dirt on me, to discredit my testimony before Congress. And the Detroit paper, Bob Irvin, first wrote the article fingering GM as behind this. And then all the other press jumped on. And that's when Senator Ribicoff had his widely publicized hearings, and then it shifted over to Senator Magnuson, who reported the bill out to the Senate floor. So that helped, of course.
But then I started going after other industries, the pipeline safety issue, the insurance industry, and others. And it, for a while, it worked like a charm. We recruited law school students who just graduated or over the summer, and the Washington Post publicized one of their reports exposing the weak Federal Trade Commission, and Congress had hearings. There were hearings at the House, and we had five young law students, or law students, testify. And the Post called them "Nader's Raiders." So that was a very useful moniker for more media. And we did one report after another on the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Food and Drug Administration, the Interstate Commerce Commission, the FAA, and each one got coverage.
Now, when you get coverage in the Times or Post or AP, or you get coverage on TV and radio, because the original content comes from the newspapers, and then, you know, NBC, ABC, so I got on *Meet the Press*, for example. I got on a lot of radio. I got on the evening news. And then we started getting Nader's Raiders major media to broaden the base, and it worked like a charm. The members of Congress couldn't shrug us off because they didn't want to be criticized by columnists like Drew Pearson in the Washington Post or the regular news reporters on Capitol Hill. There would be hearings, there would be legislation, and we got not just the auto safety law, we got the consumer product safety law, we got the flammable fabrics protection law, we got in the environmental area, the fundamental air and water pollution control acts, started the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, OSHA, the Freedom of Information Act, on and on.
And then something happened. And what happened...
Let me stop you there, Ralph. Let, let me just stop you there to make two points. One, what you did was create organizations, Common Cause, all these organizations which you then spun off. They became kind of autonomous consumer agencies, environmental agencies. So you created a counterweight to corporate power. Number one. And number two, I think we have to delineate the relationship you had with the press then and now, because these reporters, there was an alliance between your work and those reporters. Is that correct?
Yeah, but we weren't asking for favors, Chris. We said to them, "Hold us to the standard of newsworthiness." That's all we ask of you. And so they did, and we were very newsworthy. So much so that Ben Bradlee, the celebrated editor of the Washington Post, charged out of his office into the newsroom one day, holding up the Washington Post that covered one of our reports, and he said, "Why aren't you guys digging in like Nader is? What's going on here?" So that launched even more investigative reports. Had nothing to do with us. And then the television began picking up and saying, "You know, this is good for ratings. Let's have an onsite consumer reporter for the evening news," and that spread around the country.
Yeah, I started the Center for Auto Safety, Public Citizen, the Pension Rights Center, the Public Interest Research Groups around the country, and many other groups, because again, I didn't want to be a lone ranger. We had to have much more resources, many more people to counter the hordes of corporate lobbyists and their packs. So this went on until, uh, the, probably 1974, '75.
Let me just stop you because 1971 is a pivotal year. That's when you get the corporate blueprint for the blowback, you know, the Powell Memo, right? And you're the only person named to be targeted in that memo. So, you know, corporations feel heat from grassroots, civic, popular movements, unions, and they react. But let's just briefly raise the '71 Powell Memo, because they kind of followed it to the letter, what, what they, what corporations proposed doing and then the effects of that.
Well, Lewis Powell was a corporate attorney in Richmond. He represented utilities and other companies, and he was asked by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for advice on what to do with the rousing activity on campuses, the students, the anti-war, the Civil Rights, women's rights movement, criticism of big banks and other corporations, the eruption of resistance to pollution, and at that time, the early Earth Day mobilization.
I'm sorry, you started Earth Day. That was your idea, right? I believe that is correct.
And he wrote a memorandum, about 33 pages. Just read it recently. And he basically said, "Hey, we got to wake up. We're the business community. These people, they're not just radicals, they are regular people that are very turned off, and they want to regulate us, they want to tax us, they want to sue us. And we've got to beef up our lobbying, we've got to have a good presence on campus, we've got to do much more media." And they listened, and they did beef up.
But the pivotal change was not that. The pivotal change was A.B. Rosenthal, the new managing editor of the New York Times. And he was what we would call now a neoconservative. And he was a foreign reporter for the New York Times in Poland and elsewhere, and then they made him managing editor. And he did not like us. He was opening suburban editions to the New York Times. He wanted more ads. He thought we were bad for business. And he basically started to shut us down. The first thing he did was he told the Washington Bureau that if we come out with a critical report for a corporation, and the corporation does not respond, they are not to report on our findings, on our revelations.
Well, you know, that doesn't take long for corporations to find that out, and so they didn't respond. So the Washington Bureau would send the article up to New York for publication, and it wouldn't get in. He then did like Arab Americans, particularly. He was a staunch supporter of the Israeli government. Can do no wrong in those days. And there was not not a little bigotry here involved, as people told me at the time. And so he wanted basically to shut us down. And the coverage began to decline in the Times.
Well, if the coverage declines, let me, Ralph, let me, let me just stop you there. First of all, most people don't know, or may not know, you're of Lebanese descent. But secondly, we also, that was a moment when the New York Times was, was, had severe financial distress. It was not bringing in the ad revenue. And what A.B. Rosenthal did was create all the sections that we now see today, Style, you know, Business, all this stuff, which were just magnets for advertisers, high-end advertisers. And so he, Abe used to walk around and say, "You know, I saved the New York Times." Well, many of us would argue he destroyed the journalistic integrity of the New York Times, but he did so by catering to these advertisers. And part of that catering was one, to create these special sections that have nothing to do with journalism at all. Many of it was, in fact, paid content. And secondly, it was to erase the kinds of reports that you were doing, and both the kinds of investigative reports that these big advertisers didn't want.
Yes. And at the same time, the companies hired a firm called Wilmer, Cutler, and Pickering. And Lloyd Cutler would go and have meetings with editors of the New York Times and Post and saying, "What are you guys doing giving this guy so much print? Don't you know he's bad for business?" And the inference was that they were going to lose advertising if they didn't shut us out. And so once the Times started scaling down, then the Washington Post took note because they were of the same mindset. And both of them were about to go public and sell stock on the stock exchange, which gave them even more vulnerability to suppression. And then, and then that dried up more and more of the evening news. We used to get on the network news. It's almost impossible to get on network evening news now. And the same with radio.
At the same time, there emerged public radio and public broadcasting. And they were scared from the get-go that the companies would go after their funding on Capitol Hill and crimp their style. And so they, they covered us very little as well. And who took notice? Obviously, members of Congress. And if you, it broke the cycle of civics 101. You put the truth and the facts out, the public gets informed because the press covers it. The legislators or regulators see the press covering it, they begin to rise to their responsibilities, they have hearings, they take action. People's lives are saved, health is advanced, their economic well-being is protected. And then the cycle starts again against a whole set of new injustices. But all these forces I've just mentioned started shutting us down.
We were saved for a short period by the Jimmy Carter administration. He appointed very good people to the regulatory agencies, the auto safety agency, the job safety agency, the EPA, and so on. But that was just a four-year reprieve. And they were still counterattacking, more lobbyists, more political action committees, more indignant calls to reporters and editors and publishers to shut us down. And so, you know, that was their golden age, the mass media, what we call now the corporate media. And it's completely changed now. And I say to reporters or editors or publishers that I can manage to reach, it's not easy, "What are you ashamed of your golden age for? Look what you did for the country, just exercising your duty and professional responsibilities for newsworthiness." And now you don't do it.
Ralph, there was another factor too, and that is the infusion of corporate money into the Democratic Party. Because you could not have held these hearings or passed this legislation, which many of which you wrote, unless you had a viable liberal wing of the Democratic Party willing to take on corporate power. And that was eviscerated, in particular, during the Clinton administration, led by a California Congressman named Tony Coelho.
Yeah, Tony Coelho was in charge of fundraising for the House Democrats. And around 1978, '79, when Carter was president, he managed to get the party to accept the following proposition: "Why are we letting the Republicans raise all that money from the business community? We can raise money from the business community." And they started going to these dinners in Washington, PAC dinners they were called, and making the pitch for money. And that was the beginning of the end.
Because it coincided with the defeat of Jimmy Carter by Ronald Reagan. And once Reagan took over, well, you know, he gave wish lists to companies. So you go to the oil and gas company, banks, and the insurance companies, and so on. He'd say, "What do you want us to do for you in terms of getting rid of regulations, tax cuts, appointing conservative judges to the federal bench, and so on?" It was all downhill. You could see the correlation between the campaign money pouring into the Democratic Party coffers and the decline in regulatory action and congressional hearings when they controlled the House and the Senate.
And I know when you first ran for president, I think it was, you, I remember you telling me that it was done essentially because Congress had become completely captive. That all of those congresspeople, Fede, and others that you were once able to work with, had been essentially pushed out of the Democratic Party. That that had been seized, the entire party and the Congress had been seized by corporate power. Is that correct?
Yeah, that's right. Especially in 1980, the landslide against Jimmy Carter by Ronald Reagan, a great B actor who had spent some years as governor of California. We lost Senator Magnuson, we lost Senator Church, we lost Senator Nelson. These were the champions, and others were about to be defeated. We had strong progressive Democratic senators from North and South Dakota, Jim Abourezk, for example. We had Senator George McGovern. We had two progressive senators, and now they're all Republicans. There is hardly a shred of the Democratic Party in four Mountain States and the two prairie states. So now, they now having abandoned them, they start with a handicap of 12 senators that they don't even compete to challenge in the U.S. Senate. It's pretty hard to control the Senate when you start with 12 down from the get-go. So, yeah, what you said was the trend, and it just got worse and worse. Instead of getting a stronger Democratic Party, a stronger progressive movement, it got weaker.
The sign of a decaying democracy is that when the forces of plutocracy, oligarchy, multinational corporations increase their power in all sectors of our society, the resistance gets weaker. Now, in a healthy democracy, the resistance would get stronger. There'd be more marches, demonstrations, litigation, candidates running for office, and of course, more lobbying groups by new citizen organizations. And we saw just the opposite. And the, and the price we're paying right now, the end product of all this is Donald J. Trump. Der Führer. The voters in this country seeing just two alternatives, the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, on November 5th narrowly elected a lawless dictator who is now at large in our White House, dismantling what's left of the democratic accountability, the role of Congress, and dictating anything he wants to do. In fact, in July 2019, he said, "With Article Two, I can do whatever I want as president," and he's proving it, both in his first term and even on a more greater rampage in the last few days, starting his second term.
But all of this was the rot preceded, of course, Trump, even from the first administration, the destruction of civil liberties, including our right to privacy with wholesale surveillance, the destruction of due process. And you have been very critical of the liberal class, the Democratic Party, for either being active or complicit. I remember you once saying, "Where are the heads of the law schools? Why aren't they speaking out?" And even before Trump ran, when you were running, I remember you telling me once, "You know, it's just all a dictator would have to do is flick a switch. It's already there. It's already been arranged."
Yeah, if you just look at the countervailing forces that hold up a society's civilized norms, due process of law, and democratic traditions, they're all either awall collapsing. For example, they're over a million lawyers. They're called part of the legal profession. Where have they been? The bar associations don't speak out. The American Bar Association, the biggest bar association in the world, they don't take a stand. They're the first responders. They are they're supposed to be our sentinels. They're AA. The organized church used to sustain the norms. They collapsed. Gambling is everywhere now, right at fingertips for a teenager in his or her bedroom can gamble. That's collapsed on many fronts. They were in the forefront of the Civil Rights Movement, the peace movement. Where are they now? In fact, the evangelical groups in the South are just the opposite. They're for war, they're for destruction of Palestinian rights, they love Donald J. Trump. It's just the opposite.
The labor unions have never been weaker. There are a few surges in partial organization, Starbucks and Amazon and others, of course, but the number of unionized workers still going down, down, down. It's the lowest in 80, 90 years. I think only about 10% of all workers now, public and private together, are organized. And they're headed by often very cautious leaders who, every time we propose to them to join with consumer, environmental forces, pass it by the Democratic Party apparatus that turns it down. So they're like a tail of the Democratic Party. The civic groups are totally outnumbered. They can't keep up with all the opposition, just in terms of people, you know, number of lobbyists on Capitol Hill, litigators. They're struggling for funds.
So you can see the media, of course, who just finished talking. They have cut, they have cut the ground under the citizen movement and the citizen community. And that's basically why the Democrats lost election after election, including the one last November, because the civic groups are groups that know how to talk to people at the grassroots. They don't differentiate between conservative workers and liberal workers for health and safety, or conservative patients and liberal patients for health and safety, or consumers. They don't do that. They talk to all people, and they know the language, they know the strategies and the tactics. They were completely blocked by the Democratic Party from any input. Why? Because few people know that the Democratic Party not only is wallowing in corporate PAC money, they have contracted out their campaigns to corporate conflicted political and media consultants who raised the money, developed the strategy, generate the taboos, and block us from input into the Democratic Party at the national, state, and local level.
And that blockage kept the Democratic Party from taking the most obvious positions that could have won easily the House, Senate, and the presidency last year. For example, they could have made a big deal out of a frozen federal minimum wage of $7.25. That's 25 million workers would get a raise to $15 an hour, and they didn't do it. Kamala Harris just made a throwaway line. They didn't listen to Bernie Sanders, for example. They could have increased benefits of Social Security, which have been frozen for 50 years. Instead, they said, "We protect Social Security as it is now." That's 65 million people would have gotten higher Social Security benefits. They could have defeated the Republicans on the Child Tax Credit extension. 61 million kids from conservative liberal families were getting an average of $300 million of $300 a month. It cut poverty almost in half for children in the United States, and they didn't do that. Instead, Kamala Harris sent her brother-in-law to Wall Street to talk to Goldman Sachs and corporate law firms to advise her on her economic and tax policy. And her most memorable phrase is "opportunity economy." Well, that really spells specifics to put food on people's table.
So basically, the Democratic Party owes America a huge apology, and maybe 10 installments of how they sabotaged the only party that could have saved the Republic from the fascism and the corporatism and the militarism of the GOP. Instead, the Democratic Party became part of the problem. They also were militaristic, they were corporatized, and they weren't all that great in terms of opening the channels of government to civic input. And so they had an autocratic dimension as well.
I just want, before we go on, talk about the crackdown on college campuses, including your alma maters of Princeton and Harvard Law School. It's, I find it quite disturbing. Universities should be, you know, sacrosanct in terms of free speech, and having covered despotic governments all over the world, once they shut down that university space, it's quite, quite ominous.
Yes, it was made even worse by the October 7th and thereafter, where the attack on October 7th was a homicide-suicide mission. They lost 1,600 Hamas fighters, more than the alleged number of Israelis who were killed, 350, which of whom were soldiers, by the way. And that was a raid into Israel. They can't compare with the raids into Palestine for 60 years, slaughtering from the air all kinds of civilians and civilian infrastructures again and again and again against the defenseless population, as Gideon Levy, the columnist in Haaretz, wrote about again and again, among other columnists in that newspaper in Israel.
And then the eruption of protest on college campuses. I would never have guessed the level of suppression, suspending students, discharging students, shutting down events, suspending potential grants, blocking professors from moving from one university to another, including one of the nation's leading experts on genocide, Mr. Professor Siegel, from Stockton University, had a post-university Minnesota, which was re-, which was turned down because he was outspoken about the genocide in Gaza. The law schools are following suit. The law firms, some of them have announced they will not hire or they will reject job offers of law school graduates who are involved in pro-Palestinian rights activities at law school, opposed to genocide. I mean, who would ever have dreamed something like that? Even critics of universities never dreamed the level of cowardice, the level of receptiveness to a few large donors who were pro-Israeli government, do no wrong enthusiasts. And it cowed Harvard University, Princeton, and others decisively, just proving our point that at academic institutions, money talks more than truth, more than freedom of speech.
And the answer to it is just better organizing on campus with smarter strategies. I wouldn't have spent all that time on disinvestment. There are other ways that can affect universities much more, much more deeply, that have to be considered. And these students need a few full-time people helping them at these large universities because these students have to deal with classes and grades. So there needs to be more resources around. And brave faculty have to be defended. You have to have pro bono lawyers. And with the right tactics and strategies, you can tip the balance in favor of freedom of speech and developing the civic refinements for justice as part of the educational process itself.
Well, I know you've, I want to move on to what we have to do. But I know you've talked about mobilizing alumni as kind of a key aspect of pushing back against the suppression of free speech and the suspension of students and the kind of blacklisting of those who speak out on campus. But let's just close by, what do we do now? We are on the cusp of an American fascism. There's just no way around it. You know, reading these executive orders, everything from education to revoking student visas for foreign students who have participated in protests against the genocide, I mean, it's a long list. What do we do now to save what's left of our open society?
Well, there's a lot that has to be done in order to create the brooks that feed the streams that feed the tributaries that feed the Mississippi River, to take a metaphor to its limit. For example, there's nothing stopping students from organizing their own full-time groups with full-time staff. They can assess themselves $15, $20 a student and do what the publicist research groups have done on domestic issues all over the country with full-time staff. We have to expand our language. We should never use words like "white-collar crime." It's corporate crime. We should use words like "corporatism," not "private sector." We've got to organize, as you say, the progressive alumni. There's always significant percentages of progressive alumni of these schools, but they don't know each other, and that has to be connected. We've got to beef up the student press, which is very heavily on trivia and sport in AO in a broader sense, outside of the universities.
Yeah, in a broader sense, all it comes down to are two things. Trump will self-destruct because he knows no boundaries. So his greatest enemy is Trump. And you will see the unraveling of Trump in the succeeding weeks. I would not be surprised that if he continues his bull-in-a-china-shop, illegal, wild flailing, affecting tens of millions of people in terms of their dire necessities of life in favor of his corporate supremacists, that he will be impeached and convicted in the U.S. Senate. His own party will turn against him because when they see the polls, which are already dropping since January 20th, by the way, when they see the polls and they realize it's either them or Trump, they will always take their own political survival, just as a few senators did during the Nixon Watergate scandal when they got into a limousine and went to the White House and basically said to Nixon, "Your time is up. You've lost your base in Congress."
So the second is, we've got to focus on the Congress. That is the leading fulcrum for turning around the U.S. government, foreign, domestic, and affecting state and local. That's what the founders believed when they gave the most powerful authorities by far, not to the executive branch or the judicial branch, but to Congress, the exclusive power to declare war, to exercise the taxing power, the spending power, the nomination confirmation power, and the investigative oversight authority. And so we're down to 535 men and women, probably 20% of them are already on the side of truth and justice and peace. And we've got to organize back home. My best guess is 1% of the people organized in congressional districts, that's two and a half million in progressive districts, who represent public opinion, who know what they're talking about, who are willing to put in say, 500 hours a year of volunteer time, about the time people put in on a hobby, and who will raise enough money for an office with two full-time staff in each congressional district can defeat the corporate supremacists and take control of Congress and turn the country around.
That is quite a bit of organizing, but most people would not believe that 1% can do it. We did it in the 60s and early 70s with far less than 1% to regulate these companies. Remember, when it comes down to the brass tacks, the members of Congress want your vote far more than they want money from commercial interests. They want money from commercial interests in order to defeat their opponent, put ads on TV, why? Because they want to get votes. But if the votes are conditioned and focused, and if members of Congress are regularly summoned to town meetings back home where the citizenry sets the agenda and asks the questions, and the senators, representatives respond and listen and go back to their instructions, the country can be changed.
We should always remember that when it comes down to where people live, work, and raise their children, there are not the kind of polarizations that the rulers try to inculcate on the public. Divide and rule goes back over 2,000 years as a tactic. Most of the necessities of life are supported by an overwhelming number of Americans, regardless of the labels they put on themselves, conservative, liberal, or whatever. Living wage is one. Universal health insurance is two. Crackdown on corporate crooks is three. A fair tax system is four. Deluding the military budget and coming back home to repair and modernize infrastructure and public services in every community, creating a lot of jobs, is five. And empowering people so they can take back their sovereign power and condition it before they give their instructions back to their senators or their state legislators or their city council person. So it's not an impossible task. It has precedence in American history. And it's surprising when people realize what a tiny percentage of active, engaged citizens representing public opinion, knowing what they're talking about, and making direct contact with town meetings with their representatives, no flacks, no intermediaries. We have all kinds of books that show how this can be done, how it has been done. One of them is called *Breaking Through Power*, "It's Easier Than We Think," and I wrote it. And another one is called *Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State*. It's good to know history and the successes from history so we don't get discouraged and demoralized as we see so much of that today in the U.S.
Great. Thank you so much, Ralph. I want to thank Sophia, Diego, Thomas, and Max, who produced the show. You can find me at ChrisHedges.substack.com. And I might add, keep it up to date. I have a weekly column since 1971. You can get free electronically at Nader.org. Just go to it, sign up, and you'll be kept up to date on what we're doing and thinking.
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