Ralph Nader Asks: "What do these two parties have to do to lose your vote?" 

  Ralph Nader, 11-2-2008 in Allentown: the following is a transcript of selected passages from his talk...

Thank you for coming out on a Sunday evening, which is often not the best time to have a political rally...

the Democrats engaged in criminal enterprise to get us off (the ballot) and now thanks to Attorney General Corbett who brought indictments against Democrats in Harrisburg and now is trying the indictees, 2 legislators and 10 legislative aides.  In 2004 and 2006, against our candidacy and Carl Romanelli, who was running for the Senate on the Green Party, they did everything they could, using government time, government resources and State employees to get us off the ballot.  This has to be a crime, and some of them are going to jail.  And we are now on the ballot in Pennsylvania.

According to CNN's polls, we are on track to get 4 million votes on November 4, which is a good start, since we were excluded from the Presidential debates.  The Debate Commission is beholden to the two parties and they do not want anyone on the stage with them.  Every national poll wanted me on those debates in 2000 and 2004...We get excluded from national TV media because (they say) we are not on the debates...I am the only candidate in 2000, 2004 and 2006 that has campaigned in all 50 States.  And then, of course, the ballot access obstacles to small parties that the two parties put in State laws drain us.  In April, May, June and July, we are just trying to get on the ballots in places like Texas, California, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania...It is a triple whammy against any type of competition, this is a two party dictatorship...this is a country that engages in that type of shenanigans and lets the two major parties block competition.  If it was the market place, they would be in jail.  It would be a criminal violation of the anti-trust laws.

Depending on who controls State government, Republican or Democrat, they carve up the districts, and leave you with one choice, the incumbent..That means that there is no democratic election in over 90% of Congressional Districts, because an election requires a contest and a contest requires at least two viable candidates, and..in a gerrymandered district, it is a coronation, not an election. 

I just wanted to bring you this framework to illustrate that if Nader/Gonzalez were in the debates, this would now be a three-way race.  Just like Jesse Ventura, who started out at 7% running for Governor of Minnesota, and got in ten State-wide debates and won in a three way race. 

In 2012, with preparation, people get together, all major citizen groups...veterans groups, good government groups, religious groups like the National Council of Churches, student groups, environmental groups, all on one letterhead, and the letter goes out in June, Boston to San Diego to Seattle to Miami, 25 debates - we don't want anymore of these silly 30 second television ads that don't inform us and that demean us as a people.  You, the Presidential candidates are going to campaign with our debates and with our agenda.  We're going to ask the questions and the press will not be participating, they will be observing, which is their role, and relaying this all over the country. 

Now when the Presidential candidates are confronted by tens of millions of people represented by these groups, they cannot say no and the Debate Commission would shrivel...as exciting debate after debate, regional, talking about local issues, national, international strips the power of the Presidential candidates of controlling their campaign and shifts it to organized people.  That is how we get a functioning democracy.  We ask ourselves what we can do to recover our country, to make our lives better, to protect what we hand over to our children and grandchildren.  Once we answer that question, we'll stop making excuses for ourselves, we'll stop saying "O me O my, look how horrible these corporations are, how powerful these political parties are, look at all that money on their side".  We stop makiing excuses for ourselves.  We stop rationalizing our futility and lo and behold, we will discover our latent power. We cannot get by with any combination of corporate and political power - that's what the Constitution gives us - it starts with "We the People", not we the corporations.  That's why we have to recover our nerve here.

I was just campaigning in Massachusetts where I set the Guinness Book of World Records.  To emphasize the importance of a campaign that goes to where the people are, I had 21 events in 21 different places in 16 hours, and it was so much fun, I just kept going to New York.  We went to public parks, and libraries and places where people worked and gathered, and the people really loved it.  You see, the majority of people this year are really exiled from seeing Barack Obama or John McCain.  Pennsylvania is an exception because it is considered a swing state, but places like California with 34 million people or New York with 22 million people, Masachusetts 8 million people, Oregon, Washington State, Illinois, they'll never see Obama or McCain, other than in quick trips to raise money.  that's what the electoral college does, which should have been abolished 100 years ago. 

The majority of the American people don't have the chance to mix it up with the major candidates, ask them questions, show them their back yard problems and what the solutions are.  This is a decayed two party system, decayed to the point of gangrene.  How many times do they have to break their promises before they lose your vote?  When you talk with your friend over the next day or two, which I hope you will, your neighbors and co-workers, put them on the defensive if they say they are voting for McCain or Obama.  Say to them, "What do they have to do, these two parties, these two candidates, to lose your vote?"...Let me give you some historical records.

For years or decades, here is what the two parties have promised.  "If elected, they will make us energy independent."  That started when we were importing 18% of our oil.  We are now importing 67% of our oil.  That was under both Democrat and Republican.  Let's just say, that was one issue, let's see what else they have to do to lose your vote.  There's been the promise of comprehensive health insurance through a variety of cockamamie plans, ever since President Truman proposed the real thing, 60 years ago.  Today we have more people uninsured, almost 50 million, with 50 million more underinsured.  And today, 20,000 Americans die every year because they cannot afford health insurance and millions who get sick get sicker because they cannot afford treatment.  Think of the anxiety...

They may say, energy and health insurance, that's not all there is to life, you're not going to lose our vote.  Let's try the next one.  Always two weeks before the election, Republicans and Demcrats brush off their populist rhetoric.  They have discovered greed on Wall Street.  And both Obama and McCain say, "Elect us, and we'll do something about that greed."  Four weeks ago, both of them voted, without reservation, for the $700 billion bailout of these Wall Street crooks, swindlers, and speculators without even re-regulating them, giving the authority to the shareholders and mutual funds and pension funds to control the companies that they own and are being run by avaricious bosses without even expanding the prosecution.  People are demanding justice here, they are really angry about this.  They didn't give the Justice Department more resources to hire prosecutors, investigators, and they didn't do anything about homeowner foreclosure...we're not going to put $700 billion of liability on the backs of American taxpayers and their children.  people entrusted our savings to these self-enriching bosses who tanked their own banks, their own brokerage houses, unemployed hundreds of thousands of workers and then jumped ship into a golden lifeboat.  We're going to institute a one-tenth of one percent sales tax on derivatives trading...debts on debts on debts, Las Vegas East.  You know what they are this year?  $500 trillion and counting...in computer trading.  One tenth of one percent - $500 billion bucks.  Let them pay for their own bailout.  They didn't even do that.

Now, when I was campaigning in Massachusetts, the second reason I was in Massachusetts was the period of the American Revolution.  In 1775, starting in Lexington and Concord, they took on George III, and their complaint was, "Taxation without Representation".  Well, here we are again.  2008, and it's King George IV, and it's still taxation without representation.  Why don't Obama and McCain say something about it?  Why do they have marbles in their mouths?  Here's the test.  When your elected officials are more beholden ... to big business than they are to you, you are going to pay and pay and pay and never have a say or say or say. That's what it all comes down to.  The Nader- Gonzalez campaign is designed to ask for as many votes as possible, to build a third political force so that in coming months, when we go back to Washington, where you used to get a lot done for the American people, automobile safety, clean air law, clean water law, EPA, OSHA to protect workers, Freeedom of Information Act - all these measures still on the books, but they are not being enforced by either Democrats or Republicans.  Clinton-Gore, Bush, and as a result, if we get these votes and go back to Washington, we'll have a bigger hammer, we'll be able to monitor them more quickly and expose them.  We'll also be able to build for the future a bigger and bigger third political force which is the only language they understand.  Look, they' already picked their voters by gerrymandering these districts.  90% of the districts are a slam dunk, as I mentioned.  So they already pick their voters, but the one thing they cannot tolerate is to lose voters to another column line, not in significant numbers.  And when they see a third political force growing up, with each vote adding to it, every vote adding to it, that's when they have to face the wonderful dilemma, in reverse, that they better start becoming more [attentive] to the people and their taxes and their necessities of life, and their health and their safety, and the corporations.

...For over 40 years now, we have studied these agencies and departments.  This is not a generalization, for over 40 years, we have worked with them, we have sued them, we have preempted them, we have gotten whistle blowers from these agencies standing tall for the principles of the civil servant, and starting about 1980, the door started closing and we could not improve our country.  We lost the chance to improve our country...that means the chance to hold congressional hearings, the chance to have the positions responded to by the auto safety agency or Food and Drug Administration or others whose mission is to save Ameican lives and preserve or defend health and safety...so the door is closed - What do you think we should do? I have a full closet but a white flag is not in it.

Many liberal  progressive writers can go through their day and fill their wonderful exposés with criticisms of the parties and the corporations and every four years they say we have to vote for the least of the worst, let's be practical.  if you do vote for the least worst of the two parties, there will always be a least worst, for centuries if they survive...Don't you think we should make demands on the least worst?  We gave the least worst John Kerry and Barack Obama a free ride...they're trying to count on a little margin of votes on the left or right...trying to do what the corporations want them to do...the corporations are not squeamish, they make demands on both of them, they fund both of them,  but then liberals and progressives say "we don't want to upset John Kerry and continue the anti-war movement, so call off the marches and the rallies in 2004, because he wants to send more soldiers to Iraq and he wants to out-belligerent Bush...remember the first debate in 2004 where John Kerry was so hawkish he was praised by the Wall Street Journal for out-hawking Bush and, of couse he did not have to worry about the liberals, he did not have to worry about the anti-war movement because they were so freaked out about not Bush getting a second term that they did not pull Kerry in the direction of worker rights, crackdown on corporate crime, living wage and full medicare for all, and a peace movement, NO, they didn't do that and as a result, by not making Kerry better, they made him worse and blurred the difference between George W. Bush and: didn't their strategy work out?  Didn't the liberal and progressive intelligentsia strategy work out?  Who won the election? - George W. Bush, who was not very popular in 2004, but was saved by John Kerry, who tried to blur the differences...

Let's continue with "What do we have to do to lose your vote?"  OK, so the energy, they didn't deliver, the health insurance they didn't deliver, Wall Street accountability and crackdown on corporate crime worse than ever before - deficits, they all promise they will reduce the deficits and except for a period under Clinton where it actually did go down if you don't count the surpluses they used to match the deficits...so, deficits are exploding, they're reaching 11 and a half trillion...we pay 400 billion annually servicing our national debt...how do you get a framework on $400 billion?  Well, EPA's budget is $8 billion, OSHA's budget is $700 million, auto safety budget is $300 million...OK, they let us down on the deficits, which, by the way are not ordinary FDR deficits where you are repairing public works to create jobs...these are deficits to fund the criminal war in Iraq...isn't it easier to pay as you go to fund a criminal war than to have our children and grandchildren pay for it?  Do you know another war that was not financed by increasing taxes?  Bush reduced the taxes in 2001 and 2002, on the wealthy, and the Democrats could't stop it.

Then we say, "energy, heathcare, Wall Street crooks, deficits, that's still not enough to lose your vote."  What about the economy, they're always talking about reviving the economy.  A good way to revive the economy is to create a federal living wage, that is what the minimum wage is supposed to be.  The federal minimum wage in 1968, adjusted for inflation to this year the way Congress does its own salaries would be $10 an hour. Instead, it is $6.55.  You have 47 million full time workers working in this country working for Walmart wages, 7, 8, 9, 10 dollars an hour.  How can that provide the basic necessities of life, even for a small family?  How can even two jobs at that level provide for the basic necessities of life, even for a small family?

In 40 years, two things have happened in that context.  Worker productivity has doubled, therefore workers should get their just desserts, which they haven't, and prices have increased, so that the vendors who hire these workers have increased their prices, their managers' salaries.  We are not at a minimum wage level of $6.55, adjusted for inflation, instead of $10.  Both parties have not done anything about it.  OK, so jobs, energy, poverty, Wall Street, healthcare, deficits, what else?

Let's look at on the ground.  How many of you have been ripped off by drug prices, fuel prices or a credit card company?  Everybody,..look at what the two parties have done for you.  They have all kinds of tools, first of all, they could restate the usury laws, which controlled interest rates, until the 1970's when the financial companies, the payday loan rackets got rid of them, so now you can be charged 20, 25, 30% on unpaid balances and you have penalties, surcharges, late fees.  The banks now charge you for everything but breathing when you walk in.  330 different charges they can hit you with.  $30 - 35 they can charge you for a bounced check, the Federal Reserve tells me it costs them $2, including covering check fraud.  See what a profit center it is. One thing they could do is put the usury laws back, two, they could start prosecuting corporate crime.  They have so few lawyers prosecuting corporate crime in the Justivce Department you can hardly see them.  They have far more on the drug war.

The failing war on drugs - what a disaster.  We don't send nicotine addicts to jail, that's 400,000 dead Americans a year.  We don't send alcoholics to jail, that's 120,000 dead Americans a year.  We try to rehabilitate them, with non-smoking clinics, have some compassion.  Why are we sending people with drug addiction problems to jail? 10,000 dead by comparison, every year?  Nader/Gonzalez demands a national amnesty to take out of jail all non-violent drug offenders, and replace them with convicted corporate criminals. This would also have one added benefit - prison reform -  when you have powerful convicts who can't stand the conditions, much less the food.

Anyway, back to consumer protection, Speculators, when supplies are tight, fuel, up over 4 bucks.  Now that demand is down due to the recession all over the world, so, they're dropping, but don't bet on it.  They'll cut refinery output; and the producers overseas will cut production, so they get that price up again.  Why do they leave us defenseless?  What's the government for, anyway?  The government uses your tax dollars for a hundred years to subsidize the coal, gas and oil industry.  Research and development, tax breaks, you name it...they won't even defend us as consumers.  Why do you say, "That's still not enough to lose my vote."

Well, let's see.  58,000 workers die from work-related trauma and diseases each year according to OSHA...under Clinton and Bush, 16 years, only one toxic control standard has been issued and that's because of a court order.  0 under Clinton, 1 under Bush due to a court order.  Now I think, and I hope you share this, that 58,000 American lives is a lot of American lives.  Every three weeks, it's more than 9-11.  And just because it didn't proceed from terrorists - It proceeded from corporations, cost cutting corporations or corporate crime.  Does that make any difference in priority?  If your son or daughter died due to an occupational disease or trauma, would you be consoled if someone knocked on your door to give you the news to say, "It wasn't due to terrorism."

...65,000 lives lost, the EPA says, every year, from air pollution, horrible deaths, cancer, asphyxiation, lung disease.  33,000 come from burning coal.  Someday, burning coal is going to be a crime against humanity, as we bring the sun to earth, in all its facets of renewable energy, wind power, solar, solar thermal, methane energy, biomass, and of course, what's coming is geothermal...with new technologies no matter where you look, it's 10, 15 years away, very exciting.  So, we're burning coal and kill 33,000 Americans, not counting those who die in the coal mines, and they're getting more eager to open more coal burning plants...energy conservation is the best energy plan because you can do it fast compared to drilling offshore when you have to wait ten years to get the first drop.  Or, through vehicle emissions - what if you had 70, 80 mile per gallon cars.  Exxon would sell you less gasoline.  That's why it's against that kind of mandatory fuel standard.  Even air conditioning systems, we know how to do it, we've already done quite a bit of it in the last 25 years.  We've saved $300 billion in energy costs because of modest improvements..,so, what are they doing to protect us here?

Well, they want to build more coal plants.  Barack Obama, he was challenged in the last debate by McCain.  McCain said, "Give me one example where you stood up to your party."  And Obama said, "My first vote in the Senate was for tort reform, and the trial lawyers are a powerful lobby in the Democratic Party."  He's proud of that.  He's proud of closing the courtroom door more and more to the most defenseless people who have been wrongfully injured by defective automobiles, hazardous chemicals, side effects undisclosed from pharmaceuticals.  He's proud of that?  Then he said, "Clean coal", which is an oxymoron.  "That offended the environmental groups that support the Democratic Party."  As if he's proud.  You know why he gets away with saying that?  Do you thnk McCain would get away with offending Rush Limbaugh?  Do you think McCain, if he was asked a reverse question, "When did you go against the Republican Party?"  And he said, "I want to reinstate the fairness doctrine and I am pro-choice."  Obama knows that the liberal-progressives will never leave him.  These issues will not be used against him.  Do you think McCain would alienate his right wing?  Limbaugh would destroy him in three hours if he wanted to reinstate the fairness doctrine and Dobson would finish the job if he came out pro-choice.  That's the difference between the demanding right wing of McCain and the concessionary liberal wing of Obama.  And that happens every 4 years.  That's why both parties get worse every 4 years.

All right, so, they haven't lost your vote yet?  Consumer protection, let's see, how about overseas?  It doesn't affect us directly, except about 5 million people of military families and soldiers.  We don't have a draft, so large numbers of young people are not part of the risk, they're not interested in the solution.  Well, Obama says he is going to withdraw from Iraq.  His definition of withdrawal, it turns out, is 50,000 troops remain there with military bases.  I don't think many Iraqis would define that as a withdrawal, especially when you consider that three of those military bases are big and modern enough to come from Batteship Galactica, multi-million dollar operations.  So we are going to stay in Iraq, and the Iraqi puppet government is now asking us to leave by 2011, which means that is the Iraqi sentiment.  We want to get out of Iraq and I’ve said this since 2004, 6 months negotiated withdrawal, continued humanitarian aid, all our soldiers and corporate contractors out…that’s they way you bring the factions together, in a modified autonomy within a unified Iraq, make it clear that we are going to give Iraq and its oil back to you and the authority figures know that the alternative is bloodshed and chaos…  

Now, we have Palestine and Israel, there’s one for you.  McCain and Obama will not do anything the AIPAC lobby in Washington does not want them to do.  Both McCain and Obama went to the convention in the summer and read the script and..support whatever the Israeli government want to do to the Palestinians if it’s oppression, colonization, theft of land, water, night-time invasions, and casualty rates 400 times in the civilian area the net inflicted on the resisting Palestinian side.  It’s 400 to 1 in the last year in Gaza.  400 Palestinian casualties, civilian, compared to 1 Israeli civilian…That is not something known to most Americans, that kind of disparity.  tHat kind of imbalance of military power.  Now, AIPAC does not represent majority Jewish-American opinion.  The majority of Jewish Americans, in poll after poll, and Israelis, and Palestinians, want a two-state solution.  Withdraw to the ’67 borders, a viable Palestinian State in the 22% left of the Palestinian mandate – they’ve already conceded 78% to Israel.  The Arab league, in 2002, said to the Israeli government, “Go back to the 1967 borders as UN resolutions require you to do which you’ve been violating and we will open diplomatic and economic relations.”   The Israeli government…backed by the $5 billion in US aid every year, has not responded affirmatively..Where is Obama/McCain?  With a hard line military approach to the Palestinians.  It is so tragic to see this once independent mind of Barack Obama get on its knees before 7000 members of AIPAC in a convention in Washington and say he would never negotiate with Hamas which is a terrorist organization.  You know what he didn’t say?  That Hamas was created by the Israeli government to counteract the PLO many years ago – another example of the boomerang.  But more important, when he refused to ally himself with 64% of the Israeli people…the respected newspaper Ha’Aretz in a poll on March 1, this year, 64% of the Israeli people want direct negotiations with Hamas.  He won’t even support 64%, if he supports the AIPAC hard line.  He was once known in Chicago political circles as an articulate defender of Palestinian rights.  I just sent him a letter, which he will get tonight, documenting his repeated lack of political fortitude…

it doesn’t matter how smart these guys are and he’s one smart person, it doesn’t matter how good and clever his rhetoric is:  hope change change hope  hope change change hope – am I hypnotizing you?   It’s all about fortitude, it’s all about guts, about moral courage, to take on the big boys, to take on the power structure.  When you’re the President of the United States, your first priority is defending powerless people, your first priority is defending powerless people against these greed hounds, these corporate criminals, these people who think they can take our pensions, our saving our health and safety rights and boil them up in some profit formula and then bribe the politicians who take over our government and sweep aside laws enforced against themselves…so, prepare to be very disappointed. 

I’m very troubled by McCain, he has his own problems.  He hurt himself badly by turning into a clone of George W. Bush.  Then he didn’t know who he was.  He couldn’t say, “I was an author, with Senator Feingold, of the main campaign finance reform.”  He can’t even mention that because he is a Bush clone.  Bush doesn’t like that law, and he’s like a clone and you can see it now.  He’s gone.  Obama’s going to probably win in a landslide.  But what are you going to get?  The first African American presidential nominee – let’s say he wins and what you get is an unprecedented, brilliantly orchestrated upward career move – the first black President.  Shouldn’t it mean something more?  How many times have you heard Barack Obama, in speech after speech, refer to the middle class, but never the poor?”

Do you know that there are 100 million poor people in this country?  And they do the dirty work for us and the dangerous work and they harvest our food and they clean up after us and they are the nannies for our children and they are underpaid and overcharged.  The poor pay more because they get ripped off more…and they die earlier, that’s well documented…the only time they’re respected, by Washington, is when they’re asked to fight our criminal wars overseas.  Look at the enlistees, poor whites, latinos, African Americans, go into the military, save a little money to go to college…that’s about the only time, and when they come back injured…McCain votes against veterans benefits and Bush never goes to funerals and doesn’t allow the families to go to Grover, Delaware to meet the caskets of their fallen children.  What this guy gets away with is criminal…five high crimes and misdemenours day after day.  The American Bar Association had 3 reports in 2005 – 2006 charging him with systemic violations of the Constitution.  This is the most conservative Bar Association…criminal war in Iraq, high crime and misdemenour number one…systemic torture, from the top…Cheney, Bush, they knew what was going on…denial of habeas corpus rights under the Constitution…high crime and misdemenour number three, snooping on millions of Americans without judicial approval, they could be snooping on you and you would never know it – these are huge dragnets of electronic scans.  You cannot feel secure in your telephone conversations or emails, and they got away with it.  That happens to be a five year jail,term if convicted, it’s a first class felony.  So what did Bush finally do?  He got the Democrats, including Barack Obama, to vote for a revised FISA law, which gave him great leeway to do whatever he wants without judicial approval. 

Patriot Act, they can go into your library records, and your librarian could call you and say that the FBI made me give them your borrowing record…by telling you this, I could go to jail, because it’s a crime to tell patrons that the FBI has requested their library records.  Under the Patriot Act they can go into your home, when you’re not there, search anything, photograph anything, and not tell the proper authorities for 72 hours that they did this.  when they have to get a prior search warrant.  And guess who voted for the Patriot Act and reauthorization.  McCain voted for both, Obama wasn’t in the Senate when the Patriot Act got through, but voted for the reauthorization, the Constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago Law School.  There’s 5000 words, just written, well-documented by Matt Gonzalez my running mate, on Barack Obama’s record on the campaign website, www.votenader.org…how much more do they have to do to have us not vote for them?

At what point does self-respect kick in?  At what point does “enough is enough” kick in?  At what point do you vote for a candidacy like Nader/Gonzalez?  Without even asking, weekend after weekend, night after night, for over 4 decades I have been battling these corporations, and beating them, and beating them again and again, until the door started shutting on us about 20-25 years ago, and now we might have a chance to be heard, so, we go into the electoral arena, try to rouse people, give them a choice on the ballot, and then, see what they do.  And if they want more politics as usual…they can vote for Obama or McCain - if they want worse politics than usual, because every four years they get worse.  80% of the people in this country have been falling behind, not making as much as workers in 1973, adjusted for inflation.  The benefits go to the top 10%, 5%, 1%, huge concentrations of wealth…the top 1% of Americans have the financial wealth of the equivalent of the combined financial wealth of the bottom what percent?  95.

So it comes to not what we know.  There’s an old Chinese proverb which, when you hear it, you never forget it…from a philosopher of the 14th Century, under the Ming Dynasty, who said, “To know but not to do is not to know.”  We know a lot about what is wrong with this country, we know how to make things right with solutions on the shelf…affordable housing, public transit, accountable government, ways to prosecute corporate crooks, improve quality of education…teaching students about the community instead of putting them in front of screens, so they can leaarn reading, writing and arithmetic as a byproduct of understanding and studying their community…Leave No Child Behind ruptures the relationship between teacher and student and brings the student into a frenzy of high frequency multiple choice tests…and the teachers teach to the test…

It this isn’t enough, let’s try the real finale.  Taxes.  Don’t they always say they are going to lighten taxes, cut taxes on the middle class, reduce complexity and all that…have you seen the internal revenue code lately?  It’s like six times the Canadian regulations.  The more complex things are, like health care, cross billing, billing fraud and abuse, bills you can’t understand, they’re in code, you have to pay the urologist, you have to pay the people who mop the floors, then they bill you 8 bucks for a Bic razor and so on…Canada, you don’t see a bill – operation, rehabilitation, you don’t see a bill…they cover everyone, from cradle to grave, for 11% of their economy.  This year we’re going to spend 16 ½% of our economy…and all kinds of exceptions, deductions, pre-existing conditions,

I listened to the debates, and I listened to Obama and McCain, “I will give a $3000 credit and allow you to withdraw from your 401K without penalty.”  What are they giving us?  Tips?  Pandering tips?  Here’s how you change taxes.  First, you never tax labor before you tax capital.  Capital gains and selling stock – 15%.  Maximun tax on labor – 36%.  That’s fair?  I mean, you go to work every day…sometimes it costs you your health.  The second thing you do, you tax that which you like the least, or dislike the most, before we tax human labor..  That means we would tax, first, maximum security transactions on Wall Street, tax the gambling industries, the corporate criminals, and the polluters with a carbon tax.  Why?  Because presumably we want less of these things.  We don’t want less jobs, we want more jobs, so we don’t tax jobs first, or the necessities of life with a 6-7-8% sales tax, depending on the State, you tax the things you want to limit.  Now the securities tax was first started in the Civil War.  Lincoln used it to fund the Civil War…

So I’ve got it down to a poem.  Ready?  Here’s my tax plan.  Here it is:

First tax what you burn,

Not what you earn.

First tax what we bet,

Not what we net.

That’s it. 

A blue collar worker, which I could tell because of the roughness of his hands, came up to me after a rally like this, and said to me, “I’m voting for myself, which is why I’m voting for you, Mr. Nader.”  Now, I take that as a very serious thesis, and I ask the question in return, “When, at last, are we all going to vote for ourselves?”

In every speech, Obama talks about unity, unity toward what?  I want unity, I want the unity of the American people, to unify, and subordinate corporate power to the sovereign power of the people.  Corporations are our servants, not our masters.  One way to do that is to strip corporations of their equal constitutional rights as human beings.  We’re not talking about the employees, we’re talking about this artificial entity that lawyers created many generations ago.  They’re chartered by State governments…if large corporations, which have no allegiance to our country anymore, they’re global…if large corporations have all the constitutional rights we have, like entering politics, funding elections, lobbying in State capitals and Washington, we don’t have a chance, because these are power concentration megamachines…there’s no equal justice under the law…

When you talk to your friends, don’t let them confuse personal freedom with civic freedom.  Marcus Cicero, over 2100 years ago, defined freedom as participation in power….dictators allow personal freedom…for example, we have the freedom to choose our clothes, choose our friends, turn to whatever TV channel we want, brush our teeth when we want, choose our hobbies when we want, go here or there if we want, go to the local movie when we want, get in a 5000 pound vehicle to go get Chiclets when we want.  That’s not civic freedom, civic freedom is the power to shape the kind of food we have, how it’s produced, how it’s processed, to shape the tax system, to shape our civic ability to run City Hall or Congress, to shape foreign military policy, to decide how we’re going to have clean air, clean water, and not have polluters decide for us, That’s civic freedom, and that’s what we have to have and it starts with changes in who we elect and how we elect them and who has the money to get X elected, who turns against you once he gets elected. -Ralph Nader, 11-2-2008

--transcription by Joe DeRaymond