Robert Scheer: Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence. I always say the intelligence comes from my guests, and I mean it, but never so much as today when my guest is Ralph Nader. Ralph Nader is one of the great legendary figures of American history. I’d put him right up there with Tom Paine, Walt Whitman, whatever, the people who try to speak for the common person, for the average person, and take on the powerful, take on the people who care about themselves not the rest, mock the idea of democracy. Ralph Nader has been the living embodiment of democracy, the advocate for everything from the consumers who are going to be killed in cars without seatbelts to now where he speaks the truth about our military budget, about our abysmal failure to deal with this pandemic because we will not do what every other civilized country does about medical care. And so, with just one little note here, I’ve had my differences with Ralph, and I’ve had to apologize for them. And one particular incident, which will come up here, is [that] we were both speakers debating on a Nation magazine cruise, and on that cruise, I was being critical of Ralph having run an independent campaign for president, and I was still of the idea that somehow the Clintonistas were not great but certainly a lesser evil, and I bought into all that, and I defended the Clinton administration, which has turned out in retrospect to be a horror; they deregulated Wall Street, they ended the welfare system, they allowed concentration of media ownership with the Telecommunications Act, they betrayed the spirit of democracy and, I must say, bear tremendous responsibility, of course along with the savage Republicans, for this incredible income gap that we have, bringing the class struggle or the need for class struggle, to America. I also want to apologize to people listening to this because one failing of Ralph Nader is that he does not go with the times technologically, he is not enamored with the latest gadget, he doesn’t get the latest iPhone, in fact, he doesn’t own a computer. So, when it came time to do this podcast, I was assuming. because I have all the gadgets. that we would do it as we do with Zencaster, I would send him the signal, or Zoom, or something. Well, he doesn’t have one. So, we had a bit of struggle here to get the quality of the tape up to NPR standards. We’ve done it, thanks to Joshua Scheer, the executive producer. But trust me, what Ralph has to say is really worth listening to, maybe more than words coming from any other person in America at this time in our history. So, with that endorsement, let me put my first question to Ralph Nader.
— source scheerpost.com | Ralph Nader | Mar 19, 2021