Ralph Nader talking:
the people have got to demand that their members of Congress block the fast track that is now beginning to circulate in Congress, which will allow an up-or-down vote, no amendments whatsoever to the subsequent Trans-Pacific Partnership, so-called. This is a corporate coup d’état. This is worse than NAFTA. It’s worse than the World Trade Organization. It’s bad for consumers, for labor, for the environment. All these necessities are subordinated to the supremacy of international commercial trade, and a tremendous invasion on local, state and national sovereignty. And all the disputes that may affect American workers and dealing with poverty and investment in poor areas in this country, all the disputes are going to be before secret tribunals. They cannot go to our courts. This is blatantly unconstitutional. But any citizen that tries to take these trade agreements to the federal courts are dismissed because of no standing to sue. So, we’ve got a real fight coming up. Go to GlobalTradeWatch.org, and you’ll get the details. I’m telling you, people, if this one passes, with about a dozen other countries on the Pacific Rim, it’s going to affect the pace of exporting jobs and industry, and subordinating the ability of the United States to be first, and environmental, labor and consumer standards.
I think that the most democratic media in this country are the letters that individuals send to their elected officials. They cannot be censored, when they’re on their way. They cannot be distorted. And they’re not being respected. And I put these letters together in this book, Return to Sender, letters to George W. Bush and Barack Obama, just as an example of the kind of letters that go into the White House that show what the president should be doing, should not be doing, what’s going on around the country or inside the federal government that the president may not know about, unique proposals to turn the country around. And they’re ignored. They’re completely ignored. I mean, I wrote two critical letters to the prime minister of Canada, and they were properly acknowledged, answered and referred to the appropriate ministries. But it’s just a dark hole in the White House. I wrote a letter to Bush and Obama saying, “What is your correspondence policy? What’s your policy in answering letters, other than using some as political props or sending out robo-signed letters?” And there was no answer.
“A Family Appeal to Stop War.” I wrote it to the mother and father of George W. Bush on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, the criminal invasion that’s killed over a million Iraqis, and millions of refugees, and blown apart that country that never threatened us—one of the greatest crimes that presidents have ever committed. It was never constitutionally approved. It was an outlaw presidency. And we could see it coming, because in the prior weeks, Amy, 12 major groups in our country, representing business, intelligence officials retired, municipal officials, religious groups, environment, women’s groups, student groups—they all wrote individual letters. And these groups represent millions of people around the country. They wrote individual letters begging to meet briefly with their president, George W. Bush, before the invasion of Iraq. Some of them had just come back from Iraq. And these letters were never even acknowledged.
And the press bears a serious responsibility here. The White House press corps is basically a ditto scribe operation. They don’t take any interest in letters that are coming in, other than if it’s a quirky type thing. And when these letters were released to the press, as many of them were, or they were sent to the White House press corps, or they were sent to various agencies like the Centers for Disease Control, the press ignored them. Now, years ago, letters got more respect. A letter would go to Senator Warren Magnuson urging a hearing on an important subject. It would get into The Washington Post or The New York Times. But the state of correspondence today, the most initiatory democratic media in the country, is at its lowest level that I can ever see.
A letter called “Letter from E.coli 0104:H4.” on June 3rd, 2011, to President Obama. “Dear President Obama: My name is E.coli [0104:H4]. I am being detained [here] in a German Laboratory in Bavaria, charged with being ‘a highly virulent strain of bacteria.'” And you go on to say, “Your associates are obsessed with possible bacteriological warfare by your human enemies. Yet you are hardly doing anything on the ongoing silent [violence] of my indiscriminate brethren.”
it was a way to try to get a little attention. This little E. coli, in this fictional approach, was trying to redeem itself before it was going to be put away in this Petri dish in Europe, and it was a plea, as I’ve made a plea to President Clinton and President Bush, that they’ve got to pay more attention to the threat of viral and bacteriological epidemics around the world and in the United States. We’ve just come off the Ebola epidemic in Africa, as everybody knows. But the mutation of these viruses and bacteria is also a threat. You can see resistant tuberculosis to existing drugs, antibiotic resistance that’s killing tens of thousands of people in this country, hospital-induced infections.
This is a very serious epidemic of preventable violence, but where is the trillions of dollars going? To expand empire, to blow apart other countries, to create more enemies, to kill more civilians overseas. It’s a clinically insane institutional situation we have in our federal government, and what Eisenhower warned about in his final speech, the military-industrial complex, that goes from Washington to Wall Street to Houston. This has got to be what Bernie Sanders and other new entries into the presidential race talk about. You’re not going to hear this from the Republicans, over a dozen of them running for the presidency, ignoring all these problems.
It’s very important for people to write these letters, send copies to members of Congress or to the press or anyone who you think is interested in the contents of the letter. It’s a way to get people involved. And don’t worry if you don’t get an answer. Send it around to other people, and you’ll get people coming to join you in whatever effort you pursue.
You read about President Obama going to Chambers of Commerce, going to business gatherings all over the country. But he’s never addressed the voluntary nonprofit sector, the groups that deal with charity, deal with children’s needs, environment, labor groups, religious groups, groups that are advocacy groups. And when Jimmy Carter was elected president, we gathered a thousand of these leaders, who have millions of members, like the National Council of Churches—they have a lot of members around the country—and labor unions, etc., in a hotel about two blocks from the White House. And it was a very successful meeting with Jimmy Carter, and it raised the profile of these groups.
So I wrote the letters to Barack Obama saying, “Why don’t you do that? It’s just two blocks away, logistically very easy. You walked across Lafayette Park to pay homage to the Chamber of Commerce. Why don’t you do that? It’s not only the right thing to do, but these nonprofit groups have a lot of employees. And if they get more visibility, more charitable contributions, they’re going to hire more people.” And I tried to appeal to him on the job basis. Well, he never answered. So I sent it over to Michelle’s office, and back came a letter basically saying, “Thank you for doing that, but he’s just too busy.” He’s just too busy to respond to the nonprofit voluntary sector of America that every day keeps his country going.
The former community organizer. Of all people, he should have recognized this. He’s also an expert in constitutional law, and he has violated the Constitution and federal statutes in terms of his drone warfare and other foreign policies right and left. You know what the lesson, Juan, is, that it really doesn’t matter. If the power structure persists, it doesn’t matter who’s in office. It doesn’t matter what ethnic, racial background. It doesn’t matter how much they know, how much they don’t know. They’re all molded by the corporate power structure that controls Washington from Wall Street, to use a symbolic tour.
The Baltimore situation has been known for years—whole areas of Baltimore, horrific poverty, poor municipal services, massive unemployment, bad nutrition, not enough stores providing necessities, bank redlining, insurance redlining—you name it—lack of enforcing building codes, hovels as homes—you name it. And they knew it all along. And that’s what John Angelos, who is part of the Baltimore Orioles sports team, was talking about in his very, very incisive statement the other day, that basically, why does it take a few dozen young people smashing windows in cars to wake up the power structure and start paying attention to the necessities of millions of low-income people all over the country? And so, we’ve been through this drill before. There have been other uprisings, so to speak, spontaneous and short-lived, in various cities. And then, all of a sudden, attention is paid: Should we do poverty or not?
When this is the worst time in modern American history, because while this is going on, the Republican Party has just passed in the House a 10-year budget resolution, in effect, that gives the Pentagon more money, and cuts all the life-sustaining programs and the safety programs here at home for the American people, and allows all these tax breaks and tax havens and special privilege for the corporate supremacists, and then sends it over to the Senate. It’s totally brain-dead as to what’s going on in this country. And that’s why I’m so critical of the Democratic Party that they cannot landslide the cruelest, most horrific Republican Party in the Republican Party’s history. The Republican Party on Capitol Hill is displaying characteristics approaching that of a political death cult. And the Democrats can’t do a thing about it? Shame on them.
Obama expanded the empire and he’s basically broken every international law relating to national sovereignties. He’s broken some of the Geneva Conventions, all of which the U.S. is a signatory to, U.N. Charter. No wars are permitted under international law in the U.N. Charter, unless they’re for strictly defensive purposes. And obviously, we attacked Iraq. They never threatened us. And we’re attacking all kinds of other areas around the world.
What are we getting for it? We’re getting the massive proliferation of violent groups, offshoots and sub-offshoots of al-Qaeda. There are so many of these groups in Africa and Asia spreading, Southeast Asia, that the Pentagon is having trouble indexing them. But they have all this—kill list, of course, every Tuesday in the White House. And what people in this country don’t understand is that the drones may take a few dozen lives here and a few dozen lives there, but when you’re living—when millions of people in Asia and Africa are living under drones, they hear that whine 24 hours a day, it’s terror, it’s horror. They don’t know whether their homes are going to be blown up from this lightning bolt from the sky. And then we wonder why people are hating us and want to do us in.
And it’s only a matter of time. As we push these fighters to become more skilled, more bold, greater in numbers, it’s only a matter of time when the suicide belts are coming to this country. And our country is totally unable to withstand preservation of its civil liberties and democracy with these attacks. And the whole process of democratic processes, allocation of public budgets, will be completely turned upside down in this country with a couple violent terrorist attacks.
When I was a child, a youngster, I read the Adams-Jefferson letters, and I read the—later, I read the Holmes-Laski letters. And I liked the personal nature of it, the initiatory nature of it, the command of the writer. And I used letters years ago to make a lot of news. The press would look at a letter and say, “Does it say something important? Is it newsworthy? Who does it go to?” And when these letters were publicized in the press, members of Congress couldn’t ignore the issue. They often would have congressional hearings.
So now, what are we left with? A few giant media conglomerates dominating everything, a little Indymedia, Democracy Now!, Pacifica. What are we really left with for people to breathe and to have a voice? And so, that’s why I wanted President Bush and Obama to address large gatherings of citizen groups in Washington, make it easy for them, who represent the felt necessities of our time, whether it’s dealing with poverty, bigotry, whether it’s dealing with education, whether it’s dealing with environment, consumer protection, the integrity of government, integrity of elections. So, in one of the letters—I’ll read just an excerpt.
“[I]n 2009 and again in 2011 I wrote to urge you [President Obama] to address a large gathering, in a convenient Washington venue, for the leaders of nonprofit civic organizations with tens of millions of members throughout the United States. Not receiving a reply, I sent my request to … First Lady, Michelle Obama, whose assistant replied saying you were too busy.
“You were, however, not too busy to address many business groups and also to walk over to the oppositional U.S. Chamber of Commerce [across from the White House]. Well, it is the second term and such a civic gathering could be scheduled at your convenience. You could use this occasion to make a major speech on the importance and means of advancing the quality and quantity of civic groups and their chapters which, taken together, are major employers. Your advisers could even justify the [effort] as stimulating a jobs program by urging larger charitable contributions from the trillions of dollars of inert money in the hands of the upper economic classes.”
And I also urged him to make a statement on how a president has an obligation to shift power from the few to the many structurally—for example, to make it easier for consumers of insurance services to band together, to make it easy for taxpayers to band together to try to reform the corrupt tax system, to make it easy for workers to band together and overcome the notorious Taft-Hartley law and other statutory obstructions to workers banding together.
No answer there, either. I suppose some people would be discouraged, but it just further motivates me. And in promoting this book, Return to Sender, I think if people knew the variety of material here and how it raises the expectation level we should all have of our president, it could become a best-seller. But I’m not betting on it.
— source democracynow.org
Ralph Nader, longtime consumer advocate, corporate critic and former presidential candidate. His new book is called Return to Sender: Unanswered Letters to the President, 2001-2015