Unstoppable

by Ralph Nader

  What transpired before and on February 20, 2010, and thereafter provides an instructive example. On that day in a Washington, DC, hotel, forty persons gathered, all opposed to militarism, wars, and the American empire. To any observer this would seem to be nothing special so far, until they learned that around the large conference table was a multiracial attendance of libertarians, progressives, conservatives, centrists, and radicals—self-described with the usual qualifications—who were going to deliberate for the entire day. The conference was inspired and funded by Republican and former Cold War hawk George D. O’Neill Jr., of Lake Wales, Florida, and coordinated by former Green Party Senate candidate and legal scholar Kevin Zeese.

  The meeting participants were outspoken and un-sandpapered. Obviously, those at the table came from a common consensus of what they wanted to stop, and they proceeded to discuss in more detail both the malady and what needed to be done. Many had their own constituency from decades of activism, writing, rallying, and taking their lumps. They included Doug Bandow, Medea Benjamin, Glen Ford, Tom Hayden, Bill Kauffman, William Lind, Daniel McCarthy, Carl Oglesby, Robert Pollin, Cindy Sheehan, Jeffrey Tayler, Katrina vanden Heuvel, Jesse Walker, Dave Wagner, George Wilson, Thomas E. Woods Jr., and others. Woods spoke of previous Left-Right coalitions against war, including one that involved Andrew Carnegie, who was against the Spanish-American war, while Zeese laid out the components of a detailed “effective antiwar movement.”

  The gathering met its title, “The Across the Political Spectrum Conference Against War and Militarism,” causing Paul Buhle to say that “there never was such a boundary-crossing event before, at least not in my fifty-year political lifetime.”6

  As the hours wore on, some fissures emerged over tactics and on what to do with the huge savings, which would come from cutting military budgets. The savings were an incentive to oppose war making and could also fund a redirecting of our country. The most difficult subject of who, how, and when to mobilize was not expeditiously or functionally considered.

  Around three or four PM, people started moving to catch their planes. Few if any volunteered to assume the tasks that would have brought the goals of the meeting to the next step, though email addresses were exchanged. The truth was these were busy people, some of whom were plumb tired and philosophically pessimistic after decades of struggle. Okay, so how much could we expect from one meeting? At its end, I didn’t sense that this was a breakout event.

  George O’Neill, with assistance from Buhle, Kauffman, and Zeese, gathered together many short, to-the-point articles by the participants and published them in early 2011 under the title of ComeHomeAmerica.us.7 In his note accompanying the copy he sent me, O’Neill related that “we are all working toward a larger and more public conference this year.” It never happened.

  What did happen? Certainly there was passion; these were not theoretical, armchair philosophers. But their cups were full with what they chose to make their daily work, as was mine. A few went back to nonviolent civil disobedience against America’s wars; others displayed their outrage in a variety of individual ways. All seemed busy with their various work and family responsibilities. But their sum (postconference) was less than their parts, which isn’t exactly what the participants may have had in mind when they accepted O’Neill’s bold invitation.

  Making Effective Convergences Happen

  Welcome to the world of well-meaning but ultimately nonproductive, secularly ecumenical conferences, especially ones that do not hammer out a proclamation or call to action like the Ripon statement or the Declaration of Independence. What were the problems? First, the conference was too short. It needed to break down into workshops the next day with declared programmatic outcomes, ones that would explore many directions, in many dimensions. One such workshop could have focused on enlisting some thoughtful, generous, super-rich sponsor to provide the essential resources for field organizers, communicators, and grassroots lecturers, creating the type of infrastructure that propelled forward the populist-farmer movement in the 1880s and 1890s, which was so successful.

  Think of starting a business, building a trade union, or launching a nonprofit institution, and imagine what efforts have to follow any such convening meeting for the plan to come to fruition.

  Initiators who put forces in motion are usually those who commit their time to these objectives, day after day spreading the dynamic and rooting the mission. If the mission is too large for the number of available participants, then a small secretariat needs to be set up that can work to broaden the base beyond that of the founders. This group can tap into focused energies and build up a critical mass of the involved to ready the project for takeoff.

  Obviously, disparate motivations will attract different people to support a cause: anything from making money in a new field to resisting felt injustices in the workplace to being driven by a singular vision. That’s the point: multiple motivations will drive the joining of unlikely activists in one cause. During preparations for beginning a project, people’s motivating passions need to be identified and given opportunities to constructively proliferate so that they cannot easily be discouraged or sidelined by other activities. Of course, for success, some of the proponents have to see the mission as their number 1 commitment.

  It helps to propose these preconditions to a successful launch before the first invitations are sent, so that the invitees do not get the impression they are going to a talkfest simply to test their mutual congeniality and attitudes toward the issue. Moreover, there is no substitute for inviting a sizable number of young people, typically filled with vitality and vigor, who may desire to make the goal of the project their life’s work. At a get-together like this, wisdom plays when energy avails.

  Even a Successful Convergence Can Be Derailed When It Enters the Public Sphere

  Another quite different conjoining of Left-Right came out of the conservative American Bar Association (ABA) in 2005–2006 under the leadership of its president, corporate lawyer Michael Greco of Boston. Having been a lapsed member of the staid and cautious ABA, I was astonished at what Greco pulled off. He organized two task forces of lawyers—with the usual philosophical differences—to put out two white papers on the constitutional violations of President George W. Bush in the area of executive overreach of power. Greco and his colleagues then obtained a unanimous endorsement by the ABA’s Board of Delegates, comprised of five hundred attorneys, largely business-oriented and Republicans.8 He did this by the force of his character, with a sense of urgency about high-level White House–led lawlessness, and by bringing together lawyers on the task forces who had worked for the FBI, CIA, and Defense Department as well as lawyers working in the fields of civil liberties and constitutional government. The delegates looked at the roster and identified with some of the names as “people like us,” people who are true patriots who believe in our country’s commitment to the rule of law over powerful public officials.

  The white papers were sent separately at different times to the president and released to the press. They included arrests without charges, illegal surveillance, and rampant signing statements by George W. Bush declaring his power to ignore enforcement of bills signed into law. President George W. Bush did not even have an aide acknowledge receipt and made no comment on the considered judgments of the largest bar association in the world. More remarkably, apart from a short Associated Press report, the mainstream press ignored these declarations on a presidency that was deep in an undeclared war, one getting worse by the month in terms of American casualties and much, much worse in terms of Iraqi casualties, as well as overall destruction and cost.

  Whoever the clients were or could be for these ABA attorneys, they put their country and their fealty to the constitution first and foremost. They had no client agenda, no commercial inducement. As officers of the court, they just believed it was the lawful thing to do, regardless of any disfavor they may have received from others in their party, regardless of their social and professional peers,
regardless of the usual lucrative inducements awaiting commitments to casuistry. One would think that our country would take notice, ponder, deliberate, and invite these lawyers to conventions, media programs, and state and local bar associations. For the most part, it did not happen. Why was this action derailed?

  First, it was not meant to be a budgeted, grassroots movement. So there were no follow-up programs, tours, demands for public hearings, litigation, or networking. The white papers were placed before our society’s underdeveloped democratic institutions, which were unprepared to pick up and take to new heights of action anything suggested by their insights. Despite growing polls against the Iraq War, the papers were lost to indifference. Neither the legal profession, nor local political entities, nor civic associations, nor law schools and universities took this precious asset and amplified its impact.

  Second, Mr. Greco’s presidency was for a one-year term during which he traveled the nation speaking about his concerns. Before returning to his practice in Boston, he told me that his successor informed him she was not going to pick up where he left off. So that luminous expression of exceptional professional duty by the ABA simply faded away. The Iraq War became more violent and led to more serious damage to a society of twenty-five million people who presented no threat to the United States. Meanwhile, in 2009, the US government plunged deeper into another war-quagmire in Afghanistan through similar unconstitutional aggressions.

  Obviously saying the perceived truth, as did Greco and colleagues, is different from meaning it so much you take it to the powers-that-be. That is when the repercussions and retaliations start to kick in. Few have the fortitude to withstand such pressures. Even the heroic Greco has been discouraged and less active since he returned to his Boston law practice.

  Convergences on Procedural Issues

  When convergence is nipped in the bud, at least we know there was a bud. What happens when members of a potential Left-Right convergence prejudge and completely turn off each other even when there is undeniable agreement on a singular policy, though the sides are divided by a welter of other disagreements? This is how an alliance I formed was judged and condemned by those on my side who wouldn’t look beyond the multiple disagreements I had with a controversial political figure to see the one area where we had unity.

  One day in 1994 Pat Buchanan and I joined together at a news conference to denounce NAFTA and the proposed World Trade Organization agreement. We had overlapping concerns, such as the enormous override of our sovereignty, courts, agencies, and legislatures by the unelected transnational governments to which the United States signed on with many other countries to constitute these agreements. And we had separate criticisms. For my part, these criticisms were the weakening of health, safety, and environmental regulations to the lowest common denominators that these pacts would endorse. Buchanan didn’t much like regulations from any directions.

  Some of my associates wondered how I could ally with one of the last devotees of Nixon in the White House. How could I overlook his other positions, which were so regressive and tribalist? In turn, he got calls from his ideological fraternity asking why he was associating with what they called an “antibusiness” or “anticapitalist” adversary. Buchanan would tell them, “Ralph and I have many disagreements, but we want to express them under the rules of the U.S., not the secret tribunals in Geneva.”

  Here is my take. If people from usually opposing constituencies can concur on an important matter like these “pull-down” trade agreements without conceding any point for compromise, why not? Our critics would have had a point if I watered down my opposition to NAFTA and WTO to get Buchanan’s agreement, but I wasn’t going to do that. Nor was he.

  Procedural agreements are far more possible to put together than substantive ones. This was a procedural opposition to a framework of enforceable rules that subordinated consumer, worker, and environmental standards to the supremacy of trade policy. These rules of sovereignty shifting did not remotely have the consent of the affected populations. Just the opposite was the case. They were to be implemented with great secrecy. Before the treaties were enacted under proposed fast-track legislation from the White House, Congress tied its own hands for a quick up or down vote with no amendments allowed.

  There have been Left-Right procedural agreements going back generations. Many of the amendments in the Bill of Rights came to have this kind of broad consensus, starting with the First Amendment rights of freedom of speech, religion, petition, assembly, and press. We need to locate more procedural concurrence between Left and Right at less exalted heights in the many laws, agency policies, and obstructions to access to the courts that presently set up grossly unfair exclusions, leaving out the least powerful among us, who are often the vast majority.

  A good illustration of convergence on procedural issues is LibCon support for restricting the state’s power of eminent domain that authorizes corporations to forcibly take the property of others—homeowners, schools, and churches—demolish whatever is on it, and build a factory or enlarge a parking lot or a mall. This was what the city of Detroit empowered General Motors to do in the early eighties. GM asked for the use of the city’s eminent domain powers to demolish hundreds of homes, numerous small businesses, schools, hospitals, and churches in order to clear out a stable, multiracial neighborhood of four hundred acres called Poletown. The purpose was to clear ground for a new GM plant that would have been built nearby, if not within the borders of Detroit. In the torrid struggle by the community to save itself from oblivion, recurrent nighttime arsons burned down one home after another. Visitors came to support their cause. They included progressive Democratic representative, now senator, Barbara Mikulski from Maryland and a leading libertarian, Fred Smith, of the Center for Competitive Enterprise. The Michigan Supreme Court, by a split vote, sided with GM and the mayor of Detroit. After the court decision, the neighborhood was leveled for the plant. A Cadillac plant was built with half of the jobs promised in return for over $300 million in local, state, and federal subsidies.9

  Later, in 2005, when the Supreme Court upheld a state law of eminent domain (specifically to replace an entire neighborhood with the Pfizer corporation) by a 5–4 vote (liberals made up most of the five in favor, conservatives the four against) in the notorious Kelo v. City of New London, many state legislatures passed prohibitions on using eminent domain to replace private property with private property, winning these votes by lopsided margins of both Democrats and Republicans. There was clearly a Left-Right conjoining against this manifestation of statism garnished by crony capitalism—a combined force that could pass laws overwhelmingly.

  This corporatization of eminent domain is part of a continuing struggle. Accordingly, it is fertile as a cause, if necessary through referenda, to bring customarily opposing blocs together, which can lead to other redirections of our society. These are referenda that corporations oppose but most of the people support, such as stopping taxpayer-funded commercial stadiums and ballparks or the California voters’ initiative to raise the minimum wage to twelve dollars an hour, which is slated for November 2014 and advanced by conservative Ron Unz.

  This latter is another area, among the many noted in this chapter, where Left-Right alliances are doable, though time and time again blocked by wily corporatists. In the next chapter, the major policies for Left-Right action outlines just how fertile the emerging political realignment can become.

  4

  Twenty-Five Proposed Redirections and Reforms Through Convergent Action

  First the list:

  1.Require that the Department of Defense (DOD) budget be audited annually, and disclose all government budgets. Secrecy destroys accountability.

  2.Establish rigorous procedures to evaluate the claims of businesses looking for a government handout, which would end most corporate welfare and bailouts.

  3.Promote efficiency in government contracting and government spending.

  4.Adjust the minimum wage to inflation.

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sp; 5.Introduce specific forms of taxation reform as well as push to regain uncollected taxes.

  6.Break up the “Too Big to Fail” banks.

  7.Expand contributions to charity, using them to increase jobs and drawing on available “dead money.”

  8.Allow taxpayers the standing to sue, especially immunized governments and corporations.

  9.Further direct democracy—initiative, referendum, and recall, for starters.

  10.Push community self-reliance.

  11.Clear away the obstacles to a competitive electoral process.

  12.Defend and extend civil liberties.

  13.Enhance civic skills and experience for students.

  14.End unconstitutional wars and enforce Article 1, section 8, of the Constitution, which includes the exclusive congressional authority to declare war.

  15.Revise trade agreements to protect US sovereignty, and resume full congressional deliberations, ending fast track.

  16.Protect children from commercialism and its physical and mental exploitation and harm.

  17.End corporate personhood.

  18.Control more of the commons that we already own.

  19.Get tough on corporate crime, providing penalties and enforcement budgets.

  20.Ramp up investor power by strengthening investor-protection laws and by creating a penny brigade to pay for an investor watchdog agency.

  21.Oppose the patenting of life forms, including human genes.

  22.End the ineffective war on drugs.

  23.Push for environmentalism.

  24.Reform health care.

  25.Create convergent institutions.

  It is important to think about how to think about convergence before we look over these proposed reforms. Otherwise, there will be too many wayward or excessive expectations, missed opportunities, and/or abrupt prejudgment about changes in one area after another. Herewith some guidelines: