Unstoppable

by Ralph Nader

  The parallel libertarian, free market approach is taken by economics professor James T. Bennett of George Mason University. He sees a two-party duopoly, protected and subsidized by the government it controls, as a way to block any external competition and make sure that no third party or independent candidate would even have a chance to compete and grow in strength over the span of successive elections. Bennett wants to abolish the subsidies to the major parties and get rid of the ballot-access barriers to entry and other trip-points. He approves the words of progressive professor Theodore J. Lowi: “It is time to deregulate American politics, letting it take whatever form it will.”21 Bennett wants to close down the two-party controlled Federal Election Commission. He doesn’t even like the idea of organized parties, reminding us of many of the founding fathers’ deep distaste for parties or character-twisting “factions,” as they called them, before they finally resigned themselves to their formation. “Like Madison,” writes Bennett in his recent book Stifling Political Competition: How Government Has Rigged the System to Benefit Demopublicans and Exclude Third Parties, “John Adams was resigned to the existence of parties, but he stressed they must not be permitted to plunder the treasury.”22

  There is convergence here between the likes of Amato and Bennett, but it only goes so far, because of disagreements over whether the state would referee and level the playing field in a reformed system. Amato thinks this is possible. Bennett believes the state will always be manipulated to serve the two-party duopoly—now via subsidies, exclusive debates, and the funding of the two major party conventions by taxpayers. Each side’s view of the flaws in the current arrangement are good starts, but once again liberals and conservatives have to drop their corporatist and two-party allegiances and look straight at the reforms that are needed to give more choices for the voters in a competitive democracy. The convergent groups Citizens in Charge and Free and Equal are already at work on this objective. Working toward this goal may be much easier to commence at the community level, where the sense of fairness is greater than among those in the national professional party circles and their acolytes.

  12. Defend and extend civil liberties.

  This cause received a shot of adrenaline in 2002, when ex-FBI agent and Republican congressman Bob Barr joined with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to protest the Bush administration’s abuses through the PATRIOT Act, which included unlawful surveillance and invasions of citizen privacy. In truth, this kind of Left-Right alliance has been long overdue, and thanks can be given to the violations perpetuated by Bush and Cheney and continued under Obama that more LibCon alliances are being forged.

  Convergence around civil liberties can be seen in the filing of lawsuits regarding arrests and jailing without charges, and massive unlawful surveillance, and in the joint opposition to heavy-handed airport passenger searches that are conducted with ineffective, risky screening machines, even while cargo still is not fully checked twelve years after 9/11. Numerous conferences on civil liberties are now routinely attended by the most unlikely of customary adversaries.

  Yet it must be said that for the better part of a century, the fight for civil liberties was identified with the liberal Left. Right-wingers have strived to make the ACLU name into a dirty word, suggesting that pushing for civil liberties indicates a mark of softness on everything from crime to communism. Then the security leviathan began to encompass the totality of Americans. The mass surveillance program of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), conducted through the Information Awareness Office, brought a bipartisan denunciation from Congress before it was technically terminated and defunded in 2003. In reality, it was merely dispersed to other intelligence agencies, such as the CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA), which proved smarter in their avoidance of naming what they were expansively doing, all with Obama’s approval. The explosive disclosures of Edward Snowden and other whistle-blowers in 2013 revealed the program to be very expansive here and over our foreign allies.

  There really is no easy way, under either party, to stop a continuation of government surveillance of citizens, using penetrating technologies and equipped with the rationale of a permanent war against terror. On September 28, 2011, the Left-Right Alliance Against Government Reading Your Email Without a Warrant campaign was launched. The aligned groups included the Center for Democracy and Technology (L), the Americans for Tax Reform (R), the Bill of Rights Defense Committee (L), the Competitive Enterprise Institute (R), the ACLU (L), the Electronic Frontier Foundation (L/R), and Tech Freedom (R). About the same time, Apple went public, speaking out against government searches of electronic devices without a warrant. The firm joined the organization Digital Due Process, made up of Amazon, AT&T, Google, HP, and Microsoft, which asserts that the members “are working to improve privacy for smartphone, tablet and computer users.”23

  These companies often find the FBI, along with other intelligence and enforcement agencies, coming to them with requisitioning security letters and other demands for private information about their customers. These firms are in a conflict between their customers and the government, for they may be forced to give up personal computer files and invade their customers’ privacy. This issue has brought people of constitutional sensitivities together, even while they disagree with each other on many political matters.

  Call it a procedural or piecemeal convergence. Freedom and privacy will take whatever they can get these days. On this issue, the Right needs to catch up for a real convergence to get moving. The Left puts far more money and staff into these struggles, and now the Right should be matching the progressives.

  13. Expand the civic skills and experience of students from elementary to secondary schools.

  This redirection seems self-evidently necessary. If there is no convergence over this important, generic educational advancement, the reason has to be that personal animosities on other matters are poisoning local relations between the two political persuasions. In that case, someone on either or both sides should say, “Get over it.” The essence of wisdom starts with transcending lesser conflicts in favor of the greater common good. Giving our children civic skills is so necessary for the future of a democratic society and accountability of government, corporations, and other institutions of power that it invites the Latin phrase res ipsa loquitur (the thing speaks for itself). And it’s not just party partisans that are blocking progress. School boards are so riven with bitter quarrels or so willing to turn themselves into compliant supplicants trying to raise funds for the educational fad of the year, such as putting a computer in front of every ten-year-old, that they fail to appreciate the importance of civic education and civic experience.

  A coming together in the struggle against civic abdication, student apathy, virtual reality, gadgetry, ignorance of history and public affairs, and detachment from community can become a unifying force, which moves our schools beyond personalities, fads, and the wrongheaded emphasis on high-frequency standardized testing. This effort, along with restoring physical education classes to improve children’s health, is a battle that needs to be fully joined.

  Now let me mention a couple of convergence points that deal with our nation’s relations to foreign governments and globalized companies.

  14. End unconstitutional wars and unchecked militarism.

  Inspired by the military actions of the Clinton administration, the Obama and Bush teams made a seamless transition into a militarized foreign policy, extending even further the illegal reach of wars of choice, invasions, incursions, and drone attacks, carried out irrespective of national sovereignties. From libertarians to progressives, from conservatives to liberals (from the American Conservative to the Nation), one hears about the “American Empire” in one headline after another that speaks about some of the downsides of our military ventures, fueled by a relentless, bloody hubris, which has no compunction about breaking constitutional restraints, federal statutes, budgets, international treaties, and the system of checks and bal
ances. All these lead an overweening executive, a rubber-stamp Congress, and a judiciary abjuring any jurisdiction. In fact, in 2013 a debate over the military and domestic use of drones broke out, sparked by Senator Rand Paul’s twelve-hour filibuster, which brought together mainstream conservative and liberal think tanks, Republican and Democratic lawmakers, and citizen activists of both Right and Left.

  Many former high military, diplomatic, and national security officials, who have served under both parties, spoke out forcefully against the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. These included retired Marine general Anthony Zinni, retired general and head of the National Security Agency Howard Odom, and even the first President Bush’s top international advisers, Brent Scowcroft and James Baker. I counted about three hundred retirees in these three categories (military, diplomatic, and national security) who spoke out before the invasion once or more, individually. But there was no infrastructure to aggregate them into a persistent force and repeatedly publicize their detailed critiques in the crucial nine-month run-up to the invasion. Add to these antiwar voices the dozens of congressional Democrats, liberal and progressive magazines, and commentators who were challenging the same falsehoods, distortions, and cover-ups by the White House that those prominent retirees were condemning. What an opportunity there was for an organized convergence of those two groups that would have stopped this long, costly war, so destructive of Iraq, its people, our soldiers, our laws, our stressed budgets, and our country’s security and diplomatic status in the world!

  The same belligerent process can be unleashed again and again, as indeed it has been in smaller and larger ways in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and other nations. Anticipatory convergence is essential to prevent more of these provocations and aggressions that are banking future revenge against America by angry people related to the many dead civilians, as well as bankrupting our country in so many ways.

  George Soros, worth an estimated $23 billion, was a strong open and public opponent of the Iraq war. And had he provided, say, $200 million worth of strategic resources to put behind the patriotic retired leaders, helping them mobilize people to send a decisive message to Congress, it would have exposed and stopped the prevarication-strewn drive to war on Iraq. The American people would have learned of the army’s opposition to the war, which went all the way up to four-star generals, who were muzzled. Even now, during the neocon and Israeli government drumbeats to attack Iran, it would still be timely for him to provide the media infrastructure and organizational resources so as to bring together these former officials—liberals and conservatives—in a permanent, high-level watchdog network, poised to prevent such reckless, blowback wars. The path was being trail-blazed in 2012 by a small, new group: the National Commission on Intelligence and Foreign Wars. Its members, including retired military, reflect a Left-Right concurrence focusing on Congress. In July 2013, what had been simmering erupted with a Left-Right rebellion against the Republican and Democratic leaders in the House of Representatives to almost win a ban on the NSA’s blanket snooping on the domestic telephone and email communications of the American people. The vote was 217–205.24

  15. Revise NAFTA, WTO, and similar trade agreements in favor of greater justice.

  This touches the desires of both liberals and conservatives. These pacts are not your free trade treaties of modern history that involved smaller tariffs or ending quotas. As we’ve seen, they are international systems of autocratic governments, with severe penalties for infringement, which go far beyond reducing the aforementioned trade barriers. They subordinate consumer, worker, and environmental protections to the imperatives of global trade by labeling any country with high safeguards in these sectors as erecting “nontariff trade barriers,” which are illegal and prosecutable by the bureaucrats in Geneva on request by a member nation having lesser safeguards. That’s why I call these trade treaties “pull-down agreements.” Conflicts are resolved by circumventing member countries’ agencies, courts, and legislatures in favor of literally secret courts, which operate without independent appellate review, behind closed doors in Switzerland, where neither the media nor anyone else (except direct advocates from the contending countries) can witness what’s going on.

  Test what people think of this loss of sovereignty, this overriding of our democratic practices, this undermining of our workers’ jobs and well-being, this unfair competition from countries brutalized by their rulers (e.g., by using child labor, which under the WTO can be exploited to manufacture goods sold abroad, whose imports cannot be prohibited by other signatory nations, including the United States). Talk to conservatives and liberals about our country being defenseless, unable to block countries with lower safety standards that want to export food and medicines here. Thousands of Americans have died or gotten sick or defrauded just by using contaminated products from China, which has not allowed full FDA inspections. Other provisions in these agreements, always negotiated in secret, except for “consultations” with the corporate lobbies, would sear the sensibilities of just about all Americans of whatever persuasion, who experience the consequences in their daily lives. Yet the corporatists in both parties are pushing for even more autocratic agreements, such as the all-secret TransPacific partnership being negotiated with Asian nations. Lori Wallach, director of Global Trade Watch, describes this draft treaty by the United States as “enforceable corporate global governance . . . that could rip up our basic needs and rights.”25

  Language in every one of these ratified treaties allows signatory nations to give six months’ notice of withdrawal. An economy the size of the United States signaling its intention to give six months’ notice would bring the others rushing quickly to the negotiating table for revision. Global Trade Watch, a durable coalition of Left-Right allies from civic, labor, and corporate groups that has long been in opposition to these agreements, has the details of how these negotiations should be conducted to be fair to Americans and other peoples in the world. (See Global Trade Watch at http://www.citizen.org/trade/.)

  This issue is ready-made for convergence and “shovel-ready” for donations sufficient to do the job.

  The next five redirections concern corporate abuses.

  16. Guard our children from commercialism.

  About fifteen years ago, as described earlier, I spoke to an audience of evangelical Christians in Washington, DC. They were not of my political persuasion, nor were they glowing with expectant approbation as I approached the lectern. My topic was the brazen commercialism in direct contradiction of religious values and parental authority—namely, the daily, hourly, pervasive commercialization of childhood in America. Through direct marketing to children as young as three or four years old, advertisers bypass parents and sell junk food and drink—health-harming products—broadcast violent programming, and, at a later age, promote addictive products, such as tobacco, alcohol, and medications. Whole generations of youngsters are being harmed physically and mentally. I observed that it didn’t matter what your politics are, you have to agree that this is wrong and had to be opposed. They gave me an enthusiastic reception. Parents understand but are often too discouraged to fight against commercialism; many feel overwhelmed by relentless, seductive marketing aimed directly at their children and their peer groups.

  Clearly, how to defend our children from these inroads could be a unifying mission. There is already some existing converging activity from Foundations Family Counseling, Commercial Alert, Focus on the Family, and Parenting.com that needs much higher visibility and resources, as well as more aggressive convergence.

  17. Get rid of corporate personhood.

  I already cited an article by former high-ranking Republican conservative and Wyoming senator Alan Simpson calling for campaign finance reform and criticizing the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which allowed the opening of unlimited spigots for the contribution of corporate cash to political campaigns. He especially excoriated the court’s Republican majority for “asserting a remarkable ri
ght of corporate personhood that I have yet to find in the Constitution.”

  The personhood idea originated with the scribe who reported the 1886 Supreme Court decision in the Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company case and put in the head notes on the decision something the justices expressly did not decide. He erroneously or maliciously wrote—he was a former railroad employee—that the railroad in the case is considered a “person” for purposes of the Fourteenth Amendment. After that, it was off to the races, with one Supreme Court case after another using that misconstruction to assert the existence of other “person” rights for that artificial entity, chartered by the state, called a “corporation.” However, the conservatives’ conservative jurist of our generation, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, was not fully persuaded of the validity of these claims. Rehnquist’s dissent from Associate Justice Lewis Powell’s majority opinion in the Pacific Gas and Electric case (1986) still stands as a bright red line drawn to block the granting of full First Amendment powers for corporations that broke the emerging consumer checkoff movement. The California state regulators had allowed a consumer advocacy organization to place inserts in utility billing envelopes, at no cost to the utility, inviting residential ratepayers to join a dues-paying consumer advocacy group on utility issues—economic or environmental. The majority Supreme Court opinion saw this as violating the utility’s First Amendment rights to remain silent and not have to rebut declarations made in the insert.

  In stark contrast to his Republican colleague on the court, Lewis Powell, an arch-corporatist advocate of businesses’ constitutional rights, the dissenting Justice Rehnquist believed giving corporations free speech rights that assume a conscience is to “confuse metaphor with reality,” adding that “the 14th Amendment does not require a state to endow a business corporation with the power of political speech.”