I didn't really intend to post on Nader again just now but, while researching the Democratic-president-signed Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 (a key stimulus of the current financial crisis), I ran across THIS debate from last year (on Truth Dig, a very interesting site) between Ralph and Truth Dig editor Robert Scheer, a writer I respect a lot.
Scheer wants to argue that it's counterproductive to run 3rd-party campaigns. Okay, I think bad things have followed 3rd-party campaigns, but not because of the 3rd parties! It's the failure of the first two parties that follows the campaign where the 3rd party is buried (even Perot was shut out of the Electoral College).
In fact, it's failure of the best of the "second" party, the one that's supposed to mount an opposition, that really screws the public. Here's Ralph:
NADER: Now let?s take the progressives. There?s a Progressive Caucus that?s now up to 72 or so members. But when it was around 50 or 55, and this was before 2000, we tried to get it activated. You know, a real hard minority in the House can achieve quite a bit. Look what the Southerners did blocking the civil rights laws, for example?just a handful of them in strategic places. So we had, we drafted 10 statutes virtually costing taxpayers nothing, but they shifted power from the few to the many. They made it easier for labor, for consumers to organize, they changed some campaign rules, etc. And we gave it, every one of them, one at a time, and weeks went by. We never heard. We called them up. Bernie, Bernie Sanders? Why don?t you at least put an amendment in the hoppers? So people around the country can say, ?It was HR 28? and rally around it. It never had a chance. It won?t have a chance. Dennis [Kucinich], even you, why don?t you put these in the hopper so we can have an agenda, a progressive agenda that will get us some visibility and you can go on talk shows. Well, even he didn?t put them in. So I had a meeting with the chair of the Democratic National Committee. I had a nice lunch and proceeded to go through these one after another. I call them a pro-democracy agenda. And he took notes, and it was really great. And at the end of the lunch, I gave him a little paperback just for a joke; it was called ?Dogs Are More Intelligent Than Republicans.? It was a humorous little piece properly pictured and so on. It was just a fun book. So a week went by, two weeks, he said he would give it to the research committee at the DNC. Well, that?s fine, three or four weeks go by, didn?t hear about all these proposals. Finally get a call from the Democratic National Committee research unit. They said, ?By the way, you know that book ?Dogs Are More Intelligent Than Republicans?? Can we have more copies?? So I sent them a couple boxes worth. Well, this continued again after 2000. They still didn?t put anything in. So what is this progressive all about? So I wrote an article for The Nation about two years ago: ?Ten Ways to Reform Corporations.? 1, 2, 3, 4. And I get copies and I send it to everyone in the Progressive Caucus. And not a single reply. This is a dead-in-the-water operation. And this is the cream of the crop.The bottom line is that a true progressive agenda is moribund in today's fully debased politics. People want good things to happen, but they are going to have to wake up and force whoever they elect to do them.
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