The veteran activist sees a growing cross-political movement to change the way this country runs. Excerpted from “Ralph Nader,” July 31, 2014

RALPH NADER, Political Activist; Author, Unstoppable: The Emerging Left- Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State
In conversation with DEBRA J. SAUNDERS, Columnist, San Francisco Chronicle; “Token Conservative” Blogger, SFGate.com

RALPH NADER: We’re dealing with different categories of “left-right” [alliance] stages. You start with public opinion. For example, counter-intuitively, 70 or 80 percent of the American people favor restoration of the minimum wage – at least inflation-adjusted from 1968. It would be $10.90 – it’s stuck at $7.25 federal, and California is going to $9 and maybe higher. You have 30 mil¬lion workers in this country, out of about 140 million, who are making less today in inflation-adjusted dollars – purchasing power – than workers made in 1968. That holds true for Walmart workers, for example. Under Sam Walton, Walmart workers made, in real money, more than they make today, even though worker productivity has doubled throughout the years.

When 70 or 80 percent [of Americans agree] on an issue, you know there are a lot of conservatives and liberals in that category. That [issue] is starting to go operational. It’s operational now in cities like San Jose that have raised the minimum wage. It’s going operational in 21 states that have moved up to $8.50 or $9 an hour. Congress itself is starting to get the message, and it turns out that a few weeks ago, almost in the same week, Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Tim Pawlenty, the Republican former governor of Minnesota, came out for the restoration of the minimum wage.

[Left-right alliance issues tend to progress through] about four stages. It starts with public opinion. Then it congeals, becomes more visible, whether through left-right petitions or a referendum or marches or rallies. Then the press starts reporting it. Then it reaches the table of some candidates for office – incumbents or challengers – and once it reaches the table, it is discussable. Most of these left-right alliance issues are really off the table of the Republican and Democratic parties. They do not want to discuss it, and once it’s not discussable, obviously it’s going nowhere. What the left-right alliance says is, “No, we’re going to have this discussed in elections and public opinion and debate.”

We see, for instance, this tiny budget in the federal realm: the military budget, which is $800 billion. [Laughter.] It’s half of the federal operating budget. There’s no more Soviet Union. China is not going to send missiles, not while we send them our jobs and industry. So why do we have such a large budget? Well, it’s what Eisenhower warned us about: The military-industrial complex is insatiable, and it’s always looking to find an enemy to justify all this armament and all these military contracts. It’s pretty hard trying to make $800 billion worth of fighting some criminal gangs abroad or some exaggerated third-world-country peril.

What happens is, you have to cover up, and the way you cover up is you don’t audit the Pentagon budget. The Pentagon budget has not been audited decade after decade. Any businessperson knows that if you don’t audit your business, you’re not going to find out where the money is and where it’s being spent and wasted, never mind prudent business strategy and allocation. The government accounting office, the arm of Congress, reports every year on the different departments and agencies. Every year, it says, “Alas, we don’t have the data that would allow us to audit the Pentagon budget because the Pentagon doesn’t have the data.” So we discover $9 billion disappeared in the first few weeks of the invasion of Iraq, which is a criminal invasion – unconstitutional, based on lies and deceptions, [a fact] now taken for granted except by Dick Cheney.

The State Department is not that much better under Hillary Clinton. Six billion dollars couldn’t be accounted for. So where do you think the left-right [alliance]comes in on auditing the Pentagon budget? Screamingly high: over 90 percent. Ninety percent of the left-right [alliance wants] to break up the big New York banks that are deemed too big to fail – and therefore if they crash again, they crash the economy, and the taxpayers have to bail them out. The idea of initiative, referendum, recall – there are a lot of procedural Democratic reforms on which the left and right are insistently on the same side. Whether they agree or disagree, they want a voice, and if the lawmakers don’t provide a way to reflect that voice, then they want initiative, referendum and recall.

The drug wars are now being subjected to a left-right alliance. Grover Norquist and Newt Gingrich have started a group called Right On Crime. There are too many people in jail with long sentences for nonviolent offenses, and it’s costing billions of dollars. The right wing doesn’t like that. It’s a waste of money. The left also thinks it’s a waste of money, but they [also] think it’s a terrible way to treat people if you want to avoid recidivism, and if you have any sense of human rights. Sometimes left and right are both on the same side, but for different reasons. We have juvenile justice reform being passed in 15 states now because the left-right legislators have gotten together and shortened some of those outrageous sentences for small possession of marijuana or other street drugs.

Try NAFTA and the World Trade Organization: left-right [alliance], now has enough representation in the House of Representatives to stop what’s been called NAFTA on steroids, which is the Trans- Pacific trade agreement. It doesn’t just deal with trade; it deals with subordinating consumer, worker and environmental standards to the supremacy of commercial trade. [The agreement was] literally decided in secret tribunals, such as the ones in Geneva, Switzerland, quite different from our open courts and our regulatory processes and the legislator processes. Why is the right wing opposed? Because they think it shreds our sovereignty. Why is the left opposed? Because they think it shreds our decision-making, but they also think it unfairly ships millions of jobs and industries to autocratic regimes and fascist communist regimes that know how to keep their workers in their place at 80 cents an hour.

In the book I have 25 areas of convergence. As I go around the country, people suggest other areas of convergence; some of them are national, some are local. The liberals have to get over their distaste for even associating with right-wingers. I’ve found that the right-wingers are more interested in this book than the left, and I’m asking myself why. I want to be very concise because in television you have got to give people sound bites. An intelligent reporter asks me, “What’s the problem with liberals not getting together with Grover Norquist and Newt Gingrich? I mean, do you know what these people stand for? How can you stand it?” So I’ve got it down better than a sound bite. It’s called a sound bark. Here’s the problem. It’s the ick factor, like, “How can we associate with these people? How can we deal with them? We disagree with them.” Well, you disagree with them on A, B, C, D. So what? That doesn’t mean you don’t work with them on W, X, Y, Z to lift the taboos and all the repressive forces that keep people from saying what they think and doing what they want and building a better society and having the United States be known as a humanitarian superpower instead of just a military superpower with enough armaments to blow the world up 300 times over and make the rubble bounce – which was one calculation by an industrial engineer.

My favorite dollar bill is the $2 bill. I don’t know how many of you have seen the picture on the other side. This is a picture of the people who showed up to sign the Declaration of Independence on July 4th, 1776. OK, they’re white males and they’re upper income, but when they signed that declaration, they knew they were possibly signing a death warrant because they were taking on the most powerful military force in the world, the British Empire. So I say to all of us: Half of democracy is showing up. If we’re not going to show up, especially in the left-right alliance, to town meetings, to the precincts to vote, to the courtrooms, to the marches, to the rallies, we won’t get this great democratic experiment maturing as it should in the 21st century.

If we don’t do that, given the trends of decay and decline, our descendants are going to curse us for the kind of country we hand forward. All of us have our own occupations, professions and businesses, but we are also all citizens and we have to allot time for that precious and most important responsibility.

Question and Answer Session with Debra J. Saunders, Columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle

DEBRA J. SAUNDERS: Who do you think will be the candidates for president in 2016?

RALPH NADER: I could be flippant and say it’s not relevant because [all the potential frontrunners] represent the same interests – except for a few categories that are important in the civil liberties area – but on national security and corporate welfare and not doing anything about the tax code and empire and war, it’s so drearily similar [in] both parties. If I had to guess now, and it will be a wrong guess, [I would say,] the dynasty returns: Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton.

SAUNDERS: Will Ralph Nader jump into this?

NADER: No. But I do want to encourage a billionaire or two to turn it into a three- or four-way race. There should be an enlightened billionaire, especially in this area of the country, who is rather seriously concerned about the state of the country. I’m serious about that. I sent letters to 20 billionaires urging them to [run.] However, it’s a long way to Iowa and the caucuses, so anything could happen. I just wrote a column saying I think Jerry Brown is not going to go to Iowa and New Hampshire, but I think he’s standing for president. I think he’s waiting to see if Hillary falters. He’s ready and he’s done everything to be as invulnerable as possible to political attack. Plus, he’s balanced the budget and he’s run three times so he still has that taste.

SAUNDERS: This to me is one of the issues where the right and the left can quickly agree: Mr. Nader, would you share your opinion of GMO corn and the ethanol fuel mandate?

NADER: I don’t know about liberals on this, but I think there are a lot of conservatives and a good slice of liberal people who are discovering that ethanol is a waste of taxpayer dollars; it’s a subsidy. Number two, it does not help the environment the way it was exaggerated on its introduction. Sugarcane ethanol is much more efficient. Number three, it almost costs as much to produce the corn as the BTUs you get out of the corn when it’s burned. Number four, why do you want to burn food in a hungry world? And number five, the studies have shown that you’re likely to marginally increase supermarket prices because of any shortages that occur.

Back when I was campaigning, right from the start, they asked me, “What’s your opinion on ethanol?” And I said, “Out of here!” That made me really popular. [Laughter.]

SAUNDERS: And GMO corn?

NADER: For any GMO, first of all, it’s Monsanto corporate science. It’s not academic science. Corporate science is secret, proprietary information; it’s not peer-reviewed by other scientists; it’s not open; it has political power, which goes beyond its merits; and it is commercially driven in terms of what you choose to do research on while academic science is open, peer-reviewed. Some scientists may want to support something that doesn’t have to make an immediate profit, but is very good for human beings. I’ve just written a long introduction to a book called The GMO Deception that is full of articles by scientists and investigative reporters saying, “Open it up, folks. This is too secret and too tumultuous a technology. Changing the nature of nature? Flora, fauna? Corporations owning our genetic sequences in terms of monopoly patents? Let’s have a discussion.” There’s no ethical legal framework. It’s essentially unregulated. And you have farmers who don’t want to grow GMO crops whose crops are being contaminated by the winds wafting from farms that do use GMO crops. So, it is a trap. In other countries it’s worse than that. [GMO technology] allies itself with industrial farming, dispossessing millions of farmers in places like India.

SAUNDERS: NASA scientist James Hansen has suggested that eliminating the development of breeder reactors was a big mistake in our quest to reduce CO2 and global warming. What’s your opinion on that?

NADER: My opinion is that the best fusion reactor we’ll ever have is the sun: photovoltaics, solar-thermal, wind power. You know, if the sun could ever write a letter to the earth, it’d say, “You stupid people, I gave you vegetation, which congealed and went down, down into the ground and turned into oil, gas and coal. Instead of looking up at me and having more wind power and all the rest that I give you, you’re digging deeper and deeper, and bringing it up, and poisoning your own people, and devastating flora and fauna, and creating soil erosion and toxic dust for workers and pollution. What is going on here?”

Here’s what’s going on. The problem with the sun is it’s super abundant; it’s everywhere and if you can get the infrastructure, it’s free. Exxon Mobil doesn’t like that. There is a natural disposition for conglomerations of capital to lock into highly capitalized local sources of energy like coal mines, oil wells, gas lines and nuclear power because then they control it and solar energy is very decentralized. You now have trucks in California installing solar panels all over the state because the price has dropped precipitously in the last three years. That’s why I think solar energy is not irreversible. It’s had some false starts. It started over 2,000 years ago. The ancient Persians and the ancient Greeks used their construction in a way to get the benefits of the sun in the winter and not so much in the summer. East Africa had tunnels where cold wind came in. It’s been around a long time. It’s time to bring the sun back. Forget about all these hazardous, highly complicated,
highly centralized, highly autocratic and highly risky technologies. The sun’s going to be around, we are told, for four billion years, so it allows for long-range planning.

SAUNDERS: Who are the best people in government today? Who are the worst? Name names.

NADER: You have to take them piece by piece. I think Senator Elizabeth Warren is very good on consumer financial issues, debtor-creditor relations, big banks and bailouts. She really knows her stuff. I don’t think she’s very good on foreign and military policy. I think she follows the Obama line partially because she doesn’t know that much. It’s not her area, but I hold her up to higher levels.

Rand Paul – I can’t stand his positions. He’s against Medicare; he’s against health and safety regulation; he doesn’t like mandated environmental standards; I think he’s skeptical on climate change; and he hates taxation. You wonder how all this is going to be funded. But he’s against empire. He’s for open information, and he’s against the bloated military budget.

We had an amazing thing happen in 2010. Barney Frank and Ron Paul – [Rand Paul’s] father – got together in a caucus, and they staffed it to take on the bloated military budget – left-right [alliance], right there.

I mean, I would vote for 15 percent of the Congress. I’d willingly vote for them. One-five. [But that percentage has] been going down.

SAUNDERS: I know you like Jerry Brown. Who do you like from California?

NADER: On domestic issues, George Miller. I like him very much.

SAUNDERS: He’s retiring.

NADER: Yeah, he’s retiring. I have this rule. I’m for term limits, not six years, but rather 12 years. Why? they ask me. Because after 12 years, most of the members of Congress either wear out or sell out. They wear out literally. They just lose their spark and their initiative. And Henry Waxman has done neither. He’s really the supreme legislator. The greatest legislator, in my 45 or 50 years now in Washington, was Congressman John Moss from Sacramento. Hands down.

SAUNDERS: I’m sure you noticed the New York Times editorial that called for the legalization of marijuana, the end of the federal ban.

NADER: Huge editorial. There were three of them.

SAUNDERS: That’s right. Now do you think that this country will legalize marijuana in the next five years?

NADER: Yes. I mean, I do not like drug addiction. I am very strong on this, but I have studied the history of trying to criminalise personal addictions. It’s what the former dean of Harvard Law School once said about other things: There are certain patterns in behavior in human society that are beyond the effective range of legal action. You can’t prosecute them. They’ll proliferate in all kinds of brutal ways. So surface it, regulate it, tax it and rehabilitate. That’s what’s happening.

When I started opposing the tobacco industry in 1964, when the Surgeon General’s report came out, 47 percent of all adults smoked. It’s now 18 percent nationwide, lower in California. That’s a huge consumer movement. Four hundred thousand people a year die from tobacco-induced diseases. I mean, you want to talk about a terror. But now [that number] is going to decline and non-smokers won’t be able to absorb other people’s smoke.

We pushed for non-smoking compartments in railroads, buses and airplanes and then elimination. And 1988 was the last year when you could get on a U.S. airliner and have anyone smoke. I happened to be on a flight from Washington to Buffalo [on the very day before the ban went into effect], and I was the last guy on the plane. There was one seat by the window in the rear and I was going down the aisle with my suitcase, and this guy in the middle looked at me with a gleam. He couldn’t believe it. I sat next to him and he said, “You. It’s you who did this.” All the way to Buffalo, he blew smoke in my face and I was doing the vent, you know, trying to get air. When we landed and it was the last time he could ever smoke, he blew the last smoke in my face. I said, “Are you satisfied?” He said, “Yes. It was worth it.” And I said, “Well, I hope you enjoyed it because you’re never going to do it again.”

SAUNDERS: That is called gloating.