Great interview June 18th with Ralph Nader on Democracy Now! Listen / watch!

Excerpts:

"We want to galvanize the citizenry. And when we talk about aggressive crackdown on corporate crime, fraud and abuse, that’s on our table; it’s not on McCain / Obama’s table, not on the corporate media’s table to discuss, although the corporate media reports it every day.

We have a security speculation tax.
We have solar energy, instead of nuclear power.
We have single-payer health insurance.

We take no commercial money or PAC's, so we rely on individuals.

Our campaign is to subordinate corporate power to the sovereignty of the people.

We are strongly for the impeachment of Bush and Cheney. It’s never too late for impeachment or demanding a resignation. Or, after they leave office as fugitives from justice on January 21st, to invoke appropriate law to prosecute Bush and Cheney for their recidivist, criminal and anti-constitutional behavior day after day--from the criminal war in Iraq to systemic torture to imprisoning people without charges to wiretapping them without judicial approval and to have signing statements that the American Bar Association has condemned.

I think Barack Obama is in training to become panderer-in-chief. That was really a disgraceful speech [in D.C. to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, AIPAC, on his first day as the Democrats’ presumptive nominee]. It didn’t further the peace process, the two-state solution favored by a majority of Jewish Americans, Arab Americans, a majority of Israeli and Palestinian people. He basically sided with the militaristic approach to occupying, repressing, colonizing, destroying the Palestinian people in the West Bank and Gaza. He hasn’t even spoken out against the international crime of the blockade of Gaza, one-and-a-half million people, from medicine or drinking water, fuel, electricity, food--lots of silent fatalities in Gaza because of that.

Barack Obama really now has to be examined very carefully... It’s quite clear that he is a corporate candidate from A to Z. He voted against reform of the Mining Act of 1872, which gives away our hard rock minerals. He voted for a terrible class-action restriction law that the corporations wanted him to vote for. He, in many ways, has disappointed people who had greater hopes for him. He’s voted for reauthorizing the PATRIOT Act. He’s vigorously against impeachment of Bush and Cheney. He won’t even support his colleague Senator Russ Feingold motion to censure the Bush administration for systemic repeated illegal wiretaps. He’s letting the corporations who actually rule us now in Washington determine his agenda.

He’s just appointed economic advisers right out of the Robert Rubin school of Citigroup and the University of Chicago. His Middle East advisers involve people who actually helped write his AIPAC speech. He’s suppressing himself repeatedly until he becomes a different person, should he be elected president.

We’re trying to propose dramatic innovations (like) Vote Pact. Break up the two-party elected dictatorship, the duopoly, with instant run-off voting or public financing or ballot access reform, or binding none of the above--all of these can only be done through legislation by the two-parties who don’t want to change the system. So we’ve got to take it into our own hands.

Michael Abramowitz in the Washington Post in March and New York Times reporters a few weeks later said that if Obama or Clinton were elected president, the foreign and military policy would not be much different than the foreign and military policy of George Bush in his second term. The military-industrial complex and the politicians like Obama and McCain who support it are desperately looking for enemies.

Iran has not invaded anybody in 250 years. Yet it’s obviously frightened. It’s surrounded by the US military west, south, east. It’s been labeled “Axis of Evil” by Bush, who invaded Iraq after he labeled them “Axis of Evil.” We have Special Forces, according to Sy Hersh, that go in and out of Iran. What are they going to do? They talk very belligerently nationally, but they’re really scared. I mean, we supported Saddam Hussein, logistically and with materiel, in invading Iran, which took a half a million Iranian lives. They remember the shooting down of their civilian airliner years ago.

Iran does not have nuclear weapons; they’re nowhere near nuclear weapons, according to intelligence estimates. Israel has 250 nuclear weapons. Does Iran really want to commit suicide? So why are we beating the drums, and why is Obama falling for this kind of trap?

The American people have to take the reins of their government. They have to become more engaged in this campaign. They have to demand that these candidates come to their cities and towns and listen to them and answer their questions, instead of these slick journeys that these campaigns involve with their advance people and their slogans through one town and state after the other.

[Matt Rothschild, the editor of The Progressive, wrote a piece called, “Don’t Worry About Nader.”] He should look at our website and see what the polls are showing. The most recent Associated Press poll has Nader-Gonzalez at six percent, without any national coverage, against McCain and Obama.

I think his dilemma is what Vote Pact is trying to resolve. I think he supports our agenda, but he goes for the least worst. And he’s very critical of the Democrats, but obviously he dislikes the Republicans more. This is a trap that millions of liberals and progressives have fallen into. That is, by going for the least worst, namely the Democratic nominee, they don’t make any demands on the Democratic nominee, because they’re so freaked out of the possibility the Republican may win; therefore, they’re not pulling Obama in the area of peace and justice and a carbon tax.

Gore just endorsed Obama. Gore is vigorously for a carbon tax, against his cap and trade manipulation. Is he going the pull Obama toward a carbon tax, or is he going to say, 'Oh, Obama is not as bad as McCain.' The corporations are pulling Obama every day, every day, twenty-four/seven, in their direction. If all these liberal groups with all their single issues are not pulling in the other direction, where do you think the Democratic Party and the nominee is going to go? Even if they’re elected, they won’t have any mandate.

Every day--at work, in neighborhoods and at play--Republicans and Democrats, disenchanted with their parties, are meeting. They can fill out the absentee (ballot) and vote for Nader-Gonzalez.

I would stop subsidizing corn ethanol, which takes away millions of acres from wheat and barley and other edibles, soy. Obama is for subsidizing corn ethanol.

We import far too much food from China, which is contaminated. We’ve got to have much more food grown close to markets.

And above all, we’ve got to have a foreign policy that makes us into a humanitarian superpower--that is, more agricultural cooperatives overseas, showing with our technology, appropriate technology, how to greatly increase crops and preservation of crops. 30% of food grown in the third world is lost due to rodents, fungus and insects. And we have a lot of knowledge on how to store food and preserve it so it isn’t lost and so people don’t starve and children don’t have distended bellies because of gross undernourishment. It’s an absolute crime against humanity.

A six-month corporate and military withdrawal from Iraq, during which we negotiate with the Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis for modest autonomy, which they worked out in the 1950s before the dictators took over. Under a unified Iraq, continue humanitarian aid, some peacekeepers from nearby Islamic countries, and UN-sponsored elections. That’s the way you knock the bottom out of the insurgency. That’s the way you get the authority figures, the tribal leaders and the religious leaders and others, who still have authority over millions of Iraqis, to get together, because the alternative is constant bloodshed and civil strife. So you give them a stake by using the only chip we have, which is to give back Iraq to the Iraqi's, including their oil. Otherwise, it’s constant, constant strife.

The Pentagon doesn’t count Iraqi civilian tolls. They don’t even count officially US injuries unless they occur right in the middle of combat. So US injuries are triple what their official figure is.

Solar power is the closest thing to a universal solvent that we have. Wind power, solar thermal, solar photovoltaic, passive solar architecture, other forms--biofuels that are not corn ethanol--that’s the way to go. We’ve got to have a national mission of converting our economy and be an example for the world in solar energy. It’s four billion years of supply. And it’s decentralized, it’s environmentally benign, it makes us energy independent, and it replaces the Exxon Mobil-Peabody Coal-uranium complex. That’s what we’ve got to go for economic, political, health and safety, environmental reasons.

McCain and Obama have these cockamamie schemes that do not replace the health insurance companies. We have a “pay or die” situation, which is disgraceful in this country. Whether for drugs or for healthcare, physicians have their hands tied, nurses have their hands tied.

As the California Nurses Association has so trumpeted, and so specifically, a single-payer system, which is full government insurance with free choice of doctor and hospital; with a reduction of these corporate bureaucratic costs, about $350 billion; with the replacement, because it’s only one single payer, of all these computerized billing frauds and abuses that are now about $220 billion-sources for all these figures--all that can be changed by single payer.

18,000 people, according to the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences, die every year in this country, because they cannot afford health insurance. Nobody dies in Canada, Belgium, Germany, France, Italy, the UK, because they can’t afford health insurance. This is a disgrace. Focus more on prevention and more on nutrition and more on exercise, but also more on letting doctors be doctors under quality control systems, not have their hands controlled by commercial clerks."