Spirit in Action
Ralph Nader - Politics for People
Ralph Nader and Matt Gonzolas, his running mate for President of the USA, spoke at UW-Eau Claire on September 5, 2008. His campaign is less about him than it is about finding an alternative to the corporate power that has so much control over our national life. Nader mixes dire warnings with inspirational advocacy, urging citizen involvement for a better future.
- Broadcast on:
- 14 Sep 2008
- Audio Format:
- other
[music] Let us sing this song for the healing of the world That we may hear as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along And our lives will feel the echo of our healing [music] Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpsmeet. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred fruit in your own life. [music] Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world That we may dream as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along I live in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and the University of Wisconsin branch, located here, welcomes in many great and influential thinkers and actors, and last week was a primary example. We were visited by Ralph Nader and Matt Gonzalez, Independent candidates for President and Vice President of the USA in 2008. I would not find it appropriate in most cases to publicize as it were a candidate for political office. Ralph Nader is, however, a different sort of candidate, and by including him in this week's Spirit in Action program, I am not championing his candidacy for office. What I do want to do is raise up the concerns, options, and vision that Nader has to offer. His entry into politics clearly deviates from all of the norms. For almost all of my life, the parts where I've been conscious of public events, Ralph Nader has stood as a champion and advocate for the citizens of this country. I did not interview Ralph Nader personally, so I did not have the opportunity to ask him the questions I would typically ask of my guests. Questions like the religious and spiritual influences that lead them and support them in the work for the common good. I did find on some websites references to Ralph Nader and religion. Most sites indicated that he chooses to keep his religious affiliation private. There is certainly adequate reason to wish that the media and public would focus primarily on the issues and less on the person. In this, Ralph Nader is very different than others in the public eye, where personality cults and media flash are so central. I did discover some sites claiming that Nader is Methodist. If that is true, perhaps Ralph lives out some of the best Christian principles, not only caring for all of our neighbors, but a tendency towards modesty and humility, including praying in private, as Jesus advocates in the sixth chapter of Matthew. Whatever the case, Ralph Nader has a lot to say that speaks directly to the well-being and inspiration of this world. Let's listen to him now from his presentation at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire on Friday, September 4, 2008. I just come from the Democratic National Convention, corporate bachanea, and the Republican National Convention, corporate bachanea. The reporters couldn't even count the number of corporate hospitality suites and parties where the deals are cut and the money is promised. Now these are supposed to be two parties who are trying to get the votes to the people, but they're on their knees when it comes to the demands of corporations. And so they speak with forked tongue, and their rhetoric seems like they're all for us, but in their actual behavior, which is what counts, and their actual voting record, which is what counts, and what they do in Washington when they're out of sight, which is what counts. They're overwhelmingly turning our government, department by department, to corporate priorities, corporate demands, corporate interests, and former corporate executives who are placed in high government positions, department, defense, treasury, interior, agriculture. Now when I first visited Eau Claire at this university about 40 years ago, we had the corporations on the run. We were getting the giant auto companies regulated for health and safety, emissions control, safety, you're benefiting from that now. The death rate in your age group is plummeted because of motor vehicle safety standards that were installed in the 60s and early 70s. We had other industries on the run. When we pushed through the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, it was the copper industry, the steel industry, the coal industry that opposed us, but they lost. When we saw that more coal miners had died in coal mines from black lung disease and mine shaft collapses, then all the Americans killed in World War II between 1900 and 1965 to think of that, over 400,000 coal miners died, horrible asphyxiation disease of black lung. We took on the coal industry and we got through Congress. It was signed by Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, the coal mine health and safety law, and the compensation for black lung disease, which has poured billions of dollars into widows and orphans' budgets when they lost their father and their husband in these coal mines. The coal corporations decided to counterattack. They have now counterattacked and taken over our country. The sovereignty of the people is only a theory written in the Constitution, whose preamble you know starts with "we the people," not "we the corporations." The word "corporations" is not mentioned in our Constitution, and yet, judges have given corporations equal constitutional rights with you and me. And as you know, corporations are a little different from you and me. They're not human beings. They're artificial legal entities. We're not talking about employees who have been given all the First Amendment rights, free speech that you and I have. Now, how can we have equal justice under the law? When General Motors, Exxon, Pfizer, Bank of America have equal rights to lobby, to engage in elections, to engage in political activity that you and I have? There's a little difference in power, isn't there? There's a little difference in wealth. There's a little difference in the control of labor and technology. There's a little difference in being able to pick governments around the world against one another through these hooked up trade agreements like NAFTA and WTO, which are really a way to allow our industries to be shipped to fascist and communist dictators and ships who know how to keep their workers in their place at 50 cents an hour and ship the products back to this country. Now, I want to look at this world through your eyes, if I may, for a moment, and I want to compare our country with Western Europe. In 1945, at the end of World War II, we were the most powerful country in the world, hands down, and Western Europe was in rubble, devastated from this war. And in 1945, the people of Western Europe demanded, through their social democratic parties, their trade unions, their cooperatives, they demanded and got universal health care. They demanded and got decent pensions and living wage. They demanded and got university-free tuition. They demanded and got public transit that was available and affordable. They demanded and got four to six weeks paid vacation. For everyone, they demanded and got paid maternity leave, paid family sick leave. There's no one in Western Europe who has to pay $1,200 a month for health insurance after making no claim. No one in Western Europe dies because they don't have health insurance. In this country, 18,000 Americans, according to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, 18,000 Americans die every year because they can't afford health insurance. That's six, nine, elevens. Do you see Washington turning our country upside down on that one? And that's the low figure. And that's just for people between 25 and 64 years of age. In this country, we have none of these by law. For 63 years, these two corrupt parties, one worse than the other, but both bad. For 63 years, they've found a way to self-perpetuate themselves. They've found a way to flatter the American people so they can fool them and flummox them into submission into thinking that they're only two choices. They have succeeded in raising gobs of money from these corporate interests for their campaigns. Yet they haven't succeeded in providing universal health care, or living wage, or decent pensions, or university-free tuition, or paid vacations, or decent daycare, or paid family sick leave, or the amenities that make life more pleasant, like public support for well-maintained parks and the arts and the symphonies. And we're supposed to be the richest country in the world. We're supposed to be number one. Isn't that what they drummed into our heads when we were in the fourth grade and sixth grade? Well, we're 19th in infant mortality. We're 16th in wages and dropping. We're the only country in the Western world without health insurance for everybody, but we are number one in the number of people in jail per capita. We're 5% of the world's population. We have 25% of the prisoners. Half of them non-violent drug offenders. What we should do is have an amnesty for non-violent drug offenders. We don't send nicotine addicts to jail, do we? Do we send alcoholics to jail? Why are we treating drug addiction as a criminal behavior instead of as a health problem for rehabilitation? [applause] Because the two parties are chicken, they won't dare raise it, they won't dare debate it. They won't even allow your farmers to grow industrial hemp, which has 5,000 uses, but you can import it. You can import it from Canada. We can import it from Romania, China, and France for our clothes and our food and lubrication and all kinds of other things. But our farmers can't grow it because somehow it's associated with marijuana. Anybody who's grown marijuana knows the last thing you want next door is an industrial hemp farm which will cross pollinate and dilute the marijuana, but they don't know that in Washington. [applause] And both Clinton and Bush denied our comprehensive petition to get it off the prescribed list of the DEA so farmers could grow it. And we even had the paper company sign. We had farm group sign that petition. Both Clinton and Bush turned it down, even though it only has one third to one percent THC. I mean, you could chew and eat a bushel of industrial hemp and you couldn't get high on it, not even Clinton could get high on it. [laughter] And just think, with all those empty jail cells, what are we going to do if we have amnesty? We crack down and prosecute those corporate crooks from Houston to Wall Street who are ripping off pensions and workers and you the consumer and throw them in jail. That'll fill the jail cells. And those of you who are interested in prison reform, you put a lot of crooks, corporate crooks in jail, and prison reform will be here. The food will increase and improve as well. The conditions will improve and become much more humane. Let me play before you two little proverbs that really got me thinking. This one is from Marcus Cicero. Don't tell me who is Marcus Cicero. We'll get into the whole iPod text messaging craze that has lobotomized your generation from history. How many people know who Marcus Cicero is? Wow. How many people who know triumph, the dog, on Conan? Wow. Can you imagine? What would Marcus Cicero say? I just interviewed triumph, by the way, supposed to be on tonight, and I didn't take any guff from him, either. You know, when you're dealing with presidential politics, it's like theater. It's the theater, the absurd. So why not participate in theater, the absurd, so you can talk from experience. So you might see this little abbreviated give and take between me and triumph, the dog, on the Conan, the barbarian show tonight. Cicero, define freedom as participation in power. Think of that. How much power do we have to warrant a saying that we have freedom? Do we have any power when Bush and Cheney took this country into a criminal war of aggression into Iraq and the Quagmire and the death soldiers and death of a million Iraqis? That's what brought Al-Qaeda into Iraq. There's no Al-Qaeda into Iraq. Now they're saying, hey, they're beating Al-Qaeda. Well, there wasn't any Al-Qaeda in Iraq. What state did we have on the lies and deceptions which everyone now has to recognize about why Bush went to war? There were no weapons of mass destruction. The State Department told Bush that. His own State Department didn't listen and on and on with all the other lies and deceptions. How much freedom do we have to participate in power about your own educational expenses, for example? You have a public university. You're not paying what students are paying at private universities. But look at your paying for textbooks. That's a monopolistic racket. Look at your paying and other things. How many of you have student loans? You haven't felt it yet, right? What do you feel what it's like with that fine print and with that interest rate? If you can't make it and you default, the taxpayer pays Sally Mae the difference. Sally Mae makes the profit off you, and if it loses on any of you, Washington bails them out. Until very recently, when we've had corrective legislation, how much freedom or participation and power do you have when it deals with the policy on energy in this country? The price of gasoline or any oil. Why is it that we keep hearing these politicians say we want energy independence? But they keep turning control of our energy future, not to the energy efficiency companies, not to the solar energy companies, but to the same old tribe of oil, gas, coal and nuclear that brought us this problem in the first place. And it's not just a consumer problem, it's an environmental problem. So you might, when you hear these politicians talk about liberty and freedom, and they try to caress you verbally and so on, just think, how much participation and power do we have to change the political system? To open up the debates, which are controlled in this bizarre grotesque way by a debate commission, which is a private corporation that was created by the Republican Democratic parties, who still control it 21 years later, who decide the frequency of debates, the location of debates, and the reporters who they choose to ask them questions. And they don't want anyone else on the stage, and these three television networks, or four, pipe this nonsensical parallel interviews that are boring people to tens of millions of people, and there's no dissent, there's no alternative, there's no third party. There's no nadir gunzalis, there's no green party, there's no libertarian party. There are only five of us who have gotten on enough electoral college vote states to qualify to begin with, the stage could take five. Why are we rationing debates? We don't ration weather forecasts, we don't ration entertainment, we don't ration sports, how much freedom, namely how much participation to the people who are saying poll after poll, we want broader debates. We want more debates. We want nadir on the debates. One poll after another in 2004, there's no participation in power, we're just spectators. They just treat us as spectators. Shut up and listen, and then go to the poll for the least worst choice, because you know that only one of them can win, why would you want to vote for someone who couldn't win? Well, Eugene Debs, how many heard Eugene Debs? Great labor leader, early 20th century. He once said, better to vote for someone who may lose that you believe in than someone who may win that you don't believe in, because that someone's going to betray you. And how much power do we have on anything affecting this country, corporate globalization, outsourcing your jobs to fascists and communist dictators? What is left for people to decide other than American Idol? What is left for us to decide? We are supposed to be the sovereign in this country. The sovereignty of the people, your political science texts, we the people. Where's our sovereignty? The corporations dominate us. They're laughing at us. They're massaging us. They're seducing us. They're raising our children with commercial campaigns against little kids, undermining parental authority, selling them junk food, junk drink, obesity levels at record highs among kids, selling them soft pornography, all the things that aren't particularly good for their minds and their brains. Where's our participation in reshaping that into a more healthy and wholesome manner? Even what we own, Matt was telling you about, we own the public lands. We own the public lands, one third of America, the greatest wealth in our country. We own the public airways over which the radio and TV stations transmit their programs. We're talking legally now. We own trillions of dollars in the last 50 years of government research and development that built the biotech semiconductor aerospace containerization pharmaceutical and other industries because we give it away free. Where's our practitioner in power so we can control what we own? Isn't that a pretty conservative doctrine? Why do we allow the corporations to steal our hard rock metals? A Canadian corporation discovered $9 billion in gold on federal land in Nevada a few years ago. And under that 1872 mining act, Matt mentioned, they got it for $30,000, $5,000 an acre from the Department of Interior. And they give us no royalties back. It's $9 billion. We can't control the airways. Our very imagination has been curtailed because we all grow up corporate. We're looking at the world the way those billions of advertisements want us to look at the world. And so we're sitting at the TV and we don't like the program. What do we do? We click off, don't we? We use the clicker or we turn off. We don't say we are the landlords. We own the public airways. The FCC is our agent. The radio and TV stations are our tenants. Why in the world don't we have our own radio and TV stations? Why don't we have our own network? Why don't we make the radio and TV stations who are the tenants pay us rent? They've been getting it free since the Radio Act of 1927. You know, you're 17 million strong. You're more than double the size of Sweden, college students, community college and graduate students. And you don't have one single 30-minute program over the year every week devoted to you. Your pride, your creativity, your concerns, your activities. Not one. You've got football games and basketball games, but you don't have one 30-minute program. This is what I mean by growing up corporate. We don't even imagine this, do we? We don't learn about it in school, do we? We don't have civic skill courses in school so you can go out and fight City Hall and take on Exxon and overcome General Motors. We're never beating up on you and cheating you and harming you because most universities are high priced trade schools. They treat you for the skills that get your job, which is fine, but there's something more than that. Isn't there in the university if it's not going to be called the trade school? How would you write a thousand word essay on your civic skills? Could you write a thousand word essay on your social skills, your athletic skills? Sure. How about your civic skills, blank piece of paper? Do we even know what that is? Why don't we have courses on civic skills connecting the classroom with community problems and analyzing City Hall, toxic waste dumps? The horrendous problem of growing poverty here in Wisconsin, the problem of a failed healthcare system and so many people without healthcare. But you've got computer skills, don't you? You can learn accounting skills, business administration skills, you can learn marketing skills, learn advertising skills. It's gotten so bad students who take social science and humanities almost have an inferiority complex. Like you say to a student, what are you majoring in? He's helped by the body language. Come on, tell me, what are you majoring in? English literature. I know it's not going to get me a job, but I kind of like Thackeray. You say to a student, what are you majoring in? Computer science. Boy, that's great stuff, huh? Let me tell you, when our framers drafted that constitution in 1787, that hot room in Philadelphia that summer, not one of the hundred of them was a stage coach, construction specialist. But they couldn't have gotten there without the stage coach on time. They were steeped in jurisprudence, comparative politics, the humanities. They knew their history. That's what they drew upon. All this other stuffer just means. The goals of what a good life is has to come out of a university that produces enlightened, confident, skilled, experienced young citizens who are ready to take the mantles of democratic power and make this a country that we can hold our head high in front of the world instead of what is now the case. Being seen as a militarist aggressor is a huge exporter of military arms instead of a humanitarian superpower for the environment against infectious disease, for supporting trade unions and cooperatives and other institutions around the world. So we don't live in this tormented world of ours where three billion human beings are trying to make it on a buck or two bucks a day and millions of their children are dying because of contaminated water and tuberculosis and malaria and other diseases that are completely preventable. What are you going to do when you get out of college? Some of you may be lucky, but a lot of you are going to worry about affordable housing, affordable health insurance, how are you going to pay your student loans, declining real wages, you're the first generation that's ever said to the pollsters, you're not going to be as well off economically as your parents. You're going to have to worry about your skilled white collar job using software, being outsourced to China or India. You're going to have to worry about when you want to relax with a joint of being arrested and sent to jail. You imagine that? The stupid war on drugs. It's so bad that Nixon proposed a drug rehabilitation bill and no other president since Nixon has ever dared to do that before Congress. Imagine our politics is so bad that Nixon keeps looking better and better. He proposed a health care plan better than Clinton's turned down. He's the last president to support a minimum incomes policy on the way to abolishing poverty turned down. He even voted for voting rights for the residents of District of Columbia turned down. So, how do you avoid being discouraged and demoralized? Well, you look at the Nader Gonzalez agenda on VoteNader.org and you will see over a dozen redirections and changes in this country that are supported by a majority of American people and have been for years, shifting the power to people from corporations, freeing workers to form trade unions by repealing Taft Hartley, living wage is now a federal living wage of $6.55 an hour. Do you realize that the minimum wage when your parents were your age adjusted for inflation would be $10 an hour? We're going backwards into the future. Universal health care supported my majority of American people. An array of consumer protection, again, a solar energy based efficient energy economy, no to nuclear power. The poll is so. That's what the people want. They prefer taxing first what we like the least and dislike the most before we tax human labor and the necessities of life. That's a winner. In other words, first we should tax securities derivatives speculation. Imagine with a tiny tax on $500 trillion this year of securities derivatives speculation. We should tax the gambling industry. We should tax pollution first before we tax labor. We should tax corporate crime. We should tax the things we like the least and dislike the most first. Before we shift the tax burden on honest labor, we want to open up the debate so do the American people. We want direct democracy of initiative referendum recall even at the national level which the American people support. It's already operating in some western states. I guess it's a modified one here. This is the land of Robert Lefala. After all, you should learn the history of your progressive state, one of the most progressive in the history of our country. When I was growing up in Connecticut, I looked up at states like Wisconsin and Oregon with envy in terms of how you broke ground in so many social justice areas and how you had a diverse party system. You even had a law here in Wisconsin where all income tax forms of all public corporations had to be made public. That was the only state of the union where that was required. So when someone comes and tells you that you should look for a winner, whether it's McCain or Obama, you might ask themselves why do we keep losing? If we keep voting for winners, why for 63 years? Do the American people keep losing by comparison with people in western Europe? The only vote that's wasted is voting for someone you don't believe in because you think someone else is slightly worse. The only vote that's wasted is a vote that shreds your own self-respect and your own high expectation level as to what kind of country and world you want to move into after you graduate from university. And if we cannot rely on the young people of America to have high expectation levels, to throw those impertinent questions to those candidates for higher office, to mobilize their own youth party, to learn the skills and arts of political dynamics so that in 12 years you can take over and break up the two-party system and start a new frontier of progressive politics. If we don't expect that of you, we're disrespecting you. We are pandering to you. We are treating you just like cogs in giant multinational corporate wheels. This country was never meant to be run by corporations. Corporations exist because they're charted by state governments. Investors do not create corporations. They fund them. These giant corporations rose to power on the backs of American workers, made a lot of profit. When they got in trouble, they went to Washington and got bailed out by American taxpayers. When they got into trouble overseas, they called on the U.S. Marines. And now they're here in this country in a dominant role. The corporations are our government, after all, in so many areas. What is their message to the working people of America? These multinational corporations? We're out of here. We're out of here with your industry and your jobs. Do any fascist or communist regime or any oligarchic system that can run their workers into the ground and work them to the bone with modern capital equipment to ship the products to Western Europe and the U.S.? Is that the world you want to live in? I don't think so. I think it's up to you to spend less time, if I may urge you to, listening to music, less time with gossipy text messaging, less time with the iPod, because it's shredding your brain. They're only 24 hours a day. You're already listening as a population six times more time to music than we were when we were your age. And we were very musically inclined. Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra. Now, I'm sure you've never heard a politician say that to you. And I'm saying that to you. Because what corporations do so well is they give you gadgets that appeal to your lowest common denominator. They appeal to your low-grade sensuality. They appeal to your sense of mental ease and physical massage. Nader Gonzalez is appealing to your idealism, your fortitude, your moral courage. You desire to think for yourself. You desire to demand why the concentration of power in few hands have run this country into the ground and are tearing a heart and soul out of America. And your demand to build a functioning democracy is if people matter first. And as if the role of the United States in the world is one of enlightenment, muscular diplomacy, foresight, assistance, and the advancement of justice. Which is the great work of human beings on earth. And Senator Webster told us, Daniel Webster told us so many years ago. Before we have a Q&A and a discussion, one of the reasons we're doing this campaign is to bring you, the young generation, into political leadership. I really don't want to have any of you come up to me and say, well, what you said is all a nice Ralph, but we're just not turned on to politics. Because just remember your history. You don't turn on politics, which is a great word in ancient Rome to counteract autocracy. It's been turned into a dirty word. If you don't turn on to politics, politics is going to turn on you. And a very disagreeable way. And it already has. One thing we should never do is overestimate what it takes to turn this country around. A million people broken down 2,000 in each congressional district in a tight Congress watchdog civic group with full staff could dramatically change the way Congress responds to our necessities. Within a year we could get a lot of these things we mentioned. Because 2,000 people with two offices in each congressional district, full time people, and 200 volunteer hours a year by each of the 200 people. That's what people do on bowling leagues and bird watcher clubs, fishing groups, and specific hobby. Representing future directions that most people in the district support, dramatic change. The one thing that we grow up learning, which we shouldn't learn, is that you can't fight city hall, or you can't take on an exon. We've done it, and we know what it takes, and it doesn't take anywhere near what most people think takes in terms of organized, focused civic time, talent, and energy. The same true for your state, legislature. Anyway, I recall Eugene Devs. Here's what Eugene Devs said. This one is a real lingerer. He was asked at the end of his career by a reporter. He said, "Mr. Devs, what's your greatest regret?" And Eugene Devs said, "My greatest regret?" After all these years fighting for workers. Is it my greatest regret? Is it under our constitution? The American people can have almost anything they want, but it just seems like they don't want much of anything at all. That's the expectation level. That's when you have low expectation level. Western Europe had people with high expectation level, look what they got, and look what we didn't get. And of course the corporations are going after their system too, the multinationals. You see what happens when we basically buy into this fundamentalist market ideology, and we have workers who lose their jobs due to corporate globalization. They blame themselves. So it's the level of demand that great abolitionists, Frederick Douglass, set up for all time, power concedes nothing without a demand. And a demand starts with high expectation levels and collective self-respect. You're listening to a speech by Ralph Nader at UW Eau Claire from Friday, September 4, 2008. This is Spirit and Action, and I'm your host, Mark Helpsmeet. This is a Northern Spirit radio production, and you can access podcasts and additional information related to all of our programs on our site, NorthernSpiritRadio.org. While on the site, leave us a comment so we can get to know you and what is fruitful or not so fruitful in our programming. There are so many people doing great work to improve and heal our world, and we hope to connect you with them, and especially the spiritual roots that uphold their good work. Do give us feedback about other folks doing good work in the world, and we'll try to illuminate these works without the need to chop their message into compact word bites. Please sit back and listen for the depth of the message from today's Spirit and Action guest, Ralph Nader, as he responds to some questions and comments from the audience at UW Eau Claire. Can we have some questions there? If you have an announcement for a group, by the way, you know you're having a rally or something, just you can announce it. Yes, at the PA, please. Yeah, have you read Thucydides? Pardon? Have you read Thucydides? You read Cicero? Yes, a long time ago. Well, our founding fathers had read the classics, and they understood, I think, what Republic was, and when they wrote the Constitution, they put in Article 1, Section 8, saying that only Congress had the right to declare war. In the last seven years, we've invaded two countries without asking Congress to declare war, and I think our founding fathers would be shocked. Will you promise us, when you are a president, that if it is ever necessary to take this Republic to war, that you'll go to Congress to get a declaration of war? Well, of course, that's what I've been saying for like 40 years. I'm glad you make me repeat it. It's amazing how Congress and the White House nullify the Constitution with impunity. Bush basically has declared he can invade any country in the world on his say so. He's King George IV. We'll go anywhere, any place, with any amount of force needed. Well, you know, there are other people in the world who say, "Okay, you want to do that? We'll do it to you, too." And we lose our legitimacy under international law. And we have a lot more to lose than a bunch of criminal gangs who are willing to commit suicide. Look how we can be destabilized when we go in this kind of unilateral false pretense fashion. And the Democratic Party is culpable, too, because they have not initiated impeachment proceedings when they took over the Congress in 2007, not even impeachment inquiries. We have a presidency now that is establishing a tradition that the President and Vice President of the United States of America can violate the law, violate the Constitution, be above the law, be beyond the law, and escape constitutional accountability. That ought to get your blood boiling, but does it? If it doesn't, you're not working your intellect or your normative standards, because once the rule of law unravels as it's been unraveling, you know where that leads to. Look at some other countries. It doesn't unravel suddenly, does it? It unravels day by day, with the perpetrators and the violators initiating the unraveling and we the people tolerating it. You don't want to look at your grandchild in the eye when your grandchild is nine or ten years old, sitting on your knee and has come to realize the turmoil of the world as children do at that age. And that grandchild looks at you and says, "Granny or granddad, what were you doing when this world was falling apart on us? What are you going to tell them? What are you going to say to that grandchild? You were too busy updating your profile on Facebook? I mean, we have to get serious. This is an economy that gives us huge amount of time for enjoyment, for low-grade pleasure, for entertainment, for giggles on comedy shows. But there's a time for fun, there's a time for seriousness. And in those countries where people didn't have time for seriousness for a couple hundred years, look at what kind of lives are leading. We're launching off our forebears, we're launching off our ancestors. Are we going to be good ancestors? Thank you for the question. Yes, somebody else, please? Yes. It's better to go to the PA system, if you can. I worked for the University recruiting high school students and spoke with many thousands of high school students and their parents over the last 30 years, and for UW Eau Claire. Can everybody hear that, by the way? Okay. He's recruited high school students for Eau Claire for over 30 years. And I've always wanted to appeal or find a way to appeal to our higher instincts. And I think our students have been grossly underestimated in that respect. And it's wonderful to see this crowd here engaged in that you to put it out there and appeal to their higher instincts. And thank you so much for that. Thank you for putting it that way. I do have an announcement for about three and a half years, the Progressive Student Association here started Peace Rallys, which are really against this crazy war in Iraq. And we do not think that Afghanistan is the right war. We don't think war is the answer. But if you believe that way, and I know, you really wonder how do you make a difference. But there are a number of us who are out there every Wednesday from 4.30 to 5.30 right here at the University out on State Street. Many of you have probably seen us. We could use some more people, frankly. And it does work. There's hundreds and hundreds of people who drive by, and there's a real camaraderie between us and them. There's the occasional angry person that thinks concrete, and that's what this country is all about. But it's really reaffirming for us, and I think it's reaffirming for the people that drive by. So I would invite you to participate. And we have some little cards to hand out with the information of the time and the date. And finally, I'd like to just ask, how can we get you into the debate? What can we do to help that happen? Well, there are two ways. One is to break through on the debate commission, which is not likely their ironclad corporate resistance there. The others to try to get Google, or Yahoo, or coalition of veteran groups that wanted to debate at Fort Hood. That is collection of groups, say a whole coalition of trade union, neighborhood groups, urban institutes, student groups, environmental groups, all together who represent millions of people, church groups, say we want the following debates, and we want five people on the stage. It'd be hard for Obama and McCain to turn them all down. And if they did, it'd be too empty chairs with their names. That's what we should have done. I've been urging that back in March and April when there was more time. One thing, Google wanted a debate. We went out to Google headquarters and learned that they wanted to debate September 18th in New Orleans. And McCain said, okay, and Obama turned it down. So, you know, it's like they won't do debates until the two majors say, okay, my point is, no, just have empty chairs. You know, Google can deliver a lot of people, right? Yahoo can deliver a lot of people. They don't have to rely on NBC, ABC, CBS that's locked in. They're locked into the debate commission. The other thing, by the way, is in 1970, I went around college campuses and we created these public interest research groups. How many of you have heard of the perks? The first one was Oregon. The second one was Minnesota. We came to Wisconsin. The border regions was very resistant. And you do have one here, but it's not the traditional type. There are now 24 of the student-funded student-run, full-time staffed civic action groups. And in some states, they're the most powerful general civic action group in the state. New Yorkburg is a budget of $3 million, for example. It's got lobbyists and Albany. It's improved the whole subway system in New York. It's got the bottle build through. It's got prison reform. It's just a lot of things that they've done. They went after standardized testing, the whole multiple-choice standardized testing fraud. So, you see, it's happened in the past. If students get together, it's enormous power there. You have enormous energy, you have idealism, and you're willing to hit the road. You're willing to do the demonstrations. That's what helped build the civil rights movement. Where would the civil rights movement be? Without not only the student-demonstrators and rallyers and petitioners, but the student litigates, the five-student black freshmen who sat in on a lunch counter illegally, because it was segregated in North Carolina, took it up to the Supreme Court, and that desegregated public facilities with a 9-0 opinion. If you look at the history of student activity and how they took out after the Vietnam War, we would have been in a land war with China without massive student resistance. They had to draft that. Nixon knew what he was doing when he got rid of the draft. He dropped a fervor on campuses considerably. If you're not part of the risk, you're not going to be part of the solution. But your comment prompts me to remember this Chinese proverb, which is, "To know and not to do is not to know." Just think of that. "To know and not to do is not to know." How much we know about how to change and improve things. But if we don't do that, which we know, do we really know? Do we really know? Now, you know, because you're in university, you know a lot of what can be done. You're going to come out with the most advanced knowledge of green economics and green architecture and green energy of any generation in our history. The question is, are they going to translate that knowledge into performance, into deeds? There's a very nice website in the AFL-CIO on executive compensation, which was, I was on your, when I was at your age, the CEOs of the top companies made 15 times the entry level wage. They're now making 400 times. See the gap? It's getting bigger and bigger. Like, "Waltz, Walmart CEO made $11,000 an hour last year, an hour." And a million of his workers making 7, 8, 9, 10 bucks an hour. By the way, in almost all the college audiences I have spoken to, there's always one, two or three people who come up to me later and say, "You know, you really got me thinking, and that's what made me an ecologist." Or, "That's what made me an advocate against the corporate prison system." Or, "That's what made me want to go into this field or another." So, you're going to be leaders, but you're only going to be leaders if you want to be leaders. You've got to want to be leaders, you want to develop a public philosophy, how you want to live your life, who you want to live your life with in terms of civic citizen colleagues, political colleagues, and get on with it. There's nothing more gratifying. I went after the auto companies because I lost a lot of my friends when I was your age in traffic crashes, high school and college. And I started looking into why they didn't survive the crash. And I learned because there was no seat belts, there was no padded dash panels, there was no row bar, there were no head restraints, there was no airbags. Then I found out that they all had those developed in General Motors and Ford. But the engineers were being muzzled. And we had these stylistic, psychosexual dreamboats that we called cars in the 50s and early 60s. Hugely inefficient, like 12 miles per gallon, chrome bedecked, razzle-dazzle, junk technology. And that really got me angry. And that's why I went to Washington and in a very careful strategy connecting with key reporters, key members of Congress, White House aides. In six months, we got the biggest industry in the United States under federal safety and emission control regulation. And that's saved over a million lives and hundreds of millions of injuries diminished or prevented. Some of your own friends or yourselves are here today because of those federal safety standards. Now, don't look at me like I am some freak. I was just like you. I just got really upset. You can do it. There's no ticket of admission to becoming civic leaders, except your own self-discipline, and your will to improve this world of ours in one way or another. Don't allow yourself to grow up feeling powerless. And we're very good about that as a culture. Growing up young generations to feel powerless so they can get along by going along, so they can tow the line, so they can become cog and giant corporate wheels, so they can want to refuse to serve in government agencies and departments, public service, civil service. You want to spend 50 years of your life developing some phony whip on some phony dessert, like some chemists do. They call themselves food chemists. Indeed, do you want to spend years of your life developing some trivial upgrade to some trivial software? Don't trivialize your skills. You're too important. You're too necessary. You're in the top 5% of people your age in the world able to make a difference, because of your health, education, and the Constitution you live under. Thank you very much. From Lawrence to Lexington, from Concord to Kent, you'll see Adel and Selma, we are born of descent. And on this native ground, blessed by immigrant blood, in the river of freedom, we're all washed in the flood, because our flag is still there, for all the saints and the sinners, yes our flag is still there, for all the losers and winners, and those of us who still dream, those who still care, all the lost and forgotten, flag is still there. Still there though we might disagree, if you are brave in the land of the free, we have weathered so much, we have traveled so far, we're woven together, we are spangled with stars. [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] As we take off our caps, as we all rise, put our hands to our hearts, and as we lift up our eyes, we begin with a question, we ask of say can you see, stand and be strong, believe and belong, be brave and be free, because our flag is still there, for all the saints and the sinners, yes our flag is still there, for all the losers and winners, and those of us who still dream, those of us who still care, for everyone in this country, flag is still there. [MUSIC] We just listened to the end of Ralph Nader's speech at the University of Wisconsin Eau Claire, followed by a spot of music from John McCutchen. Our flag was still there, attuned very much in sync with Nader's message to the audience here at the University, mixing devotion to the public good, and share for the true wealth of this country, our embrace of all members of our nation. There's lots more good music by John McCutchen than you can track down via his website, and he sure has a good domain name, folkmusic.com. The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit in Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. [MUSIC] With every voice, with every song, we will move this world home. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world home, and our lives will feel the echo of our healing. (upbeat music)