[Marxism] Fw: Nader at the National Press Club

["Raymond Chase" <r_chase@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message -----
From: Red1pearl@xxxxxxx
Sent: Friday, February 27, 2004 9:43 AM
Subject:  Nader at the National Press Club


Probably the best-ever anti-corporate, pro-capitalist, populist, public
candidate. He's even for repealing Taft-Hartley which outlaws union/worker
solidarity, for example. Against NAFTA and WTO too.

He wants to re-invigorate and re-invent the Democratic Party. He's out to
peacefully control great wealth from concentrating and demanding its due;
he's the voice of small business that longs for cutting back the corporate
giants that developed from them over the past 150 years. And some people
think that working class socialism is impossible!

in solidarity,
Earl

P.S. He's also clear, articulate, sharp, and relaxed in the Q and A part.

Published on Tuesday, February 24, 2004
by the New York Times
NADER AT THE NATIONAL PRESS CLUB
2/23/2004
http://tinyurl.com/2k9sy

The following is the text of a news
conference with Ralph Nader at the
National Press Club in Washington, D.C.,
as transcribed by Federal News Service Inc.

MR. NADER: (Applause.) Thank you very much.
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.

Today I enter the 2004 elections as an
independent candidate for the presidency of
the United States, to join with all
Americans who wish to declare their
independence from corporate rule and
its domination. The exercised
sovereignty of the people in our history
has brought forth solutions to the
people, the justice they created and
the futures they desired for their
children.

In times past, the naysayers were
organized commercial powers, whose
unbridled greed and authoritarian
structures were denounced by Jefferson,
Jackson, Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt,
Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt in
quite memorable statements.

It took a strengthened populace against
the malefactors of great wealth to
overcome these corporate naysayers and
abolish slavery, open the vote to women,
the unions to workers, the cooperatives
to farmers, to temper the large mine
owners, industrialists, railroads and
bankers. In this manner, American
history surged forward and upward.

Today there is a compelling necessity
for a new strengthening of the people to
reform and recover their public elections
from the grip of private financing, to
rescue our public authorities from the
corporate government of big business
that prevails today in Washington, D.C.

These mass concentrations of power,
privilege, wealth, technology and
corporate immunity have placed their
rampaging global quest for maximum
profits in the way of progress, justice
and opportunity for the very millions of
American workers who made possible these
corporate profits but who are falling
behind, both excluded and expendable.
Their labors have gone unrequited as
these unpatriotic corporations abandon
our country and shift industries abroad
-- along with what is left of their
allegiance to our country and our
community.

The dreaded supremacy of corporatism over
civil institutions, stomping both
conservative and liberal values alike,
has broken through any remaining barriers
by the two major political parties, the
two-party duopolies.

Corporatism has turned federal and state
departments and agencies into indentured
servants for taxpayer funded subsidies,
budget-busting contracts of great
lucrative scope, and dwindling law and
order against the widely publicized
corporate crime wave. This resistant
corporate crime wave has looted and
drained trillions of dollars from millions
of workers, their pensions, and from small
investors. There has been ample media
publicity and documentation of such crimes,
abuses and frauds of these unprecedented
self-enrichments of top executives at
the expense of their fiduciary duties to
both their own companies and their
shareholder owners. Has the president
supplied the required law enforcement
resources for action? Scarcely. He has,
as in so many other domestic matters,
otherwise preoccupied -- very few of
these corporate bosses have been brought
to justice and jailed.

Lincoln's new birth of freedom and
government of the people by the people
for the people, in his memorable
Gettysburg Address, must indeed not
perish from this land. Only an organized,
self-confident people lifting their
expectation levels and
applying their time, energy and talent
can achieve Lincoln's foreshadowed
horizons, where freedom from fear, shift
of power and just solutions can become
realities in everyday life for Americans.
Comparing the Republican Lincoln's
assurance in a period of great peril and
daily destruction in those years in the
1860s -- contrast with the costly politics
of fear peddled daily by the obsessive
Republican incumbent of today, George W.
Bush, playing politics with national
security.

Elections should place aspirations in
motion.

Only in this way will they have meaning
for people's lives. Movements for change
come from more voices and choices, more
debates and proposals, more organizing
and more respect for the voters in the
electoral arena, so they have a broader
opportunity to vote for whom they choose
to vote for.

At the same time, there ought to be higher
levels of responsibility by voters
themselves for their own governments. The
civil liberties and their exercise by a
pluralistic, not a duopolistic, system of
political parties and candidates,
regenerate, reanimate a passive
electorate accustomed to betrayal and in
large numbers not even voting.

Movements for change also come from the
perceived neglected necessities of the
American people in a land of skewed plenty,
where the rich have so much and the rest
of America is denied the just rewards for
their labors.

These movements embrace the long overdue
abolition of cruel poverty in America;
the provision of genuine, efficient,
honest health care; the illumination of
civically inspired education; and the
shift in the burden and uses of taxes
away from corporate plunder, corporate
tax havens and cost transfers to
individual taxpayers. Taxpayers always
end up with the bill for this corporate
plunder and corporate tax escapes.

These initiatives for change embrace the
conversion as well to breathable air and
clean water; renewable energy; detoxified
agriculture; decongesting transportation
technologies on the highway and in plans
-- and in public transit; the
affordability of decent shelter; and the
enabling of workers, consumers and
communities to organize and shape their
own political economy. We need more
organization among these constituencies.

Presently, global corporations are bent
on strategically planning our future, our
politics, our economy, our military
expenditures, our education, our
environment, our culture, even our
genetic inheritance. They're all subject
to corporate strategic planning. Is it not
our responsibility together, as individuals,
as real people, to shape our futures
within our own deliberative democratic
process?

The unceasing enlightenment of humankind
requires sensitive humans to enlist in a
marathon, not a sprint. May there be a
decent tolerance for the release of these
creative individual and community entities
inside an electoral system sadly known
more for its straitjackets than for its
wings, more for its routines than its
aspirations.

The focus on the fundamental requirement
for broader distribution of power,
initiative and opportunity to forge a
resourceful society should be the
touchstone of this election year and its
campaigns. We owe at least the prospect
of possibilities to the generations that
follow us. We owe the same to the young
people of America as they ponder and
prepare for their leadership obligations.
This campaign will reach out to the young
people and to all people who wish to
volunteer for our efforts in 50 states,
who wish to contribute to our efforts in
50 states, who wish to highlight their
own creative solutions in community after
community, that are almost never
highlighted by political campaigns; who
wish to communicate to us at our website,
votenader.org.

I urge the liberal establishment to relax
and rejoice. This is a campaign that strives
to displace the present corporate regime
of the Bush administration. This is a
campaign that will have many purposes
and many functions in a political system
that's rigged from beginning to end,
from state-access barriers to exclusionary
debates against third parties and
independent candidates whose hopes and
rights we hope to carry throughout these
campaigns at the national state and local
level. This campaign can also be a trim
tab factor turning the rudder of these
giant political parties toward a more
dedicated concern for government of, by
and for the people.

We hope to show that increasingly
corporations are trampling conservative
values, as we notice increasing
conservative fury with the Bush
administration on matters such as massive,
useless deficits due to wealthy tax cuts;
on matters due to the big brother Patriot
Act; corporate subsidies to major
corporations paid for by taxpayers; on
matters involving NAFTA and the WTO,
undermining our nation's sovereignty at
all three levels of government; on
matters of promise by the Bush
administration to do something regarding
corporate pornography and violence beamed
to children at a very impressionable age,
undermining parental authority.

We mean to focus on many local issues as
well, which most presidential candidates
dutifully ignore. Local issues like what's
going on in South Central Los Angeles;
what's going on Weirton, West Virginia;
what's going on in Anniston, Alabama;
what's going on among our forests and
among our littoral shores; what's going
on in terms of the stratosphere and global
warming; what's going on in terms of what's
going on in our great oceans and streams
and rivers and lakes.

We mean to initiate a liberation movement
for the Democratic Party, whose liberals
have allowed it to slip away, year after
year, since about 1980, into the hands
of corporate interests too often bought
and sold dialing for dollars.

We hope to break the grip of the Commission
on Presidential Debates, a cynical canard
against the right of the American people
to hear more voices and choices, and
elevate publicity for the Citizen's
Debate Commission that has now been
formed, a truly nonprofit institution
controlled by no candidates and no
parties.

We hope to highlight Bush's war on the
Bill of Rights and on civil liberties
and on the egregious stereotyping and
violations of due process to people of
minority status, recent immigrants or
long-time immigrants, bearing the brunt
of the violations of our civil liberties,
especially Muslim-Americans and
Arab-Americans.

We hope also to focus on the assets of
America, where there are solutions for
almost all our major widespread problems,
working in one town and community after
another, by not having an engine of
diffusion behind them. That's what
politics and elections should be about.
Our country has so many problems it
doesn't deserve and so many solutions it
doesn't apply.

We hope to show that jobs can be kept
here in the United States, good-paying
local jobs, by a massive "repair America"
campaign, a public works or
infrastructure mission by the federal
government paid for by a repeal of those
taxes for the wealthy which the Democrats
opposed but didn't bother to stop when
they could have in the U.S. Senate.

And finally, we hope to sensitize the
media to the growing desertion of
corporations from the country where they
were born, the country where they were
raised to the heights of their profit and
power on the backs of workers, on the
backs of taxpayers who were asked to
subsidize them, on the backs of American
military forces who were asked to rescue
them when they got our country and
themselves in trouble cutting deals with
dictators around the world.

Finally, I'd like to make a personal
statement to Terry McAuliffe, John Kerry,
John Edwards, Al Sharpton and ex-governor
Dean: Relax. (Laughter.) Rejoice that you
have another front carrying the ancient
but unfulfilled pretensions and aspirations
of the Democratic Party. Do not deny
millions of voters the opportunity to vote
for this candidacy. Everyone should have
a chance. Everyone should argue on the
merits, not on the money.

I also urge you, when you analyze this
political campaign of 2004, to at least
have the sophistication that is revealed
by sports fans when they analyze their
sports teams. Look at the dynamics before
Election Day. Focus on what is being done.
Analyze carefully the polls in 2000 before
you start scapegoating the Greens for an
election that Al Gore won but had stolen
from him and had Democratic Party blunders
fail to rescue it in Florida.

And lastly, please try to extend some of
the finest rhetoric of John Kerry and John
Edwards on the overwhelming dominance of
corporate party -- corporate power in our
country and on the need to reassert
popular sovereignty, the sovereignty of
the people, over the sovereignty of giant
business; the sovereignty of real people
over the sovereignty of artificial
entities called corporations.

For those of you who want more evidence
about the statements made in this few
moments, I not only urge you to contact
our website, votenader.org; I urge you to
read back issues of Barron's Financial
Weekly, The Wall Street Journal, The New
York Times, The Washington Post, The St.
Louis Post-Dispatch, The Dallas Morning
News, The Boston Globe, The Cleveland
Plain Dealer, The San Francisco
Examiner, The Los Angeles Times, Reuters,
AP and many other wire services for
constant documentation of these corporate
crimes, abuses of power, across the
entire continuum of our political
economy.

I have read these news reports. I have
watched "Dateline." I have watched
"60 Minutes." And I take them all
seriously. They all add up to something,
don't they -- something larger than their
parts. They add up to a massive challenge
to our democracy, to our systems of
justice, to our civil liberties and our
civil rights, and to the ability of people
to pursue liberty, justice and happiness.

Thank you. (Scattered applause.)

Can have questions now. Can you identify
yourselves, first? Yes, sir?

Q Hi. I'm Darrin Garner (sp) for the PBS
Democracy Project. Despite your plans to
run as an independent, there's a strong
faction within the Green Party to still
nominate you at their convention. Would
you accept the Green nomination? And if
not, can you get on the ballot in Texas
and California without their help?

MR. NADER: Well, they are not on the
ballot in Texas. They are on the ballot
in California.

The problem is one of timing. The Green
Party convention is in June, and the
decision as to whether they will have a
presidential candidate and under what
conditions will be made then. And that
is too late for meeting the ballot
access deadlines of many states.

So we have to pursue our independent
course of action, elicit many volunteers
-- young, middle-aged, older people --
who will learn if they don't know now
how to get signatures that are verifiable
on their clipboards in shopping centers
and street corners in order to meet the
deadlines that you mentioned.

And the first deadline and most insistent
one is Texas, which requires over 66,000
signatures verified, which means you got
to get more, in a 60-day period, and no
Texan who votes in a primary is allowed
by Texas law to sign a petition to put
our candidacy on the ballot. That's just
one of many types of obstacles that we
may have to litigate against and we
certainly have to surmount. So we do
expect to get on the 50 states, and it
won't be easy.

Yes?

Q Torrado (sp) -- (name inaudible) --
Azteca Television. What would you propose
as a migratory policy if you became
president? And also, what are your
proposals for the fastest-growing
minority, which is the Latino community?

MR. NADER: I didn't hear. Migratory
policy?

Q Mm-hmm. Yeah, and what do you propose
for the Latino community as the fastest-
growing minority in the country?

MR. NADER: Yes, I think -- did you mean
migrant labor, or did you say --

Q In general.

MR. NADER: In general. One of my first
articles in the 1950s was on the
atrocious treatment of migratory labor,
many of them from Mexico. This treatment
continues because we basically have an
anarchy within which corporate employers
are seriously mistreating the rights of
these workers. I've always believed that
if workers in this country -- whether
they enter legally or not -- are employed
by employers, they should be given the
same, fair standards, the same minimum
wage, the same treatment as other workers.
Having said that, I support the following
policies.

I don't think this country should be
engaged in a brain drain, luring
scientists, engineers, doctors and many
other talented people to this country
when they should be building their own
countries. And if they have trouble
building their own countries because of
oppression, it would be a good idea for
the United States to change its foreign
policy and not continue to support the
oligarchs and the dictatorships and the
authoritarian regimes, from Mexico to
Central America to South America and to
other countries in other continents,
which drive people to our shores. Most
people don't like to leave their native
lands.

Moreover, there needs to be a legal
permiting system so -- for work that
has to be done in this country which
can't be done by American workers can
be done by temporary entries by workers
who will be well treated.

But if we raised our minimum wage, if we
had a minimum wage of $10 an hour, I
think a lot of the work that people say
will not be done by American workers will
be done by American workers.

Yes?

Q Yes, sir. I'm sure you were asked this
question before. If you are so critical
of President Bush, why are you helping
him again win another term?

MR. NADER: I don't think this is going to
be viewed as an assistance to President
Bush. You see, there's a whole myth that
has to be overturned here. Some of you
saw on NBC yesterday the description of
how the Nader-LaDuke Green Party ticket
allegedly cost Bush New Hampshire. What
they didn't say was the exit polls showed
that I got more Republican votes in New
Hampshire than Democrat votes. You see,
so they've got to be much more careful
in their reporting.

Now, having said that, John Kerry said the
other day -- and he's quite correct --
that the Democratic members will come back
into the fold. Why? Because the party
that's out of power finds that its members
come back into the fold. So this candidacy
is not going to get many Democratic Party
votes. On the other hand, the party that's
in power is the party that we are going
to focus on retiring. And conservatives
and independents who are very upset with
Bush administration policies are left with
two options: vote for the Democrats, which
is unlikely, or vote for an independent
ticket.

Contrary to popular impression, even in
the year 2000 -- and it will be more
pronounced -- 25 percent of my votes
came from Bush voters, 38 percent came
from Gore voters, and the rest came from
people who would never have voted. I
think there's going to be lower Democratic
votes this year and more from the other
sources. I might add, that was an exit
poll. There was another exit poll that
had it about 21 percent Bush, 41 percent
Gore, and the rest would not have voted.

Yes?

Q Mr. Nader, you spoke of Terry McAuliffe.
And yesterday, after he appeared on
"Face the Nation," he did come out and
talk at length with the reporters who were
staked out there. If I could read a couple
of the things he said about you and the
meetings that he held with you.

MR. NADER: Yes.

Q And I'll pause in between one of them.
He did say, "I spoke to Ralph Nader
several times myself because I didn't
want Ralph Nader to use the argument used
in 2000, which was that no one in the
party would talk with him. I spent time
with him. He did say to me, in a long
lunch that we had, he said, `Terry, I
want to beat George Bush more than you do,'
which I don't find plausible." And that's
the first quote.

MR. NADER: Yes. First of all, I'm the one
who called Terry McAuliffe, he didn't
call me. I'm the one who called Nancy
Pelosi and Tom Daschle and other leaders
of the Democratic Party to have
extended meetings with them. The
Democratic Party scapegoating the Greens
in 2000, has never reached out to the
Greens. For heaven's sake, you would
think that, as in Western Europe, if they
think the Greens are a challenge to them,
they'd sit down and say: Well, where can
we come together on certain issues which
you, the Greens, think we have ignored,
and how can we collaborate against the
Bush regime? So let's clarify that.

The second is that I do hope that Terry
McAuliffe will be as astute a political
analyst as he is as a sports fan. Again,
I repeat that point.

You want to add?

Q Let me just ask you then, he went on
to say about your being an independent,
"In many states he will not be on the
ballot, and he actually said to me,
quote, 'Terry, if you have some key target
states, maybe I won't campaign in those
states.' So he wants to beat George Bush
but he wanted to get out there, get his
voice known. So I am hoping that when he
gets out there and campaigns that he's not
going to be in certain states."

MR. NADER: I think on that score he's a
bit imaginative and a bit clairvoyant. I
admire him for his latter attribute, but
I never said what he said I said. What I
said was that this is going to be, if I
run, and it was all exploratory at that
time, a 50-state campaign that I would
help deserving congressional candidates
in key swing districts, because I wanted
the Democrats to recover the House or the
Senate or both; in part because the
senior Democrats in the House represent
the finest Democratic traditions and will
be the heads of the committees, like
George Miller, Henry Waxman, independent
Bernie Sanders, Ed Markey and John Conyers.
That's what I said. Now, I'm going to call
Terry McAuliffe and talk to him so we
can clarify the situation.

Yes?

Q Al Milliken affiliated with Washington
Independent Writers. Are you as confused
or as indecisive as George W. Bush and
John Kerry appear to be regarding marriage?
Do you see any inconsistency with the vote
and stand John Kerry took in 1996 opposing
the Defense of Marriage Act and the
clarity with which George W. Bush defined
marriage in the 2000 presidential debates,
and the retreats they both seem to have
resorted to recently? Are you willing to
take leadership on this important issue?

MR. NADER: Well, I think the
leadership's going to come from gay-
lesbians and their leaders. I think this
is a social movement that can't be stopped.
I think you can see over the years
increasing number of people in the polls
who support equal rights for same-sex
unions, or they want to call it marriage.
I think that this should not become a
major issue in the campaign because none
of the candidates should be boorish
enough to oppose love and commitment
under stable relationships. What
undermines marriage is divorce, as
Mayor Daley put it very well a few days
ago.

Yes? Right in back there.

Q Les Krepman (ph) with NBC News.
You've characterized many of those
who labeled you as possibly being a
spoiler as being contemptuous. Why are
they contemptuous and why do you regard
yourself as being anything more than
having the potential for being a spoiler
in this election?

MR. NADER: Because they restrict that word
to my candidacy. If they called everyone
spoilers, because every candidate for
political office tries to spoil the
prospect of his or her opponents winning,
tries to take votes from them, I wouldn't
have any problem with it.

But the fact that they single out third
parties and independent candidates for
that term, "spoiler," means that what
they're really saying, what their real
agenda is that you shouldn't run, you
should just sit on the sidelines and watch
our country being taken down and taken
apart by corporate politics and two
parties who are dialing for the same
dollars and are converging with more and
more similarities towering over the
dwindling real differences that they're
willing to struggle over.

I think those who use the word "spoiler"
need to reexamine their otherwise
steadfast commitment to civil liberties,
to choice, to freedom. I'm really amused
by -- some of the groups who are pro-
choice on the abortion issue are against
candidate choice on the ballot. And there
will be similar ironies transmitted to
their tender conscience in the coming
months.

Yes?

Q Sarah Powell, Washington Report on
Middle East Affairs. You mentioned the
targeting of immigrants, especially
Muslims and Arabs. How would your foreign
policy and your policy toward immigrants,
especially regarding the Middle East,
differ from the other candidates?

MR. NADER: Well, there's no particular
policy toward immigrants from the Middle
East compared to other Third World
countries that are in deep turmoil. So
you may be asking me about the conflicts
there. Is that what you want to ask me?

Q Well, okay. If you would rather answer
the question on the conflict in the Middle
East, that's fine.

MR. NADER: Yeah. Well, I'm not aware that
there's a unique immigration policy. Do
you want to illustrate it for me?

Q Not that there's an immigration policy,
other than the finger pointing and the
US-VISIT, all that sort of thing.

MR. NADER: Oh, I'm sorry. Yes. I
understand what you mean now. Yes. The
singling out of visitors and immigrants
from the Middle East raises interesting
law enforcement questions. I think that
dragnet law enforcement where you
stereotype ethnic groups is, A,
inefficient, B, wasteful of taxpayer
dollars, and C, not just smart ways to
apprehend violent offenders. It's too
much of a giant embrace.

If you want legitimate people to inform
on violent offenders, you don't stereotype
them, you don't harass them, you don't
rummage through their belongings in an
impolite manner as if they are criminals
when they have not been suspected of
anything like that, singling them out
compared to other passenger or other
entries into our company -- our country.

I think that more and more of these cases
ending up in the courts, ending up in the
Supreme Court, will either demonstrate
whether our Constitution's going to hold
firm here in terms of our Bill of Rights
or whether our Constitution's going to be
perforated by the "Patriot-less Act" and
its presumed renewal and further
enlargement next year from the White House
to the Congress.

Q Tom Curry, MSNBC. Both Senator Kerry
and Senator Edwards voted for the Iraq
war resolution. Both of them voted for
the Patriot Act. You just said a few
minutes ago you don't expect that your
candidacy will get many Democratic votes,
but will you criticize the Democratic
nominee for votes for those two acts, or
will you focus more of your -- most of your
criticism on President Bush?

MR. NADER: Well, there's limited media
time, isn't there, for an independent
candidate. That media time will be
focused on the giant corporation in the
White House masquerading as a human being,
George W. Bush. If the Democrats want to
assail our positions or the exercise of
our entry into this campaign, our
candidacy will reply. If the Democratic
candidates persist in supporting the
Patriot Act, which they're showing
serious signs of not supporting the act
that they voted for in the renewal battle
next year, they will be -- they will be
criticized.

If they persist in supporting a further
quagmire war in Iraq without end, an
unconstitutional war that President Bush
got us into based on a platoon of
fabrications and misleading information,
well documented now -- if they side with
President Bush, they will be criticized,
but I don't think they're going to. I
think they're going to realize that a
major, well-funded U.N. peacekeeping troop
replacement, properly-supervised elections
with a decent respect for the autonomy of
Kurds, Shi'ites and Sunnis while they work
toward a unified Iraq, and extended
humanitarian assistance because we owe
Iraqis a responsibility for all our years
of supporting their brutal dictator from
1979 to 1991, all of these are a proper
pathway for the Democrats in this coming
campaign.

Yes?

Q Tom Gallagher with Traffic World magazine.
You mentioned that your candidacy is
primarily focused on taking votes from
President Bush and removing the Bush regime.
The Democrats seem to be motivated by the
same thing, not so much in terms of "we
want to be in and we want the other guys
out," but by a tremendous anger that seems
to be abroad in the nation about some of
their policies; that this is more
important than partisan politics.

Some organizations, like MoveOn.org and
so forth, have been organized primarily
to remove the Bush regime.

What's the difference between your
organization and an organization like
that, that intends to remove Bush? But
how would you do it in a different way?

MR. NADER: Well, the difference is this:
that I recognize, as -- 10 years of
amazing losses at the local, state and
national election levels by the
Democratic Party, against an extreme
Republican Party. This is extraordinary.
The Democrats, because of their internal
decay, repeatedly described by former
Department of Labor Secretary Robert
Reich, even James Carville, Paul Begala,
in articles that they've written, not to
mention to Gene -- Eugene McCarthy -- the
Democrats are so decayed -- and we hope
they're rising again -- that they have
been very good at electing very bad
Republicans. And that is a sobering
thought, that the extreme wing that now
has taken over, the corporatist wing
that's against conservative values, has
taken over the Republican Party, keeps
winning elections against the Democrats.

One might assume modestly that the
Democratic Party needs some help. They
need additional strategies, additional
issues, additional reports against the
Bush regime that they're too cautious,
they're too indentured to think of
themselves. And if they want to
appropriate what we do, fine. There's
no intellectual property on the ways to
take apart the Bush administration that
comes from this candidacy.

I think the mistake the Democrats are
making when they use the mantra "anybody
but Bush" is, first of all, it closes
their mind to any alternative strategies
or any creative thinking, which is not
good for a political party. And second,
it gives their ultimate nominee no mandate,
no constituency, no policies, if the
ultimate nominee goes into the White House.

And then they'll be back to us. I guarantee
you the Democrats, the liberal groups, the
liberal intelligentsia, the civic groups
that are now whining and complaining,
even though they know they're being shut
out increasingly, year after year, from
trying to improve their country when they
go to work every day. And they'll be
saying, "Oh, you can't believe -- we were
betrayed. The Democrats are succumbing to
the corporate interests in the
environment, consumer protection." How
many cycles do we have to go through here?
How long is the learning curve before we
recognize that political parties are the
problem? They're the problem! They're the
ones who have turned our government over
to the corporations, so they can say no
to universal health insurance and no to a
living wage and no to environmental sanity
and no to renewable energy and no to a
whole range of issues that corporations
were never allowed to say no to 30, 40,
50 years ago. Things really have changed.

Yes?

Q You say you will be reluctant to
criticize the Democrats. How, then, are
you different from Senator Edwards and
Senator Kerry? What do you offer that
they don't offer? Why should a Democrat
or an independent vote for you instead of
one of them?

MR. NADER: Oh, first of all, I'm not going
to be reluctant, I said I'm going to focus
on the Bush administration. They're the
incumbents, they're the ones that have the
record. In 2000, it was Clinton-Gore that
had the record, and we focused attention
on them.

Why anybody should vote for us? One,
because our record for 40 years
represents dedicated, steadfast defense of
American liberties, justice, health and
safety, access to government, access to
the legislature, to the courts, freedom of
information, and a whole variety of reforms
that we have been proud to initiate and be
part of.

Second, we believe, unlike the Democrats,
that public financing of campaigns should
be expeditiously pursued. The first
meeting that Speaker Tom Foley and
Majority Leader Senator Mitchell had with
the Clinton administration was to urge Mr.
Clinton not to propose campaign finance
reform in early 1993 to the U.S. Congress.

Second (sic), we really believe in labor
law reforms and the repeal of Taft-Hartley.
I only hear Dennis Kucinich talking about
that. We believe that there should be many
more unions in places like Wal-Mart and
McDonald's, and among the 45 million
Americans who are not earning a living wage
at $5.50, $6, $7, $8, $9, $10 gross an hour.
We believe that NAFTA and GATT should be
withdrawn from. I haven't heard Kerry and
Edwards say that. There's a six-month
withdrawal option by all signatory nations,
so that we renegotiate these trade
agreements, A, to stick to trade; B, to be
open and democratic; and C, not to pull
down standards in this country, for labor,
environmental and consumer standards have
no business being subordinated to the
supremacy of international trade. They
should be subject to independent
agreements between nations --
environmental, labor, consumer agreements.

We also are going to engage in modes of
campaigning that the Democrats will not
engage in. They avoid local issues like
the plague at the presidential level.
We're going to work with the people, with
the neighborhood groups, with the citizen
groups to do that.

And of course, most prominently, they
don't come close to our position on
corporate power. I believe in federal
chartering of corporations above a certain
size, taking it away from Delaware and
Nevada and their race to the bottom.

I believe in strengthening aggressively
the rights of shareholder owners to
control the company that they control.
And I believe that corporations should
not be viewed as persons under our
Constitution; that they are artificial
entities, they should never have the
rights that real human beings have.

And I fully agree with this wonderful
editorial in Business Week in September
2000 which, after documenting that there's
too much corporate power; after reporting
on an extensive poll of the American
people, 72 percent of whom said
corporations had too much control over
their lives; had an editorial with the
singular phrase, quote, "Corporations
should get out of politics." End quote.
And I might add that not long after,
British Petroleum, the third-largest oil
company in the world, announced that it
would no longer, as a corporation, give
any campaign contributions to any
political campaigns anywhere in the world.
A modest step, but an important one
nonetheless.

Yes?

Q I'd like you just to clarify some of the
statements that you have made. Sam Husseini
from VotePact.com. You've said
simultaneously that you expect to help the
Democrats in a certain respect, and you
have also said that you got substantial
Republican support in the 2000 election.
Can you, A, clarify that and comment on
efforts such as VotePact.com, which seeks
to pair up disenchanted Republicans with
disenchanted Democrats and together, by
trusting each other, both vote for a third
party that they truly believe in?

One further point, if I might. You've said
that George Bush is a human being disguised
-- is a corporation disguised as a human
being, and you've also talked about the
spiritual impoverishment in this country.
Don't you think that statements like that,
which in effect dehumanize someone who you
may disagree with tremendously, impoverish
our world spiritually?

MR. NADER: Well, first of all, a
corporation is still a person under
our constitutional regime. (Scattered
laughter.) So if they want it to be a
person, let's give it personal
characterization, plus or minus.

There will be extensive use of the
Internet. For example, one proposal is
that, in a close state, someone who might
want to vote for our candidacy would pair
off with someone in Texas who might want
to Now, when you hear me talk about
Democrats, votes, Republicans, it's
because the fourth estate and reporters,
such as yourselves, are so insistent in
describing collateral benefits or
collateral deficits of this candidacy.
So sometimes I have to put myself arguendo
in responding to you in the shoes of the
Democratic Party or in the shoes of
conservatives.

But I want to point out that we have
reached out to both parties with a
35-page agenda inquiry, which is in your
press kit, that in a very relaxed way,
rather than a kind of accusatory way,
puts forth a number of major, thoughtful
policy changes in tax, in environment,
in consumer protection and election
reform and international trade, and so on,
and asked them, in late November, to give
us their views. And both of them said that
they would respond -- the Republican
National Committee and the Democratic
National Committee. Well, later on, the
RNC, through Mr. Gillespie, stated that --
his response was a simple sentence, that
the response to our agenda inquiry was the
Bush administration's policies. So that
finished that. The Democratic response
was a little more fertile. Mr. McAuliffe
said that he had read it on the train to
Philadelphia, these 35 pages. But then
came a response, not too long ago, a two-
page response criticizing the Republicans
for a number of policies that were
mentioned and raised in this agenda
inquiry.

But here you go; you see, they were given
all kinds of time. They had their own
complaints against third-party challenges.
Someone reaches out to them, they have a
research capability, it would probably
make their day less daily to ponder these
issues, like shifting the incidence of our
tax burden away from work as much as
possible, earnings from work, to wealth;
and then shifting it away from things we
like -- like books, furniture, clothing and
food -- shifting the tax burden to things
we least like, like pollution, stock
speculation, gambling or the addictive
industries. One would think they'd have
some play with that, but they weren't
interested. Another documentation as to
why we need broader public debate, broader
public dialogue, and more voices and
choices for the American people.

Q Mr. Nader?

MR. NADER: Yes?

Q Two issues. (Name and affiliation
inaudible.) Two issues. One, you're a
resident of the District of Columbia. Do
you support statehood or voting
enfranchisement for the District of
Columbia? And a second, perhaps more
challenging issue, you mentioned John
Conyers for singular praise. Since 1989,
he's sponsored H.R. 40, which is a bill
to set up a commission to study
reparations, payments for -- reparations
as a solution to the dilemma of slavery.
Would you, as president, encourage
Congress to adopt H.R. 40? And do you
support remedying the voteless status of
the District of Columbia?

MR. NADER: Well, of course, in the year
2000 we took a very strong stand for
statehood for the District of Columbia.
We're going to do it again. And we'll see
how supportive the other two parties are
against the colony called the District of
Columbia, where people who are drafted or
taken off to war and people who pay taxes
do not have the right to be represented by
a voting representative and two senators
in the U.S. Senate. So that's going to be
very clearly delineated. And I hope that
there will even be strategies to implement
that delineation, one of which you will be
very intrigued by when it is announced, as
a number of other innovative proposals
we're going to have that's going to make
what could become, by August, a rather dim
and dreary two-party campaign, as they
dwindle the number of issues that they
disagree on and repeat ad infinitum.

As far as John Conyers, I think there
should be a commission to study it.

I think a lot of Americans aren't aware
that there are corporations today,
pursuant to mergers or even actual
corporations, that were profiting from
slavery, such as the Aetna Corporation,
before the Civil War, and there's a payback
there. I think if white people had great
grandparents who were slaves, they would
be very concerned about that. There's got
to be justice here. And all John Conyers
is asking is a national commission to
inquire into it to see what the
responsibilities of governments are.

After all, slaves built a good part of
the U.S. Capitol. They built a lot of
public buildings. And I think the money
is not designed to go to individuals;
it's designed to amplify the budgets that
are now being squeezed to rebuild the
lower-income areas in our cities, for
example; to expand health care to African
American children, to reduce their
exposure to sources of deadly asthma and
lead poisoning. That is something that
we should all discuss.

After all, you know, there were other
genocidal or vicious treatments of
ethnic minorities that have gotten some
justice in recent years. And of course
the tragedy of slavery in this country
is one of the two worst tragedies in North
American history, the other being the
genocidal annihilation of the first Native
Americans. And we should always remember.

Q Mr. Nader?

Q Mr. Nader?

MR. NADER: Yes?

Q (Name off mike) -- from NBC Newschannel.
In 2000, the state that you did best in
was Alaska. You got more than 10 percent
of the vote there. How do you think
you'll do in that state again? Can you
reiterate your position on drilling in
ANWR? And thirdly, how do you think that
you will affect the Senate race there,
because the idea is that because you'll
bring in Green Party members, independents,
that will ultimately help the Democrats in
Alaska. Could you respond to all those?

MR. NADER: I think there will be a
spillover vote helping the Democratic
nominee for the U.S. Senate from Alaska.
I doubt whether there's going to be a
challenge from any other party.

I did very well in Alaska. It was
actually 20 percent at one time,
but we lost a good portion of our votes
near the end, as a lot of third parties
do. When people go into the voting booth,
they want to be with what they call as
a winner.

No drilling in ANWR, the Arctic refuge.
What we should do is nail the corporate
executives in Detroit to liberate their
engineers so they can improve fuel
efficiency. One mile per gallon over the
entire range of motor vehicle production
will save more fuel than anything that can
be gotten five, 10 years from now from the
Arctic refuge.

Unfortunately, under Clinton, among
others, a lot of the northern slope was
opened up for exploration, and the oil
companies haven't really done as much as
they're permitted to do outside of ANWR.
That's important to do. And I think the
oil companies owe the Alaskan people more
taxes. I think they owe them more revenues
for cleaning up their environmental messes.
And also, native Alaskan tribes now
organized in a corporate fashion need to
be compensated for the damage that's been
done to their habitat.

Yes?

Q I just wondered, did you ever consider
running in the Democratic primary? I mean,
we live in an electoral system that is not
a European parliamentary system. We have
a winner-take-all, as you know, and
that's a system that has produced two
parties except, I think, for 1860. There's
no realistic chance of a third party
actually getting majority power, except
the 1860 example where slavery completely
blew apart the Whigs.

What's wrong with -- where would you be
right now if you had run in the primary
in 2000? Arguably -- a lot of your
friends say you'd be in a lot better
position, and then there's something
inherently wrong where you have the Left
divided against itself by your candidacy.

MR. NADER: The simple answer to your
question is I don't choose to run in
wealth primaries. I don't choose to run
in a party that plays the for-sale game
with their Republicans, dialing for
commercial dollars in order to gain a
nomination. You can't abide by the clean
politics rules that we are abiding by --
refusing to take corporate money and PAC
money and other forms of special interest
money -- playing inside the Democratic
Party, I'm sorry to say.

Quite apart from that, I don't think
they'd have me. You know that under the
rules of both parties they can take away
your registration as a party member, if
you think that you are -- if they think
that you are there as a Trojan horse, for
example. So apart from those curlicues,
they don't practice election politics the
way I want to practice election politics.

Did you have another? What was the other
point?

Q If there's a problem with the
Democratic Party, which, you know, a lot
of people certainly think there are,
what's wrong with going in there to the
belly of the beast and changing it? Because
the alternative is what we see happening,
is progressives fighting amongst
themselves and any analogy to a European
parliamentary system just don't apply,
because we don't live in that system.


MR. NADER: First of all, you can't compete,
following our rules, in wealth primary
that starts in Iowa. I mean, Dean spent $10
million in Iowa, for example.

Q And he brought a lot of Democrats --
(off mike).

MR. NADER: Yes. Well, fine. But you simply
can't compete on a clean slate. I mean,
let me put it more boldly. You cannot
compete on a clean slate in a commercially
ridden party, number one.

Number two, give serendipity a chance.
Jesse Ventura started out running for
the governorship of Minnesota at 9 percent,
and then he got on 10 debates in Minnesota,
and he got $350,000 in state public
financing, and he is in a state with
same-day voter registration.

So there's always a chance of a
breakthrough, with the blissful
permission of the mass media, through
which you campaign. I mean, you can reach
2 percent of the people even if you speak
before the largest rallies in the biggest
arenas of America on campaign in 50 states,
as I did in the year 2000, but the only way
you can reach lots of people is through
the presidential debate -- debates and
through a more resourceful recognition by
the media that small starts with long
successful records in the civic community
deserve more than three and a half minutes
of face time on the three networks between
September 1st and Election Day, year 2000,
which is what I received.

Q Mr. Nader, would you talk to the aspect
--

STAFF: Identify --

Q I'm Joel Wishengrad of World Media
Reports. Would you talk to the aspect of
conservative versus liberal? We've seen
these talk shows in the last 10, 12 years,
such Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and
others, that you would say were skewing
the political landscape with their
rhetoric.

MR. NADER: Yes.

Q Why hasn't your particular advocacy-
type career caught on, not just in the
Green Party, but through maybe the
Democratic Party and elsewhere? And why
may be there only one radio network,
Pacifica, as opposed to the other radio
networks and television commentary?

MR. NADER: Well, if I understand your
question correctly, the answer is pretty
simple. Corporations advertise on radio,
and governments very rarely do. So the
vast amount of revenues -- he who pays
the piper plays the tune.

And one of the reasons why 90 percent of
talk show hosts are corporatists --
sometimes they think they're conservative,
but more often they're corporatist -- is
that they can go after government and not
lose advertising revenue, they can go
after liberal groups and not lose
advertising revenue, but Rush Limbaugh is
not going to go after his corporate
paymasters, because he will lose
advertising revenue.

And until we have access to the public
media and the public airwaves -- which
belong to the people, after all, and are
licensed for free by the FCC to radio and
TV stations -- unless we have a certain
amount of time as a people -- not just
liberals, as a people -- to have our own
radio stations and television stations and
audience networks, as we have proposed to
Congress over 10 years ago with a detailed
statute, then it's going to be more of the
same.

Yes?

Q John Gallagher, Traffic World Magazine.
What is your take on the status of the
transportation infrastructure in this
country, both for freight as well as for
passengers? And the $247 billion bill
that's being considered by Congress, is
that enough or not enough?

MR. NADER: It's not enough for modern
public transit, which is spectacular and
ready to go. It's not just buses and
trains in the old-fashioned sense. We're
going to try to highlight some of this
modern public transit technology and what
is available. There's still a huge bias
toward highway building, huge congestion
on the highways, which can be decongested
with a broader elaboration of our
railway system and broader utilization of
cross-transport modal containerization,
as well as a number of ways where highways
can be made less congested in terms of
staggering work shifts and things like
that that have been proposed.

Yes?

Q Hi. I'm Janice D'Arcy from the Hartford
Courant. I have a question, but before I
ask it, I want to clarify. Are you
supportive of the Internet vote trading
that you mentioned earlier, where someone
in Texas would trade their vote with
someone in Connecticut?

MR. NADER: That is a choice of the voter.
I support the choice of the voter. I don't
deny voters opportunity to make choices,
whether over the Internet in exchanges or
for third-party candidates and independent
candidates.

Q Then my question is, why you waited so
long to announce. Does it have anything
to do with Howard Dean's departure from
the race?

MR. NADER: Well, first of all, we were in
an exploratory mode since October. We
were testing the waters. And our findings
can be transferred over into the campaign.
So it isn't that we were totally inactive.
We were reaching out trying to see what
kind of volunteers can be recruited; what
kind of money can come in -- now to our
website, votenader.org; what kind of ideas.

The second is that there was an
overwhelming opposition by the liberal
intelligentsia that absorbed some of
our time. I think this may be the only
candidacy in our memory that is opposed
overwhelmingly by people who agree with
us on the issues.

So we've got a lot of communion here to
work out, and I keep saying just relax
and rejoice, wait until the months unfold.
You may see pleasant opportunities to
amplify your opposition to the incumbent
Bush regime.

Yes?

Q Yeah, I -- (name inaudible) -- health
issues --

MR. NADER: What is your --

Q I write on health issues.

MR. NADER: Yes.

Q On the issue of corporate branding of
children in public schools, you've written
far more extensively than any of the other
candidates and acted on it. However, in
the last election you failed to really
raise it as a major issue. Since then,
there's been what's been described as an
obesity and the issue of overweight and
obese children and adults. I wonder if
you will focus on the issue a bit more
this time?

MR. NADER: Well, there's a lot more data
on obesity. The number of obese children
under 12 has doubled since 1980, and now
there are -- 31 percent of adults in this
country, according to health statistics,
are obese. Coupled with overweight, the
total is over 60 percent; very sharp
increases, and certainly people should
restrain some of their fat food intake.
And certainly corporations that have,
from age two to three, seduced children
to turn their tongues against their brain,
undermine parental authority, and sold them
junk food; essentially sugar and fat pumps
into their stomachs to the detriment of
their present and future health.

I beg to differ, though, on 2000. There
was almost nobody making as many points
as I -- they just weren't reported --
about the commercialization of childhood,
the commercial exploitation of childhood.
And rest assured, you'll hear a lot about
the subject you just raised.

Q (Off mike) -- Green Party --

MR. NADER: Yes?

Q Mr. Nader, Terry Campbell (sp) --
(inaudible) -- the Green Party.
I want to urge you and ask you if you're
going to work out and reach out to
conservatives during this campaign. There
are many conservatives across the country
that are very upset at the largest federal
spending in the history of the country,
the largest deficit in the history of the
country, no accountable accounting system
-- auditable accounting system at the
Pentagon. You talked about more trains,
less traffic. We have collected thousands
of petition signatures to put these
candidates on the ballot here: Joe Odo (ph)
for Congress, a Green, and Brad Blanton (ph).

So the question is, more trains, less
traffic -- are you going to focus on that,
reaching out to conservatives and calling
for candidates all across the country?
Forty percent of all races have no one,
no opposition. Today you can reach out
across the country with this big platform
and urge people to step forward and do
their patriotic responsibility to
participate in our democracy. Will you
do that?

MR. NADER: Yes, sir. I'm enthused by your
enthusiasm. (Laughter.) I might make the
point that if you want to see a distinct
evidence of the cleavage between
conservative Republicans and corporate
Bush Republicans, on our website,
votenader.org, is my letter to President
Bush, in October, outlining over 20
positions of the Texas State Republican
Party platform of 2002 -- his own party --
diametrically opposed to the Bush
administration's policy, including
the policies by the state party to get
out of NAFTA and WTO, including the severe
criticism of the Patriot Act and the
violation of civil liberties as what those
conservative Republicans believe,
quote, was "the main threat to our domestic
liberties." End quote. You might want to
look into that and explore.

I might add this nice point that you might
be interested in. A few months ago, Ross
Perot sent a private prospectus to New
York publishing circles for a book that
he presumably wanted to write, heavily
attacking the deficit policies of the
Bush administration. For some reason, it
was pulled back. Now, Ross Perot made his
mark in 1992 excoriating deficit spending
and excoriating the exported jobs incident
to NAFTA. The WTO hadn't been passed then.
He's been right on both scores. I urge all
Americans to urge Ross Perot in Dallas,
Texas, to go public with his criticisms
of the Bush regime's devastating deficits,
so devastating that the head of the
General Accounting Office described the
budget, as I mentioned earlier, as, quote,
"Enron-type accounting," end quote, and
talked about the enormous burden on the
children in this country who are going to
inherit not just the deficit, they're
going to inherit huge interest payments
diverted from the necessities of our
country, and suffer enormous budget cuts,
which always start with the poor and with
the minorities and with the children; it
never starts at the top with the gold-
plated weapon systems that were designed
for a Soviet Union-era of hostility.

Q Mr. Nader, you mentioned that -- Sarah
Schweitzer from the Boston Globe. You
mentioned that you were looking for --
how many volunteers that you were going
to get and how much money you've raised.
How much have you raised? How many
volunteers do you have?

And then secondly, in terms of just
practical electoral results, if this time
around you're going to get fewer
Democratic votes, and if you're also not
running with a third party and thereby not
putting that party in the position of
getting federal funding next time around,
what practical electoral result do you hope
to get out of this?

MR. NADER: What practical votes or --

Q Electoral outcome. What do you hope to
get in terms of --

MR. NADER: Well, you don't need to get
electoral votes in a winner-take-all-system
to qualify for federal funding.

MORE If you get 5 percent of the total
votes you qualify --

Q (Off mike) -- the party?

MR. NADER: No, no. It also accrues to
independent candidates. John Anderson,
for example, actually got 7 percent or so
in 1980 and he qualified for federal
funding; he chose not to take it in 1984.
As far as the -- does that answer that
part of your question? And the other part?

Q How much money have you raised and how
many volunteers do you have?

MR. NADER: Yes, okay. In an exploratory
mode you can't really raise big money,
because then it will be viewed as not
an exploratory mode. So we raised about
$175,000 in the exploratory mode. But the
funds have been increasing; contributions
from all over the country have been flowing
in, especially in the last 24 hours to our
website, votenader.org. We're getting
floods of volunteers, resumes from people.
We particularly want people who are good
organizers, good signature gatherers, good
in graphic arts, good in computer software
and Web design, and good at all kinds of
creative ideas on how to advance justice in
our country based on what they're doing
back home to advance justice in our country.

Yes? Could you identify yourself?

Q Yeah, Amanda Debenen (sp), Washington
Report on Middle Eastern Affairs. And
I'm curious about --

MR. NADER: Did you ask before?

Q I do not believe --

Q (Off mike.)

MR. NADER: Okay, because -- are you
together? Because I'm sorry, you
know, we have to give someone else a
chance.

Q Okay.

MR. NADER: Yes, hello?

Q Louisa Savage (sp) from The New York
Times. Could you elaborate --

MR. NADER: Could you speak a little lot
louder?

Q Sorry. Louisa Savage (sp) from The New
York Times. Could you elaborate on --
(audio break) -- and will you be arguing
that Iraq would have been better off if
Saddam Hussein was still in power? How
do you feel about Republican and
conservative voters?

MR. NADER: Yes, well I think there are a
lot of conservative voters who thought the
Iraq invasion and its unconstitutional
authorization by the Congress was
inappropriate, to put it mildly. And as
more casualties come back, fatalities,
injuries, diseases from sand flies --
sand-fly disease has already afflicted
1,200 soldiers; it's hardly reported in
the press. They're going to be more upset
when 130,000 soldiers are rotated back
home; that's going to mean a lot of
communication with millions of families,
including conservative families.

Would Iraq had been better off under
Saddam Hussein or under the present
situation? The question should be, would
an American government-entrenched Saddam
Iraq had been better off if the Bush
administration in 1991 had overthrown
Saddam Hussein after he illegally
invaded Kuwait, and after the "Bush I"
administration had the entire international
community around them. That's where the
problem should have been resolved.
Instead, the first George Bush urged the
Shi'ites and the Sunnis to rise up and
overthrow the tyrant, and they did and
they had control over about 75 percent
of Iraq when Saddam Hussein got the okay
to slaughter them with helicopter gunships,
and put down the rebellion with U.S.
F-16s being held back from doing anything
about it.

So I refuse to be put in a situation
where you ask a question now without
discussing history then.

And now there of course is more free
newspapers; there, I'm sure -- some
small businesses starting. But on the
other hand, the health care system has
declined to even worse levels because
of the war and lack of facilities. And
to put it another way, dictators are
terrible, but they provide security in
the streets. And as one Iraqi said,
"We despise Saddam Hussein, but we have
less food, less electricity and less
security now." That's not the kind of
comparison we want to make. We -- the
comparison we wanted to make is, why do
we keep supporting dictators and oligarchs,
instead of workers and peasants fostering
democratic societies?

In the Middle East, the answer is oil.
That's the answer.

Yes?

Q Brad Blanton, Radical Honesty Rag.

MR. NADER: Radical Honesty Rag?

Q Radical Honesty Rag. I'm the editor. (Laughter.)

I'm interested in secrecy, and it seems
to me that a lot of American policy has
been dogged by the 36 separate and secret
agencies of the United States government
that our taxes pay for. They seem to have
made a lot of those policies without any
review by the American people. I'd like
for you just to say something about
secrecy and the dishonesty that's implicit
in the hiding out in this most secretive
administration in the history of the
country.

MR. NADER: Well, democracy dies in the
backrooms of government and their
corporate and other allies. We have
long been advocates and were significant
promoters of the Freedom of Information Act
of 1974, which the press takes constant
and proper advantage of.

The Bush administration is one of the most
secretive. They also have a Homeland
Security Department that can easily exempt
itself from Freedom of Information Act
requests, without judicial review. And
of course you get more misspending by
the federal government, you get bad
policies that aren't exposed in time by
the federal government when there's
secrecy. Information is the currency of
democracy, and sunlight is the best
disinfectant, as Justice Brandeis pointed
out many, many years ago.

And we will make this a major issue. We
will make government secrecy, a major
adversary of democratic processes and
public participation in their government,
a major issue in this campaign.

Can we have just one more or two more,
please. Yes?

Q (Name off mike) -- American Prospect
Magazine. I know that you've rejected
running with the Democratic Party and
the Republican Party. I'm wondering why
you've rejected running with the Green
Party, and what you think they're doing
wrong that makes them a party you don't
want to be part of.

MR. NADER: Well, they're doing nothing
wrong. The Green Party has a good platform.
It keeps getting better. It's very broad,
not just the environment, although that's
important; it's labor, it's tax reform,
it's corporate accountability, it's civic
involvement.

I had to withdraw from consideration for
the Green Party nomination because, as I
said earlier, they are going to decide
whether they're going to have a
candidate and under what restrictions --
stay out of X states or Y state -- in
June. That's too late to hazard a
candidacy that should be busily
collecting signatures to get on the
ballot and surmount the two-party
exclusionary statutes that we hope
someday will be removed by one federal
statute for federal elections instead of
50 state statutes varying wildly, from
300 signatures to get on the ballot in
Tennessee, to 100,000 signatures in
North Carolina for an independent candidate.
There's no rhyme or reason for that. They
can have their own state election
standards; for federal elections, there
should be one federal standard, and
that's going to be one of the policies of
our campaign.

Remember, if I just may end it in this, I
do beseech you -- as the media -- to focus
more and more on broader and broader issues
and not allow the candidates of both
parties to narrow the issues to four or
five which become very repetitive and bore
the heck out of all of you who follow
these campaigns. Toward that end, I hope
you will look with some measure of
devotion to reading the 35-page agenda
inquiry that I sent to the Republican and
Democratic Committees, and perhaps look
into some of those in order to flavor
and elaborate the intensity and the
diversity of an election campaign in a
presidential year, when public debate
should reach its optimum level.

Again, those who are interested in
volunteering and contributing to
our campaign, our new website is
votenader.org.

Thank you very much. (Applause.)

© Copyright 2004 The New York Times
Company

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