This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
A group of eight U.S. senators have formed what they call a “Fight Club” to force Minority Leader Senator Chuck Schumer to oppose Trump more aggressively and to back more populist candidates in the 2026 midterms. The group includes Democrats Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, independent Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
For more, we’re joined by a lifelong activist who’s run for president four times. Ralph Nader is a longtime consumer advocate, corporate critic, founder of the Capitol Hill Citizen newspaper, where his front-page piece in the current issue is headlined “Congress is there for the taking. Now’s the time to take it.” And it’s also the 60th anniversary of his book Unsafe at Any Speed, which took on major corporations — in that case, GM.
Ralph, before we go to Unsafe at Any Speed and what this 60th anniversary means, if you can talk about this Fight Club? And say what you mean about Congress is up for the taking, and it should be taken.
RALPH NADER: Well, you know, there are 535 men and women in Congress. They put their shoes on like we do every morning. They are possessed of the delegated power under the Constitution of the citizens. That’s why the Preamble to the Constitution starts “We the People,” not “We the Congress.” And so, we have 435 congressional districts. And there’s no organization, Congress watchdog groups with reasonable staff in any of those organizations, in any of those districts to monitor and push members of Congress in the right direction, so 1,500 corporations pretty much get their way on Capitol Hill. And the result is devastating. Congress is the main tool to challenge the entrenched corporate supremacists that are controlling this country. They’re strategizing and planning our entire society, whether it’s the tax system or public lands or the social safety net or energy or health insurance and healthcare.
And so, I wrote this article, which is really quite obvious, because the history of our country shows that when the people rise up, it takes less than 1% of them, reflecting public opinion, focusing on the Congress and knowing what they’re talking about, to defeat the corporate lobbies. We did it on auto safety with about a thousand people around the country. We didn’t have the money or campaign contributions, but we had the evidence that they were killing people in unsafe cars and that they knew and their engineers knew, but were suppressed, how to build cars that could prevent death and injury and make the cars more fuel efficient and less polluting.
So, we have these examples, which I put in my new book, Civic Self-respect, just to try to get people to stop giving up on themselves, stop being cynical, which leads to withdrawal, and develop a process of summoning the senators and representatives to their own town meetings, choreographed by the citizenry in town halls or school auditoriums, where there’s no intermediate flacks, and the senators and representatives have to hear the agenda of the people.
The big deception in this country, Amy is polarization. They keep talking about polarization, red state-blue state, conservative-liberal, fighting each other. There is huge consensus by conservative and liberal voters in this country on major agendas to improve their livelihoods. It’s minimum wage. It’s cracking down on corporate crooks who are bleeding consumer dollars and savings. It’s universal health insurance. It’s tax reform. Taxing the super rich and the corporations that are very undertaxed comes in to 85%. Breaking up the big banks after the Wall Street collapse came to close to 90%. The process of deceiving the people and divide and rule goes back over 2,000 years, and we’ve got to confront it directly.
Every day, for example, we see the — we see the press reporting corporate crime, frauds, abuses, and the Congress doesn’t pay any attention, even under the Democrats. They didn’t have the requisite public hearings that inform and mobilize people so they can basically tell their Congress who they work for in the first place.
So, I wrote this article in Capitol Hill Citizen — you can go to CapitolHillCitizen.com to get a copy of the Capitol Hill Citizen — in order to show people their own history and to wake them up and to recover Congress. But you do it by personal lobbying of your senator and representative, just like the two powerful lobbies, AIPAC and NRA. They don’t deal with marches and demonstrations. They deal with personal lobbying on the staff, on the members. They know the friends back home, their lawyers, their doctors, who they play golf with. So —
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Ralph?
RALPH NADER: — we really have to focus on this, just like, you know, week after week, you expose the mass murder in Gaza. It’s not called — it shouldn’t be called ethnic cleansing. It’s mass slaughter. It’s genocide.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Ralph? Ralph, if I can ask you, though —
RALPH NADER: But the belly of the beast is in Congress. It’s in the White House. That’s where —
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Ralph, if I can —
RALPH NADER: — the focus has to be.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Ralph, if I can ask you, though, this — your idea of Congress is there for the taking presumes that we are in an ordinary liberal or neoliberal democracy. There are many people who fear that this next November election, that the Trump and the Republican Party are determined to declare victory no matter what the vote total is, and will use any means necessary to maintain themselves in power. I’m wondering about your sense of this, this growing fascism in the country and the ability of even a democratic vote to take place in November.
RALPH NADER: Well, clearly, we’re seeing a rapidly entrenching dictatorship. This is not authoritarianism. It’s a dictatorship. He’s violating laws right and left. He’s violating the Constitution. He’s open about it. He’s protected by the Supreme Court decision of last year, Trump v. U.S., which basically says he can’t be criminally prosecuted. And the Congress is run by the GOP.
One thing he fears, Juan, is impeachment. He’s been impeached twice. And twice, the majority senators wanted to remove him, but they didn’t get the two-thirds number required by the Constitution. The one tool that the people have is impeachment. Now, on September 15th — that’s over two months ago — there was a Celinda Lake poll in swing districts in the United States showing 49% want him impeached, 44% oppose. And things have gotten much worse now. He’s pushing the envelope on savagery. He’s moving us not from an autocracy. He’s in a dictatorship bleeding into a police state. Look what he’s doing to citizens in the cities and the immigrants, even legal immigrants. And there are manifestations of terror that are starting. So, the focus has to be on impeachment, and there will be a large majority of people in favor of it.
And the Republicans in Congress are starting to crack on their sycophancy in fear of Trump, because they’re going to be up for reelection in 2026 and he is not. When Nixon won 49 out of 50 states and came in with 60% popularity, in less than two years, because of the Watergate scandal, he was out. They were about to impeach and remove him. Why? Because the Republicans saw disaster coming in the 1974 elections, and it was their political skin vis-à-vis Nixon. They’re going to save their political skin. And that’s exactly what’s happening now. And Nixon’s transgressions, Juan, were less than 1% of the crimes and violations and brutality and cruelty and viciousness against millions of defenseless, powerless and impoverished Americans.
Like the bully he is, he doesn’t go after the contented classes. He facilitates corporate welfare. He shuts down corporate prosecutions in the Justice Department. But what he’s going after are the tens of millions of people who are unorganized, who are poor, who are sick, disabled, Medicaid, you know, things you reported on your show, cutting off food supplements. We’re talking about tens of millions of Americans.
AMY GOODMAN: Ralph?
RALPH NADER: So, the impeachment has got to be the focus.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about this anniversary. Sixty years ago this week, November 30th, 1965, you published your landmark book, Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile. You went on to win a major settlement against GM, General Motors, for spying on you, trying to discredit you, trying to set you up with women, etc. And you used the lawsuits proceeds to start the Center for the Study of Responsive Law. This is a clip from an interview you did 60 years ago on the safety flaws of GM’s Chevrolet Corvair.
RALPH NADER: What aggravates the problem is that the rear wheels of the Corvair begin to tuck under. And as they tuck under, the angle of tuck under is called camber. And as they tuck under, it can go from three or four degrees camber to 11 degrees camber almost in an instant. And when that happens, nobody can control the Corvair.
CBC INTERVIEWER: Well, then, surely, they did the right thing: They found out there was something wrong with the car, and they fixed it.
RALPH NADER: Yes, the question is: Why did it take them four years to find out? This is my point. Either it’s sheer callousness or indifference, or they don’t bother to find out how their cars behave.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Ralph Nader in 1965. His book, Unsafe at Any Speed, just marked its 60th anniversary. Ralph, this was bigger than the Corvair, though so significant, what you were able to do in passing new auto safety laws. You were taking on large corporations and exposed how they would retaliate — for example, spying on you. In this last minute that we have — not with you; you’re going to stay with us for the next segment, because we’re going to talk about the WTO protests in 1999, a new documentary — talk about the trajectory from ’65 to now in trying to protect people in this country against corporations.
RALPH NADER: Well, I published Unsafe at Any Speed in 1965, Amy. GM tripped over it with their private detectives scandal. It reached the Congress. Senator Ribicoff held highly publicized hearings. Then Senator Magnuson had hearings on Motor Vehicle Safety Standards, which didn’t exist at that time, and the laws were passed. An auto safety agency was set up in the Department of Transportation called NHTSA. Millions of lives have been saved. Other countries importing into the U.S. had to meet the higher crashworthiness standards of the U.S. and recall requirements.
None of that can be done today. None of that can be done today. There are great books coming out exposing all kinds of corporate crimes, forever chemicals and all kinds of devastation of people’s livelihoods, and they go nowhere, because our civic institutions, our democratic institutions, for the most part, have collapsed. And the corporations have continued 24/7. The nature of the corporate beast never stops to control more and more of our country, to control more and more of our local city councils, state legislatures, Congress, massive campaign contributions, 400 to 500 drug industry lobbyists assigned to Congress alone, for example, full time. And that’s what we have to face up to.
But we outnumber these corporations. We are the only ones mentioned in the Constitution. There’s no mention of corporation or company, or political parties indentured to them, in the Constitution. So, why are we letting them support — why do we let them control and rule us? That’s the question that has to be asked of ourselves. And it only takes 1% or less of the people to defeat these corporations. That’s about two-and-a-half million organized people in 435 districts. Already, a woman who lost her two daughters due to defective truck designs, in North Carolina, is starting the first Congress watchdog group. And we’re going to have her on my radio broadcast.
But I want people to read my book Civic Self-respect, because it applies to everybody in the country.
AMY GOODMAN: Ralph?
RALPH NADER: The table of contents starts off, “I, the Citizen,” “I, the Worker,” “I, the Consumer Shopper,” “I, the taxpayer,” “I, the voter,” “I, the parent,” “I, the veteran,” and how the people, without disrupting their normal routines, can add a civic dimension to all those roles every day.
AMY GOODMAN: Ralph Nader, we’re going to ask you to stay with us for our next segment, longtime consumer advocate, corporate critic, ran for president four times, in February will celebrate his 92nd birthday.
Up next, Ralph Nader is one of the voices featured in a new documentary, WTO/99. He’ll stay with us, and we’ll speak with the film’s director about what happened in Seattle in 1999. Both Juan and I were there, as well, covering this massive protest. Back in 20 seconds.
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AMY GOODMAN: Anne Feeney singing “Have You Been to Jail for Justice?” at the WTO protests in 1999, from the documentary This Is What Democracy Looks Like.
