Reply #41: No. There you're wrong. [View All]

[txlibdem]

I hate Nader as much as the other posters on this thread but there is no question in my mind that he siphoned off enough independent and Democratic votes to cost Gore the election.

Nader knows a lot of the right things to say, but read till the end to see how he misses the point:

"RN: The problem is the nature of power, and the corporate entity controlling government, which Franklin Roosevelt, in 1938, called fascism… The global corporate model is all powerful, has no competition in terms of a model… They have nationalized the savings of the American people. They are too big to fail, so that they are bailed out, as Wall Street is bailed out. They have monetized elections, nullifying effectively people's votes. They select the politicians, put them in office, and when they retire they hire them and give them a half a million dollars or more a year as lobbyists. It is the most clever, dynamic, creative system of controlling power in the history of the world. And they give people entertainment, and they allow people to confuse personal freedom with civic freedom. So you've got a lot of people in this country who say, "what do you mean we don't live in a free country?" That's right, you have personal freedom, you can eat what you want, buy whatever clothes you want, date who you want, divorce who you want, choose the friends you want, pick the music you want, get the bicycle you want, get into a five-thousand pound vehicle and go three blocks and buy chiclets if you want. That is personal freedom. It's not civic freedom. Civic freedom is what's been shredded. As Cicero said "freedom is participation in power." What kind of freedom do we have by that standard?

… Right now we have a dystopia on the ground. It's called the liberal progressive intelligentsia and their flock. They think if they keep writing more books (the way Bill Greider and Bob Kuttner and Jim Hightower and Ralph Nader and others keep writing, exposing, proposing, diagnosing, denouncing and suggesting) that something is going to happen."

http://www.radioopensource.org/ralph-naders-flight-of-fantasy/