January, 1999
Labor Party Press
Ralph Nader:
'We've Got
the Seeds
of a Great
Political Party'
Excerpts from a talk by
consumer advocate Ralph Nader
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Photo ©Michael Kaufman, Impact Visuals |
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What I like about the Labor Party’s agenda is that it’s not
built around low expectations. If labor settles for promises, they’re going to get
promises.
People keep talking about the Y2K problem. For many workers in this
country, it really is 1900 all over again. There’s the lack of health insurance. The
minimum wage is a cruel mockery of the term – it’s a third of what it was in
1950. We have bloated giant multinational corporations with CEOs making 200-500 times more
than the entry level jobs in their companies... It used to be 12 times more.
One of the reasons I find people like Tony Mazzocchi and the other Labor
Party leaders so compelling is that they know that workers are also consumers, and if
workers’ hard-earned money is stolen by crooked savings and loans, if they’re
ripped off by health insurance companies, that’s equivalent to a pay cut at the
workplace. They’re also compelling leaders because they look at workers as taxpayers.
What are workers getting for their tax dollars, when $200 billion in workers’ taxes
goes to "aid to dependent corporations"?
Years ago working with Tony Mazzocchi on the inception of OSHA, we thought
this was a great step forward. And there are a lot of workers whose lives and lungs have
been saved. But OSHA now is a mere shadow of its former self. OSHA hasn’t issued a
single chemical standard for the workplace in six years of the Clinton administration
— that’s even worse than under Reagan and Bush. Which is why we call the
President "George Ronald Clinton."
These politicians get on their knees before the giant corporations by
supporting NAFTA and GATT. I’m talking about corporations that have very little
allegiance to the country where they were born, where they rose on the shoulders of
working people. And yet when they get into trouble, these companies go to your government
in Washington and ask for a bailout. And they demand that your children in the armed
forces go over and defend their interests. If you don’t have a Labor Party in
America, you’ll never have a democratic party – you’ll have a party of
Exxon.
Target Taft-Hartley
Last year was the 50th anniversary of the Taft-Hartley law, which
strangled labor in America. Yet there is no protest by the Democratic Party, which
originally opposed Taft-Hartley – there is no commemoration of how many workers
can’t have a decent standard of living because of Taft-Hartley. Do you think the
Republican Party would turn its back on corporations the way the Democratic Party has
turned its back on working people in this country?
I hope that the Labor Party makes a direct target of the Taft-Hartley law
and mobilizes working people in this country for its complete repeal. If you go after
Taft-Hartley, you are definitely going to get the attention of the corporate bosses and
the Wall St. Journal, which isn’t covering this convention.
Corporate power has been on an upward swing for past 20 years. They caught
a little flack in the 60s and 70s. Then they broke through in the last year of the Carter
administration. And now, who holds the power in the media? Big business. Who holds the
power in the workplace? Big business. Who holds the power in the marketplace? Big
business. Who holds the power in our government? Big business. That’s not the way
America was supposed to be designed.
We’ve got corporatizing of the universities, the media controlled by
six or seven big chains. Corporations peddling violence as the solution to life’s
problems to our kids. Peddling junk food, with the kids just staring at these TVs and
videos. We have richest one percent of people in this country having wealth equal to that
of the bottom 92 percent of the population. Meanwhile, most Americans either have a
negative net worth or a few thousand dollars net worth.
To top it off, we have Alan Greenspan at the Federal Reserve and Clinton
and business leaders telling us the economy has never been better. Well, judging by a
corporate yardstick, the yardstick of record profits, stocks, and CEO compensation, maybe
so. But what about the peoples’ yardstick? One of every four children in this country
is growing up in serious poverty. In the Netherlands it’s three percent, and
they’re ashamed of it.
Isn’t it about time that a party rises from the cinders of American
labor to create the yardsticks that measure whether this economy is really delivering? If
we don’t control the yardsticks by which our economy is judged, we lose control over
the nation’s agenda and turn ourselves over to big business, which can manipulate our
horizons and make us feel that we’re as well off as we’re going to be.
On running candidates
We come to the Labor Party’s electoral agenda. I don’t know of
any political party that has set the kind of threshold you have for running candidates,
after having laid out their own program and adopted it. There’s no point going into
the political arena if you don’t know where you’re going or if you’re only
going to get two percent of the vote.
Here’s a little advice that might be useful. On November 3 there were
95 seats in the House of Representatives where there was no opponent by a major party on
the ballot. In fact, 90 percent of Congressional seats in this country are not competitive
– there’s either no challenger or a nominal challenger. Can you imagine the
opportunity this presents to the Labor Party? The hollowness of the two-party system is
your total opportunity.
Another suggestion: You’re very likely to win these elections if you
choose right.
If you asked me what it would take in numbers to build a major political
party in this country, I would say a million people contributing an average of $25 a year
each and some of them volunteering their time — you have yourself a political party.
And there are more than a million people who want a party like this.
We need a democratic Labor Party that is building democracy, a party of
accountability, a party of a broad political social agenda that respects future
generations, a party of the workplace, the marketplace, the media — how can we be
serious if we don’t have our own media? We can never rely on a corporate media,
because we will be sabotaged by it.
Tony Mazzocchi’s message to all of us is that reading and thinking
and conversing with one another over serious topics about the future of our country and
the world are the seeds of a great political party. And the more we read, we think, we
converse, the stronger the underpinnings of this political party will be.
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