What Was Ralph Nader Thinking? 90th Birthday Celebration

By Jurgen Vsych

If you've ever been in a car accident, taken a prescription drug, breathed air, drunk a glass of water or dared to eat a hot dog, you may be alive because of Ralph Nader. What Was Ralph Nader Thinking when he decided to run for president against impossible odds? Jürgen Vsych was Nader's filmmaker and photographer - and if anyone knows, she does. Follow Jürgen Vsych as she travels across America on Southwest Airlines with the avuncular agitator dismissed by the corporate-owned media as an egomaniacal "spoiler." What Was Ralph Nader Thinking? Read this book and find out! 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jurgen Vsych
• Release date: Feb 19, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224022755

Book preview

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THE THIRD MAN

HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA

George W. Bush and John F. Kerry (2-dimensional) flank 3D Ralph. That’s Zen Master holding up Bush.

A Call to Arms

March 6, 2004 3:30am Can’t sleep – Ralph Nader isn’t having fun.

Ralph was on The Tavis Smiley Show tonight. When Tavis told Ralph that none of Ralph’s friends or anyone who worked on his 2000 presidential campaign encouraged him to run for president this year, and they all say he’s just an egomaniac, ¹ Ralph sighed and said, It’s no fun going around sweating out these ballot access hurdles, staying in Hampton Inns and coming in at midnight. No, this is all about the struggle for justice, what I’ve been doing for forty years. The doors of the Democrat and Republicans’ Washington are closing on all the citizen groups: they can’t improve their country anymore. Thomas Jefferson foresaw this: he said when you lose your government, go into the electoral arena to get your country back.

Ralph Nader isn’t having fun? That’s not right! It’s bad enough that most so-called progressives have jumped on the Anybody But Bush bandwagon driven by John Kerry, a senator who voted to give Bush the okeydoke to invade Iraq, and voted for the Patriot Act, the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a politician who is against reducing the military budget, and against a living wage. But to call Ralph – a consumer advocate who’s dedicated every waking minute of the past forty years to fighting for the little guy – an egomaniac? He’s about to get pounded in his third run for president and most of his former constituency and friends hate his guts. Terrific ego booster.

Newspapers need news. Ralph Nader doing the same old muckraking: Not news. Ralph Nader turned into a deranged Don Quixote, making one last desperate cling at fame: News! It’s difficult for heroic underdogs not to overstay their welcome…like Robin Hood, who keeps taking from the rich and giving to the poor after Richard the Lionheart is back on the throne ("Okay, Robin, enough already! Put that royal deer down!). All Ralph’s press focuses on Democrats whining about Ralph being a spoiler, and stealing votes" that they think they’re entitled to, even though they’ve almost totally abandoned progressive issues.

In 1947, during Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee’s witch trials, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Katharine Hepburn, and other actors went to Washington. They held press conferences and spoke out against the blacklist. When they got back to Hollywood, all hell broke loose. Bogart was forced to make a retraction; he said the trip was ill-advised [and] foolish. And this was one of the toughest, most independent-minded artists of his day. Of the tens of thousands of studio bureaucrats and artists who could have stood up to McCarthyism, only eight screenwriters and two directors had the guts. This election year, who will be The Hollywood Ten?

At the end of Tavis Smiley’s show, Ralph said, We’re looking for people who want to volunteer, people who want to make politics exciting again! Our website is VoteNader.org. The website has only one photo, and some uninspiring t-shirts and buttons for sale. I send Ralph’s campaign $10, as much as an independent filmmaker – whose first feature film premiered three days after September 11, 2001 – can afford.

Meet the Press, February 22

Ralph: After careful thought and my desire to retire our Supremely selected President, I’ve decided to run as an independent candidate for president.

Washington is now corporate-occupied territory. There’s a For Sale sign on almost every door of agencies and departments where these corporations dominate and put their appointments in high office. The Congress is what Will Rogers once called the best money can buy. It means that corporations are saying no to the necessities of the American people. They’re saying no to health insurance for everyone, no to tax reform, no to health and safety standards, no to stopping corporate welfare into the hundreds of billions, no to straightening out the defense budget, which is bloated and redundant, as many retired generals and admirals have said.…

The liberal intelligentsia has got to ask itself a tough question. For twenty-five years they’ve let their party become a captive of corporate interests. And now they want to block the American people from having more choices and voices – especially young people who are looking for idealism, who are looking for a clean campaign, who are looking for the real issues in this country instead of the sham and the rhetoric that masquerades for political campaigning.

I think we deserve a serious explanation of why this country was plunged into war against a brutal dictator tottering over an antiquated, non-loyal army, surrounded by hostile neighbors who, if he made one move against them, would have obliterated him. It was oil. And oil has ruined so much of our foreign policy and antagonized so many people in the Third World. We should be converting to renewable energy and solar energy and energy efficiency, all of which creates jobs in this country.

We owe a responsibility to the people of Iraq. We entrenched Saddam Hussein in 1979 along with the British. We armed them, we gave them credits, we sold them onto US export license by corporations – sold materials for chemical and biological warfare in the 1980s under Reagan and the first Bush administration.

We have no business being there. We have no business diverting hundreds of billions of dollars over there while our schools, clinics, public transit, libraries are crumbling for lack of repair. We need to get rid of that tax cut for the wealthy, which is increasing deficits, and have a massive job-producing public works.

Tim Russert: How many state ballots do you think you can get on?

Ralph: There’s a tremendous bias in state laws against third parties and Independent candidates bred by the two major parties who passed these laws. They don’t like competition. Now let me say this: this is going to be difficult. We’re asking for volunteers to log into our website, VoteNader.org. We’re asking for contributions.…

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I’ve never heard Ralph say anything like This is going to be difficult . He always seems to be having such a blast: you’ve never seen a happier guy in a suit than when Ralph was taking on the auto insurance industry in California , pushing Proposition 103 through and saving every motorist hundreds of dollars a year.

I know how Ralph could have fun: debating Bush and Kerry. Well, debating Kerry, maybe. They might be able to have something resembling a discussion. Bush? Five words and POW! watch the Secret Service scrape the president of the United States off the floor.

I send Ralph’s campaign $100 (I can go a month without movies). Unlike the Democrats and Republicans, the Nader campaign doesn’t accept money from corporations. Ralph wants all public campaigns to be publicly funded. That way, public officials won’t be beholden to their corporate paymasters, and tobacco companies like Philip Morris can’t sponsor the presidential debates and keep out anti-smoking advocates like, oh, say, Ralph Nader. The Commission on Presidential Debates, which was created by the Republicans and Democrats, didn’t invite Ralph to debate because he didn’t meet their criterion: polling at least 15% in an average of five national polls. A neat Catch-22, because you can’t possibly get that high in the polls unless people see you on the debates.

Be your own Ralph Nader. – John Kerry, January 10, 1972

When I was three years old, Ralph was on the cover of Time magazine. Most of the words were too big for me to understand, but I knew an honest face when I saw one. Mom read parts of the article aloud: she said Ralph wrote a book about how General Motors made unsafe cars. GM was greedy and didn’t want to spend money to fix their cars. So GM tried to set Ralph up: they sent beautiful women to follow Ralph into supermarkets and to invite him into their apartments, where they would take movies or photos and make him seem like a bad guy who slept with women he wasn’t married to (!) so no one would believe anything he said. But Ralph was so smart, he kept his pants on. Time had a photo of Ralph’s Nader Raiders, and a photo of Ralph shopping for groceries (my dad never did that). I asked Dad if I could have the magazine for my scrapbook. Dad smiled, held the magazine up high, and slowly ripped Ralph’s face in two. I can still hear the paper tearing.

In the fourth grade, for our assigned essay, Three American Heroes, my choices were Sherlock Holmes, Mr. Spock from Star Trek, and Ralph Nader. I didn’t get marked down for choosing Holmes (fictitious and English) or Spock (fictitious and Vulcan)…but Nader? That was the straw that broke the principal’s back. It was bad enough that my school had an artist [principal’s italics] taking up a desk when the Commie Russians were passing US by in mathematics and plotting to blow US up – but to have this artist admire Nader? That Arab probably wears a seat belt when he rides his flying carpet! the principal sneered as she crumpled up my paper. I stopped talking about Ralph, consciously extracting his name from my vocabulary like all those words I learned from watching Mel Brooks movies.

I didn’t get why Ralph was so hung up on fighting corporations. Why didn’t he take on some really influential swamp – like Hollywood? It has worldwide influence, kills a lot of its workers, and hurts consumers. Ralph said that after his famous battle with General Motors, he could have gotten fat, married a starlet and moved to Hollywood. Why couldn’t he have done that, and shut down Warner Brothers?

I wasn’t a Ralph Nader; I couldn’t push through legislation to regulate these corporations’ descent on Hollywood. I fought back by making a comedy called Ophelia Learns to Swim, which I pitched as, A girl debates whether to join the bankrupt environmental Superheroines Mother Nature and The Librarian, or the wealthy Supervillains Virginia Svelte and Cosmetic Chick who run an advertising agency that promotes carcinogenic products to young girls. Ophelia was the first screenplay of mine that no one in Hollywood would even read, let alone produce (I should have pitched it as Girls in tiny swimsuits!). I ended up financing the film myself. After its post-September 11 release, Ophelia’s small distributor was bought out by a bigger fish, who promptly dumped my corporate-bashing film into a storage bin.

At last, I understood why Ralph went after behemoth corporations: they are indeed where the root of all evil – the love of money – lies. The environment, schools, healthcare, the arts…everything decays when the desire to make more and more money – at any cost – runs rampant.

I finally met Ralph at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books on the UCLA campus on April 28th, 2002 at 3:38pm (not that I remember the exact details or anything). Ralph came to promote Crashing the Party, his book about the 2000 campaign. At the Barnes & Noble stage, he told how he was barred from watching the 2000 presidential debates in Boston, even though he had a ticket, and how a state trooper said if he didn’t leave, he would be arrested. Ralph was pretty funny: "People say our average life expectancy in the United States has gone up. I dispute that, if you deduct all the years we spend stuck in traffic. The big secret of democracy is when you work at it, it’s really gratifying. It’s not like eating three slices of chocolate cake and then you wonder why you did it! We feel we can’t do anything about [injustices], because we’ve been individuated into futility. We’ve been told in so many ways, ‘Forget it – you can’t fight City Hall!’ We grow up to believe, instead of to think. We grow up to obey, instead of to challenge. That is not the American way. That’s the corporate way!"

All of the questions at the Q&A were variations on, How do you feel about being a SPOILER? (spoiler a candidate whose chances of winning are slight but who may garner enough votes to prevent one of the leading candidates from winning) In 2000, Al Gore lost Florida by 537 votes…or so Katharine Harris, Florida’s secretary of state, claimed. In Florida, Ralph got 97,488 votes, and Democrats protest that if Ralph hadn’t run, more than 537 of those 97,488 votes would have gone to Gore. Very interesting. But what if just 538 of those 250,000 Democrats in Florida who voted for Bush had voted for Gore? What if Gore won his own state (Tennessee), which would have gotten him the electoral votes to win? What if Gore had chosen a Democratic vice president instead of Joe Lieberman? What if Gore had been distinguishable from Bush? But Gore wasn’t man enough to thump his own head and exclaim, NINE MILLION Democrats in America voted for Bush? Life-long Democrats jumped ship and voted for Nader? Gee, during my lustful quest for the Oval Office, I must have done something to make people not want to vote for me – not even in my home state…!

After the 2000 election, my soon-to-be-ex-friends blamed Ralph for stealing votes. They couldn’t attack Ralph on issues, so they ridiculed him. Why did the Democrats scapegoat Ralph? Why did the Democrats never say one word about the Reform, Libertarian, Natural Law, Workers World, Constitution, Socialist, or Socialist Workers parties – all of which got more than 537 votes in Florida? And why did the Democrats keep chanting, That !@#$%&*()! Nader elected Bush! and never anything logical like, Those !+¨)(*&%$#@! Republicans elected Bush! or Those !@#$%&*() Florida Democrats elected Bush!?

I waited until Ralph went to the table at Book Soup, one of LA’s few remaining independent bookstores, and I asked him to sign my copy of Crashing the Party (To Jürgen, For Justice. Ralph Nader). No one else was around, so I quietly asked him something I’d been dying to know since I was a kid. He gave his brilliant answer (so brilliant and useful a weapon, I’m afraid I cannot reveal it, dear reader, or I would have to kill you). I also asked Ralph, Why didn’t you get arrested at the debates in Boston? It would have been great publicity! He smiled and said, "I always prefer to be a plaintiff rather than a defendant." ² Ralph Nader: Smart, great listener, and 100% bullshit-free.

Yup, Ralph is one hell of a guy…too bad I can’t help him. I’m immigrating to New Zealand, a nice photogenic place where an independent filmmaker can be far from Hollywood yet still speak English. When I was living overseas ten years ago, I was embarrassed to admit I was an American. Ralph is highly respected around the world (other countries adopted the auto safety standards he helped implement). He could restore the US’s reputation. He wouldn’t be controlled by lobbyists, or a party. His only allegiance is to the People. He’d be like Kevin Kline and Charles Grodin in Dave, balancing the federal budget in forty-five minutes.

I can flee the country with a clear conscience. I’ve done my bit: I’ve always voted for the least-worst candidate. I don’t have time for politics. I’m an artist (my italics). I only have so many hours in the day to compete for directing gigs against the boys. I’ll throw an occasional artistic egg at the rats, but that’s it.

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Tuesday March 16 There has never been a feature film made about Ralph, the American hero who has saved millions of lives (most of our heroes are famous for killing lots of people). Next year is the 40th anniversary of the publication of Unsafe at Any Speed . I can’t believe no one has made a feature film about how Ralph wrote that book, exposed General Motors’ total lack of interest in auto safety, and used the money he won in an invasion of privacy suit against GM to start the modern consumer revolution. In Crashing the Party , Ralph said HBO was going to make a film about his battle with GM, but the film was scuttled in the wake of spoiler accusations.

The only way Ralph has a chance is if he gets in the debates and people start to remember his record. But Bush will never debate Ralph. In 1992, Ross Perot, a Texas billionaire, got in the debates and he shot up in the polls. And Perot was pretty nutty. If Ralph was heard, who knows how high he could go?

I’m not the only one thinking along these lines:

March 16, 2004 VoteNader Wesbsite Until There are Truly Open Debates, Create ‘Proxy’ Debates’ by Ralph Nader

"My nephew, Tarek Milleron, while thinking about this debate subject, came up with a sterling idea. Milleron proposes tens of thousands of proxy debates all over the country – in schools, universities, Elks Clubs, union halls, chambers of commerce, forums by the League of Women Voters, the Junior League Civic and neighborhood associations. People would volunteer to stand in for the Presidential candidates, under cross-questioning debate formats. Milleron’s proposal is very