.
Democracy Now!: Ralph Nader on the Candidates, Corporate Power and His Own Plans for 2008
AMY GOODMAN: The Independent unannounced: Ralph Nader.
RALPH NADER: Too early to say. It’s too early to say. If I was going to run — and I have not decided at all — the biggest problem is getting on the ballot. The Democrats filed twenty-one phony suits against us. We won most of them, but it was very draining. In Pennsylvania, they got a Democratic judge, using a Republican law firm, Reed Smith, to assess me and Peter Camejo $81,000 in transcription costs and handwriting expert fees for defending our right to be on the ballot, which they got us off through all kinds of shenanigans. First people in American legal history who had to pay court costs for defending their right to be on the ballot. So ballot access obstructions is the political bigotry of American politics. It’s very hard to get liberals who love civil rights and civil liberties and who are Democrats to be at all excited about the systemic obstruction of fifty state laws at one level or another that can be used by either Democrat or Republicans against third-party candidates.
And historically, Amy, that’s where all the great ideas came from. In the nineteenth century it was the anti-slavery party, the women’s suffrage party, the farmer party, all the things we read about briefly in our history books that pushed these social justice movements before one or both of the two parties picked up on them. So they’re — you know what I like to say? What would happen to nature if it prohibited seeds from sprouting? What would happen if big business could totally extinguish small business? That’s what the big two-party elected dictatorship is doing to a whole array of local, state and national candidates who would like to give the American people more voices and choices.
Filed under: 9-11, Action Alert!, election, elections, events, grassroots democracy, Green Party Websites, international politics, Labor, nature, New York State Politics, News, Our Favorite Radio Stations, personal, president, presidential race, progressive politics, Ralph Nader, reform, republican, third party, US Politics, video Tagged: | elephant, nature, Ralph Nader, republican, third parties, UFPJ, unreasonable man, vegetarien
Leave a Reply