RALPH NADER: Well, first of all, the corporations are very involved in the war machine. Remember President Eisenhower’s statement about the military-industrial complex. He might have called it today the industrial-military complex, because the industrial part is now a supreme influence on the US military budget, which now is half of the entire federal government’s operating budget, and as well as effecting foreign policy. Even Mr. Koppel has written that oil is very much involved in the invasion of Iraq. In fact, he went to say it’s mostly about oil in an op-ed in the New York Times—Ted Koppel. So the domination, the corporate sovereignty over our political economy is very much related to our foreign, military and economic policy, including GATT and NAFTA, which are architectures of corporate supremacy over civil values and the rights of workers, environment and consumers.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you recap from this conference of three days—people coming at corporations, dealing with them in many different ways—what you think are the biggest problems and the most effective strategies for dealing with them?

RALPH NADER: Well, the biggest problem is that the avenues to challenge corporate power, to restrain it, to break it up in its present concentrated form, to take it away from the political arena, because corporations are artificial entities. They’re not real human beings. They don’t vote. They don’t die in Iraq. They don’t have children. They are entities that are dominating our politics, our electoral systems, our universities, increasingly, dominate almost everything, even moving into areas that were once prohibited by custom in our country, like commercializing childhood.

And so, this conference really challenges the corporations at every interface that affects people—taxpayers, consumers, workers, communities, children, healthcare, living wage, the varieties of opportunities that people should have that are being denied. We are in the advanced stages of being a corporate state, where—as Franklin Delano Roosevelt warned Congress in 1938 that when government is controlled by private economic power, he called that fascism. And he would consider today’s control by private economic power—namely, giant corporations astride the world—as an even more advanced form of what he called fascism: control of government by corporate interests.

AMY GOODMAN: Would you call it fascism?

RALPH NADER: Yeah. The clinical definition is what he was saying. It was obviously colored in a different context in World War II, but the clinical definition of “fascism” is when private concentrated economic power takes government away from the people, turns government into a guarantor, a subsidizer, a covering of corporate power. And corporations now have their executives in high government positions. They have 35,000 full-time lobbies here, like the drug companies getting all kinds of subsidies from Congress. And they have 10,000 political action committees.

Now, if you look at the civic side, there’s very little of that, although as this conference showed, they’ve achieved an enormous amount, given their small numbers. I think, basically, if you could quantify corporate power and civic power in Washington, D.C., civic power is probably 1% of corporate power. And, yeah, look what it has achieved. And I think the hope coming out of this conference is not only that we have a lot of solutions that we don’t apply in our country, because concentration of power in the hands of the few allows the few to decide for the many, but we have a large amount of unused democratic power, unused civic power, that can be unleashed, organized, to take back our government, if people stopped believing that they were powerless, which they are inbred in ever since we entered elementary school. You know the old phrase, “You can’t fight City Hall.”

But if we want a society where people have the opportunity to fulfill life’s possibilities, doesn’t that tell you what the priorities are, which is focusing on subordinating the corporate entity to the sovereignty of the American people, as implied in the Constitution, so that they are our servants, not our masters, so that they have to compete against other models of economic development, like cooperatives, like replacing the HMO insurance companies with full Medicare, like decentralized solar replacing more and more of Exxon and Peabody Coal and the nuclear industry, like a redefinition of efficiency in productivity as if people mattered, not as if corporations dominate? They actually define our economic terms, and if we defined “efficiency” as if people mattered, we would have a massive energy efficiency program, which would, of course, reduce the sales of Exxon and Peabody Coal and Commonwealth Edison and all the rest, because we would be using less electricity and less gasoline, because we would democratize technology.
Instead, we have what Andrew Kimbrell called, at the conference, these giant corporations are dictatorships. And they have enormous power without anywhere near the commensurate responsibility. They are highly autocratic dictatorships that prevent constitutional rights from being with workers when they go to the workplace. They lose their constitutional rights when they enter that corporate domain.

And because of all this, it is interesting that our political leaders don’t like to discuss it. I mean, every politician in this town knows who runs this town. They know who runs the Defense Department, the Department of Interior, Department of Agriculture, Food and Drug Administration. And there are only a tiny handful of politicians who will raise the banner of subordinating corporate power to the sovereignty of the American people. The debates are sterile. The debates are exercises in parallel news conferences repeating ad infinitum the same words and phrases of evasion. They will not confront the corporate crime wave. They will not confront the destruction of our democracy. They will not confront the usurpation of our electoral processes, even though they can go back to Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and others, who have condemned corporate power as a perilous threat to even a modest democratic society.

AMY GOODMAN: So if corporations are dictatorships, you have a choice of regulating a dictatorship or getting rid of it.

RALPH NADER: Well, you’ve got to do all these things. For example, you have to strengthen the traditional tools that have curbed corporate crime, fraud, violence, outrages, bigotry. And these are regulation, adequate opportunity for litigation. These are anti-trust, which has been caricatured, but it is a powerful tool if it’s adequately applied. You have to give the owners, the mutual fund people, the pension shareholders, more power. They are the owners of the corporation, but they have no power. Just imagine the violation of capitalist principles. These guys at the top, who are paying themselves $10,000-$12,000 an hour in compensation, the CEOs, basically have repudiated the cardinal principle of capitalism, which is if you own property, you should control it. And now they have said to their owners, “Get lost! Don’t dare tell us what we’re going to pay ourselves. After all, we’re only your hired hands.” And so, that’s a very important front or initiative.
We have to ask ourselves, why not more cooperatives. With the internet, you can develop cooperative purchasing and develop specifications for the kind of cars or the kind of insurance policies people should be able to buy. We need stronger trade unions. We need trade unions unlike SEIU. We need trade unions like the California Nurses Association, who see themselves as a powerful countervailing force.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain that difference.

RALPH NADER: SEIU is the inheritor of the tradition of company unionism, basically.

AMY GOODMAN: The Service Employees International Union.

RALPH NADER: Yeah, the Service Employees, Andrew Stern. I mean, basically he spends more—sometimes you think he spends more time with corporate executives than he does with workers. He’s constantly trying to collaborate with corporate executives in ways that weaken the morale, undermine the rights and horizons of workers. And most prominently, the way he signs these full-page ads with the US Chamber of Commerce and all the other corporate lobbies, saying Americans should have universal healthcare. Yeah, more universal healthcare gouging, more universal healthcare exploitation, not full Medicare for all.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about labor unions today, how they can regain their momentum and power at one of their lowest points in history.

RALPH NADER: One is they’ve got to mount an assault on the WTO and NAFTA. WTO and NAFTA are basically an albatross around the neck of workers, of consumers and of clean environments, to begin with. They are an end run around our courts and regulatory agencies. We couldn’t have gotten airbags under WTO, because that would have been considered a unilateral move under this global trade agreement and a non-tariff trade barrier. It would have been considered too high a standard imposed on importing cars, even though it’s the same standard on domestically produced cars. What WTO does, it prevents us from being first in the world. It pulls down our standards so our workers have to compete with brutalized child labor in third world countries. It makes this impossible to prohibit the importation of products from child labor—that’s a violation of the WTO—even though you can’t buy a product here in the US made from child labor in the US. It is the greatest loss of sovereignty—local, state and national—in American history. And it’s an autocratic system with secret courts and secret equivalency procedures. I mean, it’s just a total contradiction in subversion of our democratic society. So that’s the first thing that has to be done, to invoke the six-month notice of withdraw and renegotiate pull-up trade agreements, where we pull up the rest of the world and our standards, instead of pull-down trade agreements that subordinate health and safety to trade agreements. That’s the first time that’s ever been done. Trade usually stuck to trade, trade agreements. Now, they’ve become very imperialist, and they subordinate health and safety, consumer, environmental, and worker rights.

The second that has to be done is something no Democratic politician will ever utter, except maybe for Dennis Kucinich. Not one Democratic politician will say, “We should repeal the notorious anti-worker Taft-Hartley law of 1947.”

AMY GOODMAN: Explain what it is.

RALPH NADER: Which basically obstructs the organization of unions, which transfers control of union pension funds to management. With all these trillions of dollars, imagine the power that workers could have. They would own a third of the New York Stock Exchange. They would be able to put real muscle in investor ownership. And it prevents workers from helping one another, called secondary boycotts, among many other notorious provisions.