RALPH NADER: Hillary Rodham Clinton is a corporatist. She’s on the Senate Armed Services Committee, didn’t lift a finger against major corrupt, unnecessary weapons system contracting or even weapons system. Hey, there are people all over the Defense Department who think we should scrap the F-22, the Raptor, which is now over $250 billion program. The plane has gone from about $40 million to almost $200 million. You could put two or three of them in this room. And she’s never taken on any of the corruption, the fraud, even though she complains that there’s not enough money for children’s programs. Well, she’s on the Senate Armed Services Committee. She’s signaling that she is going to play ball with the military-industrial complex.

She has never taken a stand on corporate subsidies, handouts, giveaways, bailouts. You know, stadiums in New York subsidized by taxpayers, while so much in New York City is crumbling for lack of repair.

And finally, she doesn’t even do what Spitzer did. Her fellow Democrat gave her cover by prosecuting Wall Street crooks, rode all the way to the governorship in a landslide election based on his prosecuting corporate crooks. People like prosecuting corporate crooks. And she won’t even sponsor tough corporate crime legislation and tougher penalties, law and order for corporate crooks, in the US Congress.

So, to be kind to her, one can summarize as saying, she is severely lacking in political fortitude. She knows she’s the frontrunner, and therefore she’s going around the country pandering to powerful interest groups and flattering the people. Now, maybe they’ll get tired of it after a while. Maybe they’ll say enough is enough. Do we want eight more years of the Clintons? And, you know, you get a “twofer.”

AMY GOODMAN: What does that mean, “eight more years of the Clintons”? How would you summarize the Clinton-Gore years?

RALPH NADER: The Clinton-Gore years were—they further allowed and even encouraged, with this reinventing governments movement, the further consolidation of corporate power, agency by agency, department by department. Eight years went by, and there wasn’t a single chemical control standard issued by OSHA initiated by the Clinton administration. 58,000 American workers died from worker-related disease. You’d think they’d at least issue one. And there’s a big backlog of them. There’s been a lot of scientific work done. They didn’t do it. They didn’t issue one fuel efficiency standard. Where was Gore? Gore knew about this. He called the internal combustion engine, in his first book that came out in 1992, a major threat to the planet. But when he was vice president, he was either muzzled or went along with Clinton, who right from the beginning signaled to the auto companies: you’ve got a four-year pass; in fact, we’re going to spend a billion dollars subsidizing a joint program, which was a complete waste of money, to develop some sort of improved engine efficiency—a partnership between the White House and the three auto companies. So the Clinton-Gore years were the final evidence that the Democratic Party is now a wholly owned subsidiary of giant corporations, with a few luminous exceptions, like George Miller, Dennis Kucinich, some of the older Democrats, Ed Markey. But even Ed Markey has lost some of his vigor in the telecommunications area.

Washington, D.C. is corporate occupied territory. The Democrat and Republican candidates are fighting against one another to see who’s going to go into the White House and start taking orders from their corporate paymasters. When are we going to understand that either the people are going to control our government or we’re going to cede control increasingly to global corporations that have no allegiance to America, no allegiance to communities, other than to control them or abandon them as they see fit to communist China, with the industries, or elsewhere?

AMY GOODMAN: You mentioned Al Gore. He’s seen as the major voice now on the environment. I don’t know if it’s exactly on taking on the corporations, but he was in power for eight years. So what is your assessment of a Gore candidate for president?

RALPH NADER: Gore has been environmentally reborn. He is experiencing a important redemption. He is doing something very important. He is now basically a full-time citizen alerting the world to the peril of global warming and getting some pretty muscular forces behind them, behind his efforts. Maybe he’ll be restrained in terms of what needs to be done, in terms of the democratization of technology and the expansion of solar energy. I stood in line waiting for, you know, the book signing, when he came here in Washington. There were 300 people at a bookstore, and I just stood in line and finally got up to his desk, and he was very cordial. Anybody who thinks that the Greens cost Gore the election should ask Gore. He not only won the election, he knows how it was stolen from him. He knows he made some very serious failures himself, including not winning his own state of Tennessee, which would have put him in the White House. But he was very cordial, and I said to him, “Al,”—because I’ve known him since years ago—I said, “Al, how does it feel to be liberated?” He said, “Very good.” And that’s really the description of his present state. It’s quite the testimony. When he had real power, he couldn’t deploy it.

AMY GOODMAN: If he were to become president, what makes you think he would remain reborn?

RALPH NADER: He wouldn’t. See, the only politicians who are liberated once they’re elected are those who come out of mass movements, so that they know who they’re accountable for. And we have an electoral system where everybody tosses their hat in the ring and then goes around trying to raise money and expects people to be spectators on their campaign voyages through their cities and states instead of participants. I mean, that’s what they do. They don’t campaign with the people, with the citizen groups, with these struggles at the local level against pig farms or blowing off mountaintops for the coal industry or South Central LA and the poverty, and so on. They parade in front of the people. And that’s no way to win elected office and expect to represent the people.