Whatever you might think about Ralph Nader as a presidential candidate, you should acknowledge his enormous contributions to consumer rights and safety, ecology, and good government. He spawned a generation of organizers that became known as Nader’s Raiders. It all really got started fifty years ago when Nader published Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile, a scathing critique of the auto industry’s indifference to driver safety, pollution, and even pedestrians.
To commemorate the book and to celebrate all the work that has been since, Nader is holding a conference May 23rd-May 26th in Washington DC at the DAR Constitution Hall. Dubbed the Breaking Through Power conference, it will have a large roster of speakers, many of whom you probably know nothing about. You might know some of them, however. Phil Donahue will be there. So will Jim Hightower. Bush administration critics Lawrence Wilkerson and Paul Pillar will make appearances, and you’ll be able to see presentations by folks like Bruce Fein, Obama-critic Jonathan Turley, and the famous whistleblower John Kiriakou.
The conference is organized with a theme for each day. The first day is general, but Day Two is about the media, Day Three is about militarism, and Day Four is about Congress. If you’re interested, you’ll be able to see filmmaker Michael Moore on the media day, prominent Bernie supporter Rep. Raul Grijalva on the day dedicated to war, and Fein and Turley discuss the legislative process on the 26th.
Nader is characterizing the gathering as a “citizen mobilization.”
The theme of this citizen mobilization will be elaborating ways to break through power to secure long-overdue democratic solutions made possible by a new muscular civic nexus between local communities and Washington, D.C.
On these four days, speakers will present innovative ideas and strategies designed to take existing civic groups to higher levels of effectiveness. The participants will be asked to support the creation of several new organizations. One such group will work to open up the commercial media, which use the public airwaves free of charge, to serious content. Another will facilitate action by retired military, national security and diplomatic officials who want to deter unconstitutional and unlawful plunges into wars that lead to calamitous and costly blowbacks.
This “Civic Mobilization” will involve thousands of people at Constitution Hall and around the country and connect long-available knowledge to long-neglected action for the necessities and aspirations of people from all backgrounds. Many of the presentations will feature reforms and redirections for the common good enjoy Left/Right support.
Nader is obviously hoping to use the anniversary of Unsafe at Any Speed as a catalyst to organize for significant new pressure points, and he’s trying to muster as much progressive support as he can get.
If you’re going to be around and you’re interested, you can register here.
How many milliseconds will it take Ralph to announce that there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the Democrats and Republicans? That’s always a big applause line with his groupies.
yeah, but you know, it gets tiresome having knee-jerk reactions to everything.
Heh.
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The “Nader cost Gore the election!” screamers always remind me of the Republicans still foaming at the mouth about “Hanoi Jane” and Alger Hiss.
Excellent analogy.
It does have the virtue of being true. Unless one thinks all those voters would have otherwise chosen Bush.
Your “truth” is assuming all those Nader voters 1) would have actually voted and 2) if they did, Gore would have gained a net thousand votes from them.
The truth is GHWB won FL in ’92 even as Perot took over a million votes that year. The FL electorate was flat between 1992 and 1996 and expanded in 2000. Of those that went for Gore and GWB, they got approximately the same numbers.
As soon as I saw that the conference was called Breaking Through Power and that the i phrase break through power was italicized in the conference description, I guessed that this was marketing for a forthcoming Nader book.
I was right. Nader’s new book, Breaking Through Power, goes on sale August 16.
Yeah, well, a guy’s gotta eat. Even Ralph Nader.
Whatever one says about Ralph, and I’ve said my share, it would be good to have him back on the bright side again. We just have to remember (and probably remind him too, maybe often) that we’re on the same team.
I’d make an exception for him.
At this point he is too damaged to be of any use. He has gone down the narcissistic trail one too many times. Any cause he is involved with will spend more time dealing with fall-out from being associated with him than on its own message.
Writing books is a way to advocate for your position and it’s nothing new for Ralph Nader. He does have name recognition. BTW, I owned a Chevy Corvair. Someone rear-ended me at a fairly low speed and it was totaled.
Yes they were death traps, but sort of fun to ride in.
Coulda been worse. Coulda been a Pinto.
The Pinto was bad news. For me, the Chevy Vega takes the cake topper. I was traveling on a Sunday in late 1973, during the initial gas shortages. The engine overheated, so all I could do was stop at taverns along the way to obtain water. Of course, the head cracked. The Chevy Vega was a disaster for GM.
Did it have an oil leak? LOL
Public Citizen’s Worst Pills/ Best Pills was a godsend when trying to medicate geriatrics long before that specialty commonly existed in medical practice. I bless them for it.
it will have a large roster of speakers, many of whom you probably know nothing about. You’re might know some of them, however. Phil Donahue will be there. So will Jim Hightower. Bush administration critics Lawrence Wilkerson and Paul Pillar will make appearances, and you’ll be able to see presentations by folks like Bruce Fein, Obama-critic Jonathan Turley, and the famous whistleblower John Kiriakou.
All good people. Hope that most here are familiar with, if not all, then with most of the speakers. But seriously, another conference with leftie speakers (in a location that most don’t have the means to get there) on “Breaking Through Power” is quaint. In one year, one man demonstrated many times more “Breaking Though Power” than collectively has been done in the past few decades by prominent lefties.
No Bernie wasn’t able to take it all the way in one election cycle, but he has demonstrated a way forward. His astute supporters are now more fully informed of all the barriers, traps, and tricjs that the SQs use. His life informs of the steps a leftie politician must take to become credible. It begins with getting elected, doing a good job, and getting elected again to a higher office and doing a good job.
There’s a reason why Bernie has an 80% approval number among Vermont constituents. And that, despite all the trashing he’s been subjected to by his opponents and their shills and the MSM, did leak through to the national electorate and he’s the only one of the top four candidates that has a positive approval rating. That’s what needs to be replicate anywhere and everywhere it can possibly be done until the bench is full with those that have a similar passion for doing the right thing for the people. Then maybe we won’t see nominees that are loathed by the people.
Jonathan Turley is not “good people.”
and Laurence Tribe? He doesn’t go on the TV much though.
Bernie is like Elvis. No one can stop either of them from appearing time and time again.
Really? I find both of them relics.
I think that mold is broken. We are all Darwinians now.
If we want to learn from Bernie, a far better conference would be entitled as follows:
“How to elect progressives to city council and state representative”
I am sorry to be cynical, but having seen the entirety of Bernie’s political career I am kind of over the usual leftists having a conference full of ambitious ideas. To be fair I have to been to my share.
But it’s just fricken irrelevant. They are fun and the topics will be interesting. But they will change nothing.
We need more conferences on the HOW. How to win local offices. How to take over the state parties. How to build connections so we can support each other.
We spend too much time on “messaging” and not enough time on candidate recruitment and how to influence state and local parties.
I confess my depression has been by the NY Times piece on Clinton and her hawkishness. I think a reasonable case can be made Trump is less likely to become involved in stupid wars that Clinton will.
And in this moment I can see no realistic way to influence any of that.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/24/magazine/how-hillary-clinton-became-a-hawk.html?ref=topics&_r=
0
here’s some more, don’t know if it helps or not
http://www.vox.com/2016/4/27/11504272/hillary-clinton-hawk
Yea, I read that and saw Markos trying to get a piece written to soften it.
The New York Times piece is devastating.
Outside the DNC? As a (c)(4)?
Foot soldiers don’t need conferences. They just need to be pointed to where and funded. Plenty of talent within the mass of those interested in remaining engaged that they should be savvy enough to identify the those with the right stuff to succeed. Plenty of models exist of non-party people that defied expectations to win primaries and general elections.
http://youtu.be/ODu888i14-I
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Campbell Brown at Politico – Why I Blame TV for Trump
But will Campbell be able to eat lunch in town again? (Probably as long as she stays married to Dan Senor and remains on the board of Success Academy Charter Schools.)
How long until it becomes apparent this is just another Nader scheme to get attention and money for himself?
Not as taxing as going on a national book tour in an effort to become relevant again. After all, he’s not a spring chicken.
Snark? Channeling another member? Affected cynicism? I am left guessing here.
No, full on skepticism and dislike of anything to do with Nader.
I don’t know what happened to him that caused him to end up where he is, but the current Nader is all about himself, others be damned.
There are more than enough of those type of people in the political sphere already.
The ghost of J Edgar Hoover rides again. The Intecept – Letter Details FBI Plan for Secretive Anti-Radicalization Committees
Or a time warp.
Fuck that guy. Fuck him in the dick with a pickle fork.
Amazingly it’s never the conservative Republican Teabaggers fault for anything – even who they vote for or the policies they support.
If the Kardashian/Jenners were running a political party and leading the polls, I’d still blame the morans supporting them, not the teevee.
The explanation for Trump is simple – he knows his audience, he knows what they want, and he knows how to give it to them.
He’s the Howard Stern of politics. Not everybody’s taste but he has a large audience.
Nice to see that an 82-year-old can still peddle a book. Be nice to break the Social Security income cap so that some of those progressive profits can help folks who never had Nader’s advantages.
Looks like a pretty-much Washington insider conference. In other words, I don’t expect much new out of it and little effect on politics at all.
David Sirota at IBTimes – Federal Regulators Let General Electric Quash Shareholder Resolution On Hudson River Pollution
Not a quid pro quo, of course. Absent a briefcase stuffed with cash, a quid pro quo doesn’t exist.
SC Roberts was very understanding of ex-Gov McDonald. All those strange birds walking around like ducks and quacking must be long lost dodos, don’t ya know.