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AMERICA'S PAY OR DIE HEALTHCARE SYSTEM! Ralph Nader Lays It Out Why ONLY SINGLE-PAYER Will Solve Our Problems + World Food Production, Iraq War, Energy, Populism - RI10
AMERICA’S PAY OR
DIE HEALTHCARE
SYSTEM!
Ralph Nader
Lays It Out Why
ONLY
SINGLE-PAYER
Will Solve Our
Problems + World
Food Production,
Iraq War, Energy,
Populism - RI10
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/6/18/ralph_nader_on_barack_obama_it
June 18, 2008
Tabacco: Edited by Tabacco for focus because, like Lou Dobbs, Nader often dumps on the lesser of two evils and his own attempts to attain PERFECTION (a Ralph Nader presidency) often contribute to the greater of two evils getting the job. If anybody in America, who has presidential ambitions, is more of a loose cannon, more self-promoting and ultimately detrimental to the people he professes to support than Ralph Nader, I swear I don’t know who he is! No, not even Hillary Clinton can claim this crown – and we know her reason is greed! Nader actually believes his own propaganda. This is the most dangerous type of politician.
However, when he is not pontificating and self-promoting, he does make great logic and is not afraid to tell the Truth and lobby for extreme solutions when a compromise solution is insufficient.
Independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader discusses his independent run for the White House, the media blackout of third party candidates, and his stance on the Iraq war, the military-industrial complex, the global food crisis, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and more. [includes rush transcript]
RALPH NADER: We have a security speculation tax. $500 trillion in security derivatives are going to be traded this year. A tiny tax on those transactions would relieve the federal income tax up $100,000 on American workers. We have solar energy, instead of nuclear power. We have single-payer health insurance, which replaces the health insurance moguls and their enormous administrative and bureaucratic waste and their denial of doctor discretion and their “pay or die” policies in America, unlike all Western democracies.
So, you can see in many ways that we favor workers, and we favor consumers, and we favor small taxpayers, we favor the environment to the expense of corporate power. I mean, the issue here is centralized corporate power. And that’s why day after day, whether through demonstrations in front of toady government agencies and trade associations in Washington to campaigning with people and their controversies for justice all over the country, we have made our website, votenader.org, a very vivid, vivacious website for people who want to volunteer, who want to get engaged, who want to contribute money to our campaign. We take no commercial money or PACs, so we rely on individuals.
So, to sum it up, really, our campaign is to subordinate corporate power to the sovereignty of the people. Why is that a radical notion? Doesn’t the Constitution start with “We the people”?
[break]
We’re trying to propose dramatic innovations, like votepact.org is proposing, to get over this problem where disenchanted Democrats vote for the Democrats because they can’t abide the Republicans, and disenchanted Republicans vote for the Republicans because they can’t abide the Democrats. And what Vote Pact does is it gives people—for example, a disenchanted Republican and a disenchanted Democrat get together, and they say, “Let’s vote for the Nader-Gonzalez ticket.” And that way, a third party has a chance, because we all know that if we don’t break up the two-party elected dictatorship, the duopoly, with instant run-off voting or public financing or ballot access reform, or binding none of the above, all of these can only be done through legislation by the two-parties who don’t want to change the system. So we’ve got to take it into our own hands.
[break]
RALPH NADER: Well, I would stop subsidizing corn ethanol, for one, which takes away millions of acres from wheat and barley and other edibles, soy. Obama is for subsidizing corn ethanol. Actually, McCain was fairly critical of it. I don’t know what his latest position is.
Number two, we’ve got to straighten out our food export situation. We import far too much food from China, which is contaminated. We’ve got to have much more food grown close to markets. For example, Massachusetts used to grow 80 percent of its tomatoes in 1948. Now, it imports 80 percent of its tomatoes from California, Mexico. There’s no reason for that. There’s plenty of land for vegetable growing, fruit growing near the metropolitan markets.
And above all, we’ve got to have a foreign policy that makes us into a humanitarian superpower, that is, more agricultural cooperatives overseas, showing with our technology, appropriate technology, how to greatly increase crops and preservation of crops. 30 percent of food grown in the third world is lost due to rodents, fungus and insects. And we have a lot of knowledge on how to store food and preserve it so it isn’t lost and so people don’t starve and children don’t have distended bellies because of gross undernourishment. It’s an absolute crime against humanity.
[break]
RALPH NADER: Six-month corporate and military withdrawal from Iraq, during which we negotiate with the Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis for modest autonomy, which they worked out in the 1950s before the dictators took over. Under a unified Iraq, continue humanitarian aid, some peacekeepers from nearby Islamic countries, and UN-sponsored elections. That’s the way you knock the bottom out of the insurgency. That’s the way you get the authority figures, the tribal leaders and the religious leaders and others, who still have authority over millions of Iraqis, to get together, because the alternative is constant bloodshed and civil strife. So you give them a stake by using the only chip we have, which is to give back Iraq to the Iraqis, including their oil. Now that—otherwise, it’s constant, constant strife.
You saw that huge explosion in Iraq, in Baghdad, yesterday. The Pentagon doesn’t count Iraqi civilian tolls. They don’t even count officially US injuries unless they occur right in the middle of combat. So US injuries are triple what their official figure is. And all the press, including the liberal press and the indie press, still uses that figure of some 32,000 injured soldiers, when it’s triple that. I don’t understand why they follow that kind of Pentagon line. So that’s the way to deal with it.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: The Iraq war—your assessment of the Iraq war, from McCain’s comment, we’ll be there for a hundred years, Barack Obama not clear exactly how withdrawal would happen? And what would you do?
RALPH NADER: Six-month corporate and military withdrawal from Iraq, during which we negotiate with the Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis for modest autonomy, which they worked out in the 1950s before the dictators took over. Under a unified Iraq, continue humanitarian aid, some peacekeepers from nearby Islamic countries, and UN-sponsored elections. That’s the way you knock the bottom out of the insurgency. That’s the way you get the authority figures, the tribal leaders and the religious leaders and others, who still have authority over millions of Iraqis, to get together, because the alternative is constant bloodshed and civil strife. So you give them a stake by using the only chip we have, which is to give back Iraq to the Iraqis, including their oil. Now that—otherwise, it’s constant, constant strife.
You saw that huge explosion in Iraq, in Baghdad, yesterday. The Pentagon doesn’t count Iraqi civilian tolls. They don’t even count officially US injuries unless they occur right in the middle of combat. So US injuries are triple what their official figure is. And all the press, including the liberal press and the indie press, still uses that figure of some 32,000 injured soldiers, when it’s triple that. I don’t understand why they follow that kind of Pentagon line. So that’s the way to deal with it.
AMY GOODMAN: Ralph Nader, the issue of global warming?
RALPH NADER: Global warming, solar power. Solar power is the closest thing to a universal solvent that we have. Wind power, solar thermal, solar photovoltaic, passive solar architecture, other forms—biofuels that are not corn ethanol—that’s the way to go. We’ve got to have a national mission of converting our economy and be an example for the world in solar energy. It’s four billion years of supply, Amy. And it’s decentralized, it’s environmentally benign, it makes us energy independent, and it replaces the Exxon Mobil-Peabody Coal-uranium complex. That’s what we’ve got to go for economic, political, health and safety, environmental reasons.
AMY GOODMAN: The meteorologists talking “extreme weather,” those two words, but not “global warming”?
RALPH NADER: Yes. Well, you know, the connection will be made more and more between extreme weather that’s occurring all over the world, the increase in water vapor, the effect of that. It’s amazing how some people who doubt global warming, I guess like Rush Limbaugh, want to wait until the ocean has overcome our literal landscapes, and I don’t know what more evidence they’re going to require. We’re having a lot of material on our votenader.org coming up on that subject, as well.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, healthcare—the difference between you, Obama and McCain, and Obama and McCain, on healthcare?
RALPH NADER: As clear as could be. McCain and Obama have these cockamamie schemes that do not replace the health insurance companies. When Medicare came for the elderly in the mid-’60s, Medicare replaced the health insurance companies. We have a “pay or die” situation, which is disgraceful in this country. Whether for drugs or for healthcare, physicians have their hands tied, nurses have their hands tied.
As the California Nurses Association has so trumpeted, and so specifically, a single-payer system, which is full government insurance with free choice of doctor and hospital; with a reduction of these corporate bureaucratic costs, about $350 billion; with the replacement, because it’s only one single payer, of all these computerized billing frauds and abuses that are now about $220 billion—sources for all these figures—all that can be changed by single payer.
18,000 people, according to the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences, Amy, die every year in this country, because they cannot afford health insurance. Nobody dies in Canada, Belgium, Germany, France, Italy, the UK, because they can’t afford health insurance. This is a disgrace. And we must get rid of this inefficient, swollen, redundant, corrupt, “pay or die” so-called healthcare system and focus more on prevention and more on nutrition and more on exercise, but also more on letting doctors be doctors under quality control systems, not have their hands controlled by commercial clerks.
Tabacco: I edited out Nader’s political assessments, not because they are inaccurate, but because they are skewed against Obama, not McCain. Yes, Obama is the lesser of two evils, not the Messiah! But the public doesn’t think subjects through the way I do. If you expose the Lesser Evil’s faults, many will vote for the Greater Evil.
This is the same propaganda that Lou Dobbs spews forth. Lou Dobbs deliberately attempts to cull out Democratic voters for his “Independent Scam”. Nader is a natural Democrat and does not have to try to cull out those same Democrats. Because both have the same effect, if not the same intent, both must be highly edited and watched very carefully with a jaundiced eye.
Remember the best Liars tell the Truth frequently so you cannot automatically know when they are lying. That is Lou Dobbs’ Trick. The same carefulness must be applied to Ralph Nader, who like the woman in the Bible, who claimed the baby was hers, then agreed to cutting the babe in half and giving half to each woman who claimed parentage, Ralph Nader wants his share of the “Pie”, even if the rest of us must choke on the other half. Of the two, both are dangerous, but Ralph Nader is the most dangerous because few see through his sincerity to his self-centeredness, whereas Lou Dobbs’ duplicity is obvious to anybody who is paying attention.
Before you can eat those peanuts, you must first discard the shells!
Tabacco: I consider myself both a funnel and a filter. I funnel information, not readily available on the Mass Media, which is ignored and/or suppressed. I filter out the irrelevancies and trivialities to save both the time and effort of my Readers and bring consternation to the enemies of Truth & Fairness! When you read Tabacco, if you don’t learn something NEW, I’ve wasted your time.
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