Hedges bets on Nader?

"But when Nader hinted in San Francisco that he might run if Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton became the Democratic Party nominee, I knew I would be working for his campaign if he indeed entered the race." -- Chris Hedges.

Ralph Nader isn't the answer. Ralph Nader is a relic from the last political era in Washington where meaningful regulatory reform was possible -- Nixon+Gerald Ford. Those days are long gone. You can't have DC-based corporate reform anymore. Forget it.

If you were curious about the discrepancy between 80% of Americans hating corporations and Ralph Nader's >1%-2.7% showing in presidential races, you might conclude that there was something that most Americans didn't like about the way Nader said he was going to solve the problem, which was more or less that he would pull on the levers in Washington and regulate our way out of the corporate state. You'd expect Nader to at least consider it, but I don't think he has.

What Nader doesn't get is that while corporate power is high on our hate lists, so is the idea that anything good is going to come out of Washington.It's important to remember, and I'm sure most readers do, that Nader wasn't always a presidential candidate -- he was a public advocate who rode a wave of citizen write-in letters into Washington in the '70s and was responsible for the creation of regulatory bodies like the EPA, the establishment of stringent auto-manufacturing safety rules, and the like. It was a very impressive career, if centralized government made safe by regulation is your kind of thing. But Nader found himself eventually squeaked out of the process. I've written a bit on Nader's political approach before,

Ever wonder why, after a Babe Ruth-like career as an advocate, Nader decided to run for political office? Because DC stopped working the way he understood it to. Increasingly his lobbying, his ideas, his staff weren't relevant. Not only was he quoted less and invited to fewer hearings, but his quotes mattered less and the same went for hearing testimony -- even as the call-ins and write-ins kept piling in. Fast forward the years of irrelevance, and we come to his great act of desperation: running for the presidency. Unfortunately his political vocabulary and mind were too entrenched in tinkering reform language. And so were his followers.

And so Nader didn't see the bigger problem -- that our political system is totally obsolete and unaccountable: hundreds of years obsolete, unaccountable for decades.

Let's take Nader and his political solutions to the present era. His grand acheivement, the EPA, has been turned right around on its head. Bush and the business state have come right in, pillaged and looted the thing to work in their favor. So it's a "captive" agency, captive to the entities it's supposed to regulate. And since the EPA has federal control of environmental regulation, at the expense of state and local governments, it's a tool that corporations are using to prevent local efforts from happening.

If I had helped spawn a regulatory disaster like this I'd do at least three things:

1. Fess up to everyone who would listen that environmental regulation or any regulation through centralized government is a dangerous thing because it leaves it open to takeover by hostile interests -- you only need one takeover.

2. Fess up that further attempts to save society using the techniques I had used to create the EPA were perhaps the wrong way to go.

3. Fess up that there's something odd about the enormous discrepancy between the public appetite for corporate reform and the public appetite for my sales pitch to deal with it.

Then I might stand up and say to my band of followers, "Hey, let's not do it like this. My political imagination is sharply limited by my experience from decades ago. I don't know what we should do, but let's certainly not approach politics like I have because it obviously does not work. ..."