Ralph Nader doesn't pull his punches. He's not impressed with the Mueller Report:
What a farce and distraction this whole exercise turned out to be! Mueller’s assigned subject was Trump. So, does this prosecutor demand to interview Trump, to subpoena Trump? No. Does this special investigator conclude with any legal recommendations at all? No. He just wants to be forgotten as he slinks away into deliberate silence (unless he is made to testify before the House Judiciary Committee).
The assignment to Mueller was doomed from the start. Its charge was far too narrow and proof in such matters is very difficult to find. Intent to collude requires direct examination of the President himself. But why would Trump have to collude at all? The Russians interfered in his favor in various ways to the detriment of Hillary Clinton and all he had to do was accept such foreign largess.
There is all kinds of evidence of Trump's malfeasance, Nader argues. And it's in plain sight:
Consider all the print, TV, and radio time the mass media used on the Mueller Russian probe compared to Trump’s cruelty and viciousness from his brazen “deregulation,” or open flouting of statutorily mandated government missions.
These policies have directly harmed innocent children, the elderly, patients, consumers, and workers and have wreaked environmental ruin, polluting the air, water, and soil with lethal toxins. He proudly took away protections leaving defenseless humans to suffer more deadly coal dust, coal ash, and coal pollution.
He has blocked our government’s responses to the climate crisis looming everywhere.
He has gotten away with massive federal deficits caused by his tax holidays for corporations and the rich, including the Trump family. Take that, next generation of Americans!
He backs for-profit colleges who have committed serial crimes against their impoverished students while heavily subsidizing these corporations with your tax dollars.
He is pushing to weaken or eliminate modest controls over imperial Wall Street, upsetting even Wall Streeters like Timothy Geithner, setting the stage for another Wall Street collapse on the economy, causing workers to lose their pensions and savings, before they, as taxpayers, are required to again bailout the Wall Street speculators and crooks.
He lies repeatedly about current realities, falsely brags about conditions he is actually worsening. He opposes any increase in the frozen federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour and does not adequately enforce fair labor standards. He has hired and personally profited from many undocumented workers while attacking their presence in the U.S.
He pays more attention to one golf ball than he does to the estimated $60 billion in annual wage theft or $350 billion a year in the health industry’s computerized billing fraud, or the gouging drug prices he falsely promised the people he would reduce.
Millions of Americans should be marching in the streets demanding Trump's resignation, Nader writes.
Don't count on it.
Image: Truthdig
8 comments:
Green, Reform or No-Name, among all the independent presidential candidates that have come forward over the past couple of decades, it was most important to the commission that this one be kept off the debating stage. Nader continues to remind us why.
You can argue quite credibly that Nader was the reason Al Gore did not become president, John. But you can also argue -- quite credibly -- that Nader is the fiercest foe of Neo-liberalism.
I've been mulling over the spread of chaos through so many nations, ours included. Are we witnessing something we haven't as yet recognized? Is there some sort of political and social tide change underway?
Governments no longer govern, not in the public interest. They get hung up on scandals and distractions, mired in quagmires of their own making. Public confidence in democratic governance appears to be waning. Xenophobes, racists, bigots of any and all sorts are on the rise.
Where is this going? How does it end? Has liberal democracy become a victim of neoliberalism?
Gore probably wouldn't have started the Iraq war but he didn't discover environmentalism until he lost his job shilling for the transnationals. He may be more serious now but I think he took it on as just another gig. Nader would have made then both look like fools and, win or lose, that might have nudged things back towards the road to sanity. The commission therefore had to protect the company's investment by keeping him off the stage.
Good question, Mound. One gets the sense that Yeats got in right: "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."
Ever since Nader wrote his book on the Corvair, John, the big guns have been trying to keep him off the stage.
Nader is correct, Owen. I've just come back from my annual 3 months in Arizona and only have access to American TV. It was really noticeable how many ads were being broadcast this year that were very similar to all those ads extolling folks to take the value out of their homes to buy all those things they ever wanted, and that people who had virtually no income could acquire a mortgage in (60 seconds or less) sort of sales pitch. You just knew this would come to a bad end -- and it did in the 2008 financial meltdown. Now that they have a president who is the chief grifter and cooker of financial books in charge, I can already see the same thing happening again and the poor working folks will bail out Wall Street.
It does appear that recent history will repeat itself, Lulymay. That doesn't say much for the people who are now in charge.
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