The Good Fight, by Ralph Nader – Review. For novices, 90 year old Nader is principally known for his legal work in the 1960s that resulted in seat belts becoming standard issue in all cars, something everyone now takes for granted. Published in 2004 as Nader ran for President a second time, the first being in 2000, this book was a personal declaration of independence from both major parties, which he asserted have become similarly corrupted by corporate money and power, in effect a Uniparty before that term became popular. In this well-organized, readable and impassioned plea, Nader called on the average American to reclaim a lost era when corporations were better controlled and less blatant in their power grab.
Nader has quite a series of axes to grind: he denounced the end of traditional anti-usury laws; the growing trend of forfeiture provisions in installment contracts; credit card universal default schemes; adhesion consumer contracts; unconscionable tort “deform”; the tangled mess of privatized healthcare in the U.S. that promotes the health of no one but insurance execs and undermines the very economy that produces corporate profits; and other anti-consumer, pro-big business legal measures and predatory business practices that are turning the poor and America’s middle class into “contract serfs” with little or no remedy in the courts.
There is much here worth championing; some states, Texas for instance where I live, have adopted the so-called English Rule which requires the loser in a civil court case to pay both sides’ lawyers, in effect cutting the public off from access to the courts since lawyers will now sue only if victory is guaranteed, a very rare thing in law, with the result that corporations have become untouchable and can swindle and cheat customers in Texas almost at will since the average citizen has no recourse.
In traditional Marxist fashion–trendy in the 1950s–Nader asserts that modern America reflects “corporate socialism” where the ruling class—an international network of mutually supporting, overpaid CEO’s, the wealthiest capitalist-owners, with those upper-echelon white-collar staff whom the corporations have invited to join the ranks of the privileged elite—enjoy the benefits of the very socialism and government favoritism that they indignantly deny the rest of the country.
The working poor, on the other hand, Nader observes, are subjected to the privatization of poverty in an ideology of bootstrap individualism, while society as a whole is left to pay the bill—literally—of their corporate pollution, health-destroying products, and war-mongering, oil-centered foreign business practices.
Straight out of the Progressive Era and New Deal, Nader’s views, though laudatory and largely discounted by today’s corporate mass media, are vulnerable at times to the same criticisms that are applied to other Progressives today. Blaming global poverty on the exactions of American multinational corporations, he presents no explanation for why this same global poverty existed centuries before NAFTA and the creation of the WTO. Blaming global poverty on corporations is like blaming the common cold on colonialism, or all wars on Jews. I am sorry to have to point out that poverty, illness, and war long predate the existence of all these alleged culprits, and that business corporations, on the contrary, have lifted half the world out of the very poverty that Nader claims still predominates.
In short, Nader’s views are outdated and stuck in the 1950s. For instance, blaming 9/11 on “blowback” from the global policies of American oil companies in propping up oil dictatorships and perpetuating poverty overseas, he offers no explanation for the fact that the perpetrators of 9/11 were middle-class citizens of the most comprehensive welfare state on the planet: Saudi Arabia, which offers free education and free health-care to all, and is flush with petrodollars, as were the bank accounts of the perpetrators themselves. And he says not a word about blowback from US support for Israel, something which clearly has foreign and domestic policy in knots today, simply because, when it comes down to it, he favors Democrats and their billionaire Jewish donors over Republicans.
He shows this bias again by blaming the Bush administration for using 9/11 to erode constitutional civil rights that the New Deal and traditional Democrats supposedly defended. But the Patriot Act only completed an erosion of the U.S. Constitution that began with the American Civil War and was greatly accelerated by FDR’s New Deal, most clearly in his packing of the Supreme Court in the 1937 “switch in time that saved nine.” We in fact have lived in a Constitution-free society since 1937 but no one in power is brave enough to admit that fact, including Nader. Republicans can hardly be blamed for the Warren Court and Brennan and their extra-constitutional excesses. (For my analysis of the Democrat-driven collapse of the US Constitution click here.)
As for deficit spending, the Democrats have a far worse record than the Republicans, and if anyone still has any doubt they can look at Biden’s frantic spending like a drunken sailor–a few trillion here, a few trillion there, and before you know it it amounts to real money! No Republican administration ever dreamed of rocketing up the debt like Biden has done in his efforts to buy his reelection.
Lastly, Nader’s view of discrimination of women as a class is even more outdated and doctrinaire and ignores the modern co-opting of women by the corporate class and their recruitment into the ranks of corporate privilege while changing the overall balance of money, privilege, and power not one whit.
In the end, like other JFK boomer liberals, Nader cannot seem to escape the intellectual milieu of the 1950s and 1960s, and, again like most libs today, he still wallows in that time period unaware that virtually everything has changed, that minorities are not victimized but are now victimizers, that once marginalized groups are now vastly over-privileged, that women, far from second-class citizens are today the only group with full citizenship and constitute virtually the entire government and educational establishment.
Finally, he completely fails to realize that the most significant problem facing the US today is the marginalization and disfranchisement of white males coupled with illegal erasure of the nation’s borders by an insane usurper in the White House, resulting in swarms of illegal immigrants who are collapsing the living standards of everyone who doesn’t have a stock portfolio. Nader has NO answers for these issues which are existential and far more important than the scarecrow of corporate greed which he spent his life tilting at like Don Quixote, even if he did score a few successes, like his 1965 book Unsafe at Any Speed, which triggered mandatory seat belts, and his later lobbying efforts, which resulted in making air bags mandatory in all cars.
History and global politics aside, however, this book is an articulate and rare challenge to the globalist modern corporate class and its political arm, the Uniparty, with its preference for the thin, the beautiful, the young, the healthy, the unmarried, and the childless over the rest of America that has been left to drown in a system of privatized poverty and drug addiction, justified by a fig-leaf libertarian regime of “personal responsibility.” A must-read for those who would like to see society made more humane and respectful of those who are not and can never be atomized and corporatized economic units. With the Republicans deaf to reform (as usual), and the Democrats trying to erect a global military empire with themselves in charge of the whole world, maybe third parties will become legal again, as Nader fervently hoped, and restore economic sanity and law and order to the US.
