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The deadline for the Congressional Supercommittee to outline cuts in the Federal budget is today and an announcement is expected at any time that the 12-member bi-partisan group has failed to come to consensus. This means that $1.2 trillion dollars of automatic cuts to Medicare, the military, and other programs will be triggered as per the debt ceiling bill that was enacted and passed in late summer. But some Republicans are scrambling to prevent cuts to the Pentagon, leaving only domestic social safety net programs on the chopping block. Democrats say they won’t let that happen. Meanwhile, popular sentiment against skyrocketing income inequality, as manifested in the Occupy Wall Street movement continues to rise. On Sunday, Zuccotti Park in New York, where overnight camping is now prohibited, saw a gathering of immigrant Spanish speaking women who declared solidarity with the Occupy movement. Elders from the civil rights movement also addressed occupy protesters at a local church. And, a drum circle protest was carried out in front of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s private mansion. Most notably over the weekend, Occupy protesters and students at UC Davis, protesting fee hikes, were pepper sprayed in the face by police while they were sitting down with linked arms. A video of the incident has gone viral and resulted in the UC Davis police chief being placed on leave. And, Occupy Los Angeles and Occupy Oakland have planned to shut down all ports on the West Coast on December 12th.

We turn next to a man who has been a stalwart defender of the 99% for decades. Ralph Nader, is a long-time consumer advocate, presidential candidate, and author. His 1965 book Unsafe at Any Speed led to vast improvements in automobile safety. His latest book is called Getting Steamed to Overcome Corporatism: Build it Together to Win. The book is a compilation of corporate misdeeds throughout the year 2009, with pointed commentary by Nader. In his introduction Nader writes, “The aggregation of these [corporate] outrages … can spark your conscience and stiffen your resolve to speak out with other Americans or support much greater reforms and law enforcement against corporate crimes.”

GUEST: Ralph Nader, author of Getting Steamed to Overcome Corporatism: Build it Together to Win

Find out more at www.nader.org.

Read his latest article about the Occupy movement here: http://www.registercitizen.com/articles/2011/11/21/opinion/doc4ec9e0cd2549f262686881.txt

Rough Transcript:

Kolhatkar: In your book you say you’re conducting a sort of experiment that’s based on generating a sort of moral indignation, informed indignation, among the public who reads your books that when they read enough stories of corporate misbehavior it could generate or spark action. What do you mean by informed indignation?

Nader: Corporate abuse is everywhere and it’s reported everywhere but you hear about it one at a time and it’s hard to recall. So what I did in this book is take about 200 cases of corporate abuses in health insurance rackets and financial and product defects and corruption of government and tax havens and all the kinds of mainstream reporting in the Wall Street Journal, The New York times, Washington Post and also from the Corporate Crime Reporter and other smaller publications and I summarized them with my commentary, so that you have most of them in one page. And so here’s the experiment, in the Introduction I say to people, get ready for this experiment and I ask them a question: When you read about an injustice by a corporation against a patient, a consumer, a worker, a taxpayer, a community do you, like most people, recoil with dismay or disgust and then return to your workday world? Do you react that way because you don’t have the power to do anything about it. All right just take a few hours and go through this small book reading one outrage after another and then at the end read the aftermath. In the aftermath it basically says, ‘Are you ready for action?’ Well here you are with fresh memories of what you just read —- pretty rotten abuses eh? But we’ve got the power to stop these big corporations from running this country into the ground.

Kolhatkar: And you essentially cite examples of corporate malfeasance from one year alone.

Nader: Yes just one year, 2009, just to show that we are not picking the worst one from a 20 year span. It’s chronic, it’s continual, these corporations are recidivists. Even in the rare instances where they are caught and prosecuted they keep doing it just like Wall Street now is still messing around with these risky derivatives using other people’s money. So the important thing is how people react. Now I say, ‘Okay if you’re steamed (and I use the word steamed because in the physical world steam powers turbines that produce electricity which in turn produces light) and so I say getting steamed to overcome corporatism. That’s what the big problem is in this country, is keeping solutions on the shelf from energy to health care to community economics to clean government. So I say, ‘Okay if you’re steamed enough here’s the offer’. A lot of people don’t want to pledge time and money to a national movement to subordinate corporate power to the sovereignty of the people unless they know others are going to do it. So on page 187 I have four little squares and I say, okay will you pledge at least 100 volunteer hours to raise and contribute a hundred dollars for coordinated fundamental corporate reforms and self initiatory power for people to protect themselves? You might want to check the box when you are directly informed that 999 Americans have signed the same pledge or you might want to check the box when you’re directly informed to your satisfaction that 9,999 other Americans signed the same pledge or if you want to wait further till 999,999 and then the final one is 9,999,000 in other words we’re looking for one million Americans to put funds on the line to put their time in a coordinated type of drive on Congress and other institutions to solve this problem constitutionally. Corporations are not persons, they are not human beings they must be subordinated to the sovereignty of the people in all kinds of ways.

Kolhatkar: Well let’s give our listeners a taste of some of these instances of corporate crime perhaps even aggregating a few of them in a short interview. This might get them a taste for getting steamed. In your book you have so many examples one of which is the pharmaceutical industry’s selling of drugs that are known to be dangerous or are just not tested very well with the collusion of the government among them things like hormone replacement therapy but even the more recent drugs. How is this allowed to happen? How can the pharmaceutical industry keep manufacturing drugs that have endangered Americans and even caused death?

Nader: Well first of all they fund the Food and Drug Administration’s budget to monitor them and they fund members of congress to make sure the FDA doesn’t have the resources sufficient to crack down, that’s one. The second is that these drug companies always keep one step ahead of the federal cops on the corporate beat so they will sell a drug for an approved use but on the side they will push for off label approval to market it which is a crime. They’ve been caught a couple times and had to pay 6, 7 hundred million dollars. And then there are other drugs that are actually inadequately tested after they sell them. They get clinical reports saying, hey you’re not preventing heart attacks with this drug you are creating heart attacks wit this drug. Just the opposite.

Kolhatkar: And in your comment on this story you say there are about 100,000 Americans who die every year from adverse reactions to approved prescription drugs. Just an amazing number. A lower number is from Americans who die every year because they don’t have health insurance. The whole health reform debacle that resulted in the very weak bill that President Obama passed and the fight over that is some indication of how health insurance companies have a hold on the economy.

Nader: 100,000 people lose their lives because of adverse effects of drugs in this country. That’s 2000 a week. Just consider that’s close to 300 a day. And in ten days that’s equivalent to the massacre on 9/11. And there’s so much price gouging by these tax subsidized and research transmitted drug companies. I mean they get a lot of their research and clinical studies free from the National Institute of Health like Taxol a major anti-cancer drug was developed with 31 million tax payer dollars by the National Cancer Institute and given free to Bristol Myers Squibb. Bristol Myers then turns around, and in a letter I got 10 years ago from a 50 year old woman they were charging her 14,000 dollars for six treatments for ovarian cancer and of course they pay Uncle Sam no royalties form these drug profits. So you see it does get people pretty angry. It not only gives them material to talk it up in their community to anybody who wants to doubt the presence of corporate abuses but it also gets them fire in their belly. It’s not enough to know what’s wrong. The people must really do things like the occupy people like Rosa Parks refusing to go to the rear of the bus in 1955 and segregated Montgomery Alabama, like the sit down strikers in the 1930s who formed the UAW, they have fire in their belly and that’s why this book is called getting steamed to overcome corporatism.

Kolhatkar: Another issue that affects so many Americans financially is over draft fees from banks which you also document in your book . Amazing that banks and credit unions collect tens of billions of dollars in overdraft fees and you say that the cost of a bounced check to the bank is actually just $1.50 and that includes the cost of fraud losses. So many American overdraft because they have overdraft fees and they rack up debt because they have one overdraft fee after another.

Nader: Or if they inadvertently bounce five checks the bank doesn’t cash it in the sequence that reduces the number of thirty dollar charges for each. They do it so it maximizes the number.

Kolhatkar: So they deposit the biggest check first.

Nader: And, by the way, who agreed to this? You see all these fine print contracts are a form of contract peonage, contract serfdom. We sign these form contracts and they are all rigged against us. They block us from going to court with arbitration. They have words that say the seller, the bank, the insurance company, can change the contract at any time unilaterally. That isn’t a contract but the courts enforce that kind of contract servitude. Underneath a lot of these abuses are these fine print contracts. We’ve got a major project to challenge this massive corporate contract peonage and servitude of hundreds of millions of people around the world. The website for that is www.fearcontracts.org if you want to know more about it.

Kolhatkar: One other issue before we go into the aftermath of your book is a simple demand of a transaction tax, which given the economic state we’re in could solve so many of the government’s deficit problems and this has been called the robin hood tax or Tobin Tax by the Occupy movement and this is just a tiny tiny tax on speculation but of course, Wall Street has blocked this tax and Congress has upheld that blocking but it would be such a simple thing to enact.

Nader: But the movement is growing. As you say there’s signs in the Occupy protest around the country: tax Wall Street, tax Wall Street gamblers, tax Wall Street speculators. You know people go into stores and this is the other thing that gets people upset, you know you go into a store and you buy necessities of life, furniture, clothing so on, you pay 6 to 8 percent sales tax but while you’re in those stores someone is buying a hundred million dollars worth of Exxon derivatives on Wall Street. They don’t pay a penny sales tax. We had a sales tax on stock transactions as far away as the Civil War and then World War II and up to 1981 when it was abolished. But now of course, the volume is staggeringly higher and so a tiny tax of less than one percent will raise over three hundred and fifty billion dollars. That’s with a ‘b’. So if we want to tax things, first let’s tax the things we like the least or dislike the most like speculation, like a carbon tax on pollution, and the book has very outrage generating summaries of corporate abuses.

Kolhatkar: Well the title of your book is “Getting Steamed To Overcome Corporatism” and you presumably you started working on this book more than two months ago since the Occupy movement has taken hold. Are you seeing the country getting steamed?

Nader: Yes in fact it’s quite a coincidence. It’s sort of like the Occupy movement’s little paperback. I was working on it last year and it came out at just the right time. We’re sending it around. I was just down speaking to the Occupy people at Freedom Plaza and Washington DC and we gave them some books for their little library there and we’re going to send some around the country.

Kolhatkar: Well the recent news this year that the five dollar a month charge that Bank of America was getting ready to charge customers for debit cards. The fact that they have stepped away from that charge would be the kind of thing you would have documented in your book had it happened in 2009. It seems as if it was a small victory. Is that an indication of Americans getting steamed?

Nader: It is. And it’s an indication that Americans are not only losing their fear which they respond to with apathy, by showing up in these squares and marches but they are beginning to realize that they really have the power. I mean the power of the people once organized is massively greater than these corporations. They will run for cover, they’ll beg for mercy once people get organized, once they take back their congress once they take back their regulatory agencies, once they move their money from the big banks to the small community banks and credit unions once they start supporting these community economies like local energy and local community clinics and local farmer’s markets and local credit unions. I mean it’s immense once they realize that they are going to want more and more and more instead of just saying, oh me oh my these corporations, these global corporations are just too powerful. Victims throughout history have limited their own power by convincing themselves that they are powerless.

Kolhatkar: Well Ralph Nader in the aftermath of your book you clarify or discuss what you call corporate law and order which is a very great phrase because it’s so clear through your book that we essentially have a lawless country when it comes to corporations and the rights of corporations. You outline 9 very specific things like abolishing corporate personhood, which perhaps could be nine of many many demands that the Occupy movement could make and I know there’s been some reluctance to embrace demands but certainly do you think that these could be a small part of a broader agenda?

Nader: Exactly. They are not detailed so they are not going to start talking about how much the speculation tax should be . . . .03 percent or .01 percent or .3 percent. They are at a specific level but they are generally phrased like larger law enforcement budgets for smarter crackdowns on corporate crime and broader facilities for workers, consumers and tax payers to band together to become powerful in their own right. New labor laws like getting rid of Taft Hartley Law which restricts the rights of workers to unionize. More power for investor share holders. Let’s face it, people have mutual funds but they don’t have any power over these companies to say send us back these dividends you are sitting on two trillion dollars outside the banking industry. Two trillion dollars they are using for stock buy backs or bonuses, but hey that’s our money we want it back in dividend checks so we can buy necessities of life. So that’s what these are. They are on page 185, 190 your whole idea here is to make something very accurate very readable very compressable and very conversational.

Kolhatkar: Ralph Nader you cite in the foreward of your book how you in the 1950s got steamed after so many people you knew perished in auto accidents which led you to be a pioneer of auto safety and pushing auto safety laws thru Congress. So do you feel that sort of informed this experiment that you are hoping to conduct thru this book?

Nader: Very much so. When I was in high school and college I lost friends in car crashes and there were serious injuries. It was much more frequent then when cars were more dangerous. And I began looking into it in law school and wrote a paper that became Unsafe At Any Speed the book in 1965 which led to the motor vehicle and highway safety laws which saved over a million lives, tens of millions of injuries prevented or diminished so I had that steam in my interviews for the book I interviewed people who knew huge amounts of auto technical and safety systems that could be replaced. They had a lot in their heads these engineers and human specialists and scientists but they didn’t have fire in their belly. It is this combination of cognitive knowledge and fire in your belly which psychologists have now dressed up with the words emotional intelligence they call it. That is really what gets people to break their routine, band together and create movement and change the country and the world. We have so many problems we don’t deserve and so many solutions on the shelf we don’t apply. Just look at energy, housing, public transit look at better ways to heal people instead of unnecessary operations and dousing them with pharmaceuticals that back fire. Different kinds of food systems, clean elections. But you can’t do it if people don’t spend two to three percent of their discretionary time on their civic duties.

Kolhatkar: Are you optimistic about the Occupy movement because a small section of American society says that they represent the 99 percent are not just spending their discretionary time but all of their time at these encampments and they are really trying to point out this economic injustice.

Nader: I think this is a historic movement. I don’t think its going to go away. It’s being dispersed by a lot of police action from places like Oakland to New York but that just disperses them into the neighborhood and strengthens them and increases their numbers. Repression increases the level of resistance. And they are very smart. As long as they stay non-violent open civil disobedience, as their numbers grow they will exhaust police resources just like in Albany where police refused to come in because they don’t have the resources for this and these people aren’t bothering anybody. The police rejected the order of the mayor and governor in Albany New York a while back. I think this is very important and I’ve been writing about it. And if your listeners would like to get my weekly column free just visit www.nader.org you will get the latest copy on the article about the Occupy movement. Nader.org you sign up and you automatically get my weekly column I think the Occupy movement is breaking new ground it’s much more fundamental and very smart. It’s not just a Saturday afternoon big march in Washington or Los Angeles or elsewhere it’s showing up and staying. And the pool of young people who are unemployed will simply be a huge reservoir of recruitment by the ones who are already standing up for justice.

Kolhatkar: We’ll certainly link to you site. Thank you for joining us today.

Special thanks to Bipasha Shom for transcribing this interview.