Alternative ideas to the status quo

Wednesday Amy Goodman (Democracy Now!) conducted an interview with third party candidate for president, Ralph Nader. He talked about his platform and also about Obama and his beliefs.

Read the whole interview here.

Check some excerpts here:

On some of the ideas he is pushing:

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.

On Senator Obama's statements on Israel:

AMY GOODMAN: Ralph Nader, on his first day as the Democrats’ presumptive nominee, Barack Obama traveled to Washington to address AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. This is some of what he had to say.

SEN. BARACK OBAMA: Let me be clear. Israel’s security is sacrosanct. It is non-negotiable. The Palestinians need a state—the Palestinians need a state that is contiguous and cohesive and that allows them to prosper, but any agreement with the Palestinian people must preserve Israel’s identity as a Jewish state, with secure, recognized, defensible borders. And Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.

AMY GOODMAN: Obama later appeared to backtrack on his comments about the future status of Jerusalem as capital in a follow-up interview on CNN. He said it would be up to the Israelis and Palestinians to negotiate. Ralph Nader?

RALPH NADER: Well, I think Barack Obama is in training to become panderer-in-chief. That was really a disgraceful speech. It didn’t further the peace process, the two-state solution favored by a majority of Jewish Americans, Arab Americans, a majority of Israeli and Palestinian people. He basically sided with the militaristic approach to occupying, repressing, colonizing, destroying the Palestinian people in the West Bank and Gaza. He hasn’t even spoken out against the international crime of the blockade of Gaza, one-and-a-half million people, from medicine or drinking water, fuel, electricity, food—lots of silent fatalities in Gaza because of that.

Barack Obama really now has to be examined very carefully. He has worn out the word “change.” We now want to know what change is involved. And it’s quite clear that he is a corporate candidate from A to Z.

On Iran:

Iran has not invaded anybody in 250 years. Yet it’s obviously frightened. It’s surrounded by the US military west, south, east. It’s been labeled “Axis of Evil” by Bush, who invaded Iraq after he labeled them “Axis of Evil.” We have Special Forces, according to Sy Hersh, that go in and out of Iran. What are they going to do? They talk very belligerently nationally, but they’re really scared. I mean, we supported Saddam Hussein, logistically and with materiel, in invading Iran, which took a half a million Iranian lives. They remember the shooting down of their civilian airliner years ago...

...The point is that we are exaggerating that threat instead of using diplomacy, number one. Number two, Iran does not have nuclear weapons; they’re nowhere near nuclear weapons, according to intelligence estimates. Number three, Israel has 250 nuclear weapons. Does Iran really want to commit suicide? And number four, two major national security experts in Israel have been reported as saying Iran is not a problem. So why are we beating the drums, and why is Obama falling for this kind of trap?

On Iraq and his plans for withdrawal:

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.

Wow. And Nader and McKinney are steadily ignored by the media, and the populace in general, as viable presidential candidates.