Thomas Wilberding's List: Nader

• His main characters include figures such as Warren Buffett, George Soros, Ted  Turner, Yoko Ono and Phil Donahue.
• the oil industry, the insurance industry, arms manufacturers, the corporate  media and Wall Street.
• Popular democracy triumphs. There is an ascendancy of independent third parties.  An independent press challenges the status quo. There is universal  not-for-profit health care for all Americans. Vibrant labor unions defend the  working class. Flourishing public schools educate the rich and poor alike, and  pot is legal.

• The fantasy of the rich going to the rescue of ordinary Americans is born out  of Nader’s deep despair over the decline of our democratic mass movements. It  will take angels—and this is what the super-rich become in the book—to descend  from the heights to save the country from corporate neofeudalism.
• “I think something’s happened—50 years of looking at screens,”
• When you’re in virtual reality—it’s not like they’re watching a re-creation of  the Federalist discussion—then something happens. They don’t know what a town  meeting is like. They don’t know what the words civic engagement mean.”
• “The corporations have weakened the labor movement. The two parties, under the  influence of corporate power, are converging. These corporations game the  electoral process. Money and politics is cleverly distributed. They have  deregulated the regulatory state. They are beginning to block the courtroom  door. All the countervailing forces, which were built up in the late 19th  century and the early 20th century to curb corporate power, are powerless.”
• Madison and others did not want anybody but Congress to deliberate and take our  country to war.
• We have accepted, as a people, that the president can go anywhere in the world,  with any troops, at any time, under any pretext. Period.”
• Half of democracy’s showing up. There is demoralization. How do these super-rich  people turn the motivation to action? How do they turn a demoralized, powerless  population to action? You start with imagination.

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