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By Dan McKee
The Ukiah Daily Journal
Sunday, June 22, 1997
Consumer advocate and 1996 presidential candidate Ralph Nader told Mendocino
County residents if they were willing to devote as much time to community
action as they were to bowling, they could change the face of society and
defeat and "oligarchy" of multinational corporations dominating
American politics and endangering the environment.
Nader, a consumer advocate for more than 35 years, spoke Saturday at the
Real Goods SolFest.
While Nader told the audience it was "too early" to decide if he'll make another run for president in 2000, he did say he supported former Congressman Dan Hamburg's gubernatorial ambitions.
Hamburg, who supported Nader's presidential bid in 1996, was instrumental in luring Nader to the SolFest.
In his hour-long address, Nader praised solar power as a "people technology" as opposed to "global corporate energy technology," which" maximizes corporate power over energy sources, relies on complex technologies no one else can understand" and enables multinationals to exert tremendous political influence on government.
"Nuclear power was sold as giving us energy 'too cheap to meter, '" Nader said. "Instead it gave us the highest energy costs of all."
Nuclear plants across the country are shutting down, he said; they're no longer viable energy producers. And taxpayers have had to foot the bill, "both going in and coming out."
Government subsidies, Nader charged, have kept the nuclear power industry alive. "It's a technology that has not been allowed to fail, until it finally fell under its own weight."
Utility companies have been allowed to "blunder and plunder for years," Nader said.
Now, he said, it's time for "people-dominated technologies to replace corporate-dominated technologies.
"We have had decades to refine solar and biomass technologies," he said. Yet corporate-sponsored myths about the efficiency and effectiveness of solar power persist: solar energy is too costly, too unreliable, is not practical for urban area use.
The reason the myths persist, Nader argued, is because "solar energy can't be 'catelized;' it can't be monopolized by the energy conglomerates.
"Even Exxon can't order an eclipse."
Solar energy is a "decentralized form of energy that doesn't warm the planet, that doesn't deplete the ozone," he said. "It's a form of energy that's democratic to the core, that doesn't make people vulnerable to intimidation by the energy cartels."
As early as 1952, a commission appointed by then-President Harry S. Truman recommended the United States invest in developing solar energy rather than nuclear energy, Nader said.
That decision was reversed a few years later under Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and American taxpayers have been footing the bill ever since.
But today, Nader pointed out, "more energy is produced by burning wood than from nuclear power plants."
Nonetheless, America's energy giants continue to wage war against expanding solar technologies in an effort to maintain their dominate position in the marketplace, he said.
Nader had harsh words for both President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore for their lack of support for solar energy development.
Before reaching the White House, both Clinton and Gore "talked about (solar energy) and wrote about it. Then they went to Washington and forgot about it," Nader chided.
In 1980, he pointed out, the United States was the world leader in solar energy production. Today, many European countries, as well as Japan, spend more to develop solar energy resources than the U.S. That's a shame, Nader said, because "solar energy is going to be a major industry" as the world leaps into the 21st century.
Nader said he also favors the production of industrial hemp for the manufacture of textiles, lubricants and paper as an "existing, environmentally benign product."
"China, France and Rumania are going big into industrial hemp," he said. "We're importing clothing from France made from hemp."
Hemp production is being endorsed by diverse groups such as the International Paper Company, the American Farm Bureau and by a dozen state legislatures.
"These kind of issues are not new," Nader said. "They've been discussed for years. You could have heard the same things we're talking about today discussed 10, even 25 years ago."
Then why has there been so little change? For Nader, the answers lies in an old adage: "A democracy being disassembled by an oligarchy is a democracy that's going to solve fewer and fewer problems."
"Every society on earth has gotten into trouble when wealth becomes concentrated in the hands of the few,' he said. And in the U.S. today, "two percent of the population control more than 90 percent of the wealth."
The answer, Nader feels, is a more informed, more involved citizenry. Americans, he said, "spend less time pursuing major, progressive national goals (such as universal health care and campaign reform) than bowling or watching the Super Bowl."
If Americans were willing to make a "very modest commitment" in time, they could galvanize public opinion into the action needed to make democracy work, he said.
"The pursuit of justice is the pursuit of happiness," Nader said. "The social, economic and environmental solutions we need are on the wall now." But it will take "moral indignation, coupled with knowledge and daily citizenship" to make those solutions a reality, he said.
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