General Discussion

Ralph Nader Was Indispensable To The Republican Party

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During the 2004 election contest, a local AP story from Salem, Oregon, on June 25th, was similarly headlined "Pro-GOP Groups Seek to Aid Nader, Hurt Kerry," and reported, "Two conservative groups [the business-oriented Citizens for a Sound Economy, and the fundamentalist Christian Oregon Family Council] have been phoning people around Oregon this week, ... in hopes of putting Nader's name on Oregon's presidential ballot." Oregon was one of 18 tight "battleground" states in the 2004 Presidential election, and Republicans wanted Nader's name to be on the Presidential ballot in order to draw votes away from Democratic candidate John Kerry, and thus throw Oregon's electoral college votes to Bush, and so make Bush the winner, just as had crucially happened in 2000 in both Florida and New Hampshire. (Here is how Citizens for a Sound Economy explained it to their members accompanying their 27 June 2004 "Phone Script": "Liberals are trying to unite in Oregon and keep Nader off the ballot to help their chances of electing John Kerry. We could divide this base of support" between "the uber-liberal Nader and John Kerry," so as to produce a Republican win.)

The board of directors of one of these groups, the Koch brothers' Citizens for a Sound Economy, happened to have been headed by two longtime personal friends of George W. Bush: the former Republican House leader Dick Armey of Texas, and the former counselor to President G.H.W. Bush, C. Boyden Gray. It's virtually certain that these two men authorized this backroom campaigning for Ralph Nader's candidacy. Mr. Gray was an heir to the Reynolds Tobacco fortune. CSE was financed by the foundations of Richard Mellon Scaife, of the Coors family, as well as of the Koch families, and by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, and the J.M. Olin Foundation. Jane Mayer, on 30 August 2010, headlined in the New Yorker, "Covert Operations" (of the Koch brothers), and wrote: "'Ideas don't happen on their own,' Matt Kibbe, the president of FreedomWorks, a Tea Party advocacy group, told me. 'Throughout history, ideas need patrons.' The Koch brothers, after helping to create Cato and Mercatus, concluded that think tanks alone were not enough to effect change. They needed a mechanism to deliver those ideas to the street, and to attract the public's support. In 1984, David Koch and Richard Fink [whom she called 'the central nervous system of the Kochtopus'] created yet another organization, and Kibbe joined them. The group, Citizens for a Sound Economy, seemed like a grassroots movement, but ... was sponsored principally by the Kochs."

On 5 July 2004, BusinessWeek (p. 53) similarly headlined "Bush Bigs Open Their Wallets For Nader," and reported that among Nader's largest donors was Richard J. Egan, who was a Bush "Ranger," having raised more than $200,000 for his friend, George W. Bush. Egan, whom President Bush appointed Ambassador to Ireland, contributed the maximum allowed, $2,000, to Nader, and Egan's son also did. Unknown other Bush contributors, whom the senior Egan had previously "bundled" into that $200,000+ for Bush, also contributed to Nader. BusinessWeek reported that Richard J. Egan denied being the same person as the Richard J. Egan who contributed to Nader. However, the magazine reported that the Richard J. Egan, whom the records showed to have contributed to Nader, happened to live at the very same address, and that only one Richard J. Egan happened to live there.

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On July 9th, the San Francisco Chronicle headlined "GOP Doners Funding Nader: Bush Supporters Give Independent's Bid a Financial Lift," and reported that the Nader campaign "has received a recent windfall of contributions from deep-pocketed Republicans with a history of big contributions to the party," according to "an analysis of federal records." Perhaps these contributors were Ambassador Egan's other friends. Mr. Egan's wife was now listed among the Nader contributors. Another listed was "Nijad Fares, a Houston businessman, who donated $200,000 to the Bush inaugural committee and who donated $2,000 each to the Nader effort and the Bush campaign this year." Furthermore, Ari Berman reported 7 October 2004 at the Nation, under "Swift Boat Veterans for Nader," that some major right-wing funders of a Republican smear campaign against Senator John Kerry's Vietnam service contributed also $13,500 to the Nader campaign, and that "the Republican Party of Michigan gathered ninety percent of Nader's signatures in their state" (90%!) to place Nader on the ballot so Bush could win that swing state's 17 electoral votes. Clearly, the word had gone out to Bush's big contributors: Help Ralphie boy! In fact, on 15 September 2005, John DiStaso of the Manchester Union-Leader, reported that, "A year ago, as the Presidential general election campaign raged in battleground state New Hampshire, consumer advocate Ralph Nader found his way onto the ballot, with the help of veteran Republican strategist David Carney and the Carney-owned Norway Hill Associates consulting firm."

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On 2 August 2006, Paul Kiel at TPM Muckraker, headlined "GOP Donors Funded Entire PA Green Party Drive," and he reported: "OK, we've done it. We've nailed it down: Every single contributor to the Pennsylvania Green Party candidate is actually a conservative - except for the candidate himself. The Luzerne County Green Party raised $66,000 in the month of June in order to fund a voter signature drive. The Philly Inquirer reported yesterday that $40,000 came from supporters of [Republican] Rick Santorum's campaign. ... Also yesterday, we confirmed that another $15,000 came from GOP donors. ... Today, I confirmed that" the entire remaining $11,000 also did.

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-zuesse/ralph-nader-was-indispens_b_4235065.html

Ralph the Leninist

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This depraved indifference to Republican rule has made Nader’s old liberal friends even more furious. A bunch of intellectuals organized by Sean Wilentz and Todd Gitlin are circulating a much nastier open letter, denouncing Nader’s “wrecking-ball campaign–one that betrays the very liberal and progressive values it claims to uphold.” But really, the question shouldn’t be the one liberals seem to be asking about why Nader is doing what he’s doing. The question should be why anyone is surprised. For some time now, Nader has made it perfectly clear that his campaign isn’t about trying to pull the Democrats back to the left. Rather, his strategy is the Leninist one of “heightening the contradictions.” It’s not just that Nader is willing to take a chance of being personally responsible for electing Bush. It’s that he’s actively trying to elect Bush because he thinks that social conditions in American need to get worse before they can better.

Nader often makes this “the worse, the better” point on the stump in relation to Republicans and the environment. He says that Reagan-era Interior Secretary James Watt was useful because he was a “provocateur” for change, noting that Watt spurred a massive boost in the Sierra Club’s membership. More recently, Nader applied the same logic to Bush himself. Here’s the Los Angeles Times‘ account of a speech Nader gave at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., last week: “After lambasting Gore as part of a do-nothing Clinton administration, Nader said, ‘If it were a choice between a provocateur and an anesthetizer, I’d rather have a provocateur. It would mobilize us.’ “

Lest this remark be considered an aberration, Nader has said similar things before. “When (the Democrats) lose, they say it’s because they are not appealing to the Republican voters,” Nader told an audience in Madison, Wis., a few months ago, according to a story in The Nation. “We want them to say they lost because a progressive movement took away votes.” That might make it sound like Nader’s goal is to defeat Gore in order to shift the Democratic Party to the left. But in a more recent interview with David Moberg in the socialist paper In These Times, Nader made it clear that his real mission is to destroy and then replace the Democratic Party altogether. According to Moberg, Nader talked “about leading the Greens into a ‘death struggle’ with the Democratic Party to determine which will be the majority party.” Nader further and shockingly explained that he hopes in the future to run Green Party candidates around the country, including against such progressive Democrats as Sen. Paul Wellstone of Minnesota, Sen. Senator Russell Feingold of Wisconsin, and Rep. Henry Waxman of California. “I hate to use military analogies,” Nader said, “but this is war on the two parties.”

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http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/ballot_box/2000/10/ralph_the_leninist.html