What would Ralph Nader do with a $15-billion operating budget and a dedicated corps of sage billionaires onside to wage the good fight? In Nader's new book, “Only The Super-Rich Can Save Us!”, we find out.
The “practical utopia” – don't call it a novel – begins in a cozy den in Omaha, Neb., with the protagonist, Warren Buffett, watching the horrors of Hurricane Katrina unfold on his TV. Seething with indignity at the sight of bodies left bobbing and rotting in swollen waters, Buffett sends himself and a convoy of relief supplies to the Ninth Ward. Struck by the ineptitude of the people in power, Buffett resolves to fix his broken country.
“Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!” by Ralph Nader, Seven Stories, 733 pages, $29.95
To this end, he convenes a carefully chosen group of 16 other elder billionaires and mega-millionaires – including George Soros, Bill Gates Sr., Paul Newman, Ted Turner, Barry Diller, Bill Cosby and Yoko Ono – to a high mountain resort on Maui. Their mission: Save America from its corrupt plutocracy and restore liberty for all by the end of the year.
And so it goes: Wal-Mart is unionized by Sol Price, the founder of Price Club. The Clean Elections Party wins 17 per cent of Congress. A common agenda of legislation, guaranteeing health care and living wages for all, is passed, and a raft of citizen groups with self-financing mechanisms, including the People's Chamber of Commerce, are set up.
The funny thing is, this is not as crazy as it sounds. U.S. culture respects power and wealth. The richest 450 billionaires in the world control more wealth than the poorest three billion people, and the rich have the means to affect massive change for the better, if strategically directed.
As for will, no legacy-minded billionaire should look forward to replaying the pathetic dynamic of social-regressive soft philanthropy described by John Steinbeck, whereby the rich spend the first three-quarters of their lives ripping the entrails out of society, then spend the last quarter clumsily trying to put them back in. As Buffett puts it in Maui, “Why rely on the smug foundation world, which has brought forth so few innovations while spending trillions of dollars. Why bequeath to unimaginative people?”
Few Americans have experienced the same combination of high influence and all-out backlash as Nader
As someone who worked as press secretary to the author and was once asked to organize a major campaign address to a press conference of 500 dogs, I can attest that Ralph Nader certainly has an unencumbered sense of imagination that occasionally brushes up against the wacky. The book reflects this, with Sun God festivals that show the power of solar energy by cooking giant pots of tomato-and-eggplant stew, and a parrot named Patriotic Polly that pops up on TV enjoining Americans, “Get up. Don't let America down.”
While the title of this book seems to suggest the antithesis of the citizen power movements with which most people identify Nader, it is a powerful idea by the perfect person at a fortuitous time. Nader, who was at the vortex of almost all of the progressive legislation (from the Clean Air Act to the Freedom of Information Act and seatbelts) of the late 1960s and '70s, is – in the words of President Barack Obama (a former Nader Raider himself) – a “singular figure in American history.”
The Ralph Nader of the past few decades, however, has been swamped by the corporate backlash his reforms provoked, and after the Florida fiasco of the 2000 election, he received hundreds of death threats, including one by a media executive who said, “I want to kill Nader,” to which Hillary Clinton, at her 2000 election party, replied, “That's not a bad idea.”
