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Are you a worker? Yes. Are you a consumer shopper? Yes. Are you a taxpayer? Yes. Voter? Well, sometimes. Are you a parent? Yes. Are you a veteran? Sometimes. Well, how can you say you’re a nobody? You know things about those roles. You’ve experienced them. You’ve been frustrated. If you lie to yourself to be a nobody, you’re going to be treated like a nobody. You’re going to be treated like someone who doesn’t count, someone who doesn’t matter, somebody who can be disrespected, someone who can be ripped off, somebody who could be underinsured, somebody who can be suppressed.

Ralph Nader, consumer advocate, corporate critic and former presidential candidate, asks these questions to demonstrate how Americans often sell themselves short regarding their power as citizens.

Nader, whose life-long mission has been to empower people to fight back against corrupt politicians and greedy corporate criminals, joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to continue to spread this message at a critical juncture in American politics.

With Donald Trump’s increasing fascistic repression and an impending government shutdown, Nader offers a roadmap for how both government officials and ordinary people can fight back.

His latest book, Citizen Self-Respect, serves as a call to action, arguing that Americans must not passively allow the Trump administration and corporate elites to consolidate their power.

Buy my new book “A Genocide Foretold"

Host

Chris Hedges

Producer:

Max Jones

Intro:

Diego Ramos

Crew:

Diego Ramos and Victor Castellanos

Transcript:

Diego Ramos

Transcript:

Chris Hedges

There is no functioning opposition party that can halt America’s rapid descent into an authoritarian state. The Democratic Party, which in the last presidential election saw the party hierarchy anoint a candidate who ran a vapid, issueless, celebrity-driven campaign, was soundly rejected by the voters for the grifter and demagogue Donald Trump.

The party, which is a minority in the House and the Senate, stands for nothing and fights for nothing. Indeed, it does not even function as a political party, with the concerns of its voting base routinely ignored. Democratic Party voters, sixty-two percent of whom say the party leadership should be replaced, seventy-five percent of whom oppose sending more military aid to Israel and sixty-six percent favor socialism, are little more than props trotted out as extras at the highly choreographed convention.

The sinking poll numbers — the Party has a twenty-four percent positive rating and a fifty-six percent negative rating — have done nothing to jolt the party back to reality. Hakeem Jeffries, the House Minority leader, and Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, each of whom are from New York state, have refused to endorse the party’s official candidate for mayor in New York, Zohran Mamdani, despite his energized grassroots campaign and high polling numbers.

It has ignored Bernie Sanders “Fighting Oligarchy” tour which drew large crowds across the country and did all it could to sabotage Sander’s campaign to be the party’s presidential nominee. The party continues to cravenly serve the interests of its corporate and oligarchic donors, including the Israel lobby, at the expense of its own viability.

It refuses to mount little more than a symbolic challenge as the Trump administration dismantles democratic institutions and eviscerates civil liberties. With government funding set to expire tomorrow, the party could deliver a significant blow to the Trump administration by orchestrating a partial government shutdown.

This tactic was rejected earlier this year by Schumer when he supported a continuing resolution, but the widespread outrage over the abject failure by the party to throw up roadblocks to Trump’s authoritarianism may finally see the Democrats reluctantly react.

Joining me to discuss the crisis in the American political system, what it means if the Democratic Party continues to capitulate and the Trump administration’s war on democratic norms and lawful dissent is consumer advocate and former presidential candidate Ralph Nader.

I want to begin, Ralph, by looking at the Democratic Party. I think you have long blamed the party for this rightward drift and even the election of Trump.

Ralph Nader

Chris, I have to bicker with you. Stop using the word authoritarianism to describe Trump’s fascist dictatorship, which meets every criteria of dictatorship, moving into a police state with only terror to look forward to.

He has violated every law that would obstruct him. He has defied judicial decisions. He has ignored congressional exclusive authority over spending and declaration of war and other authorities under the Constitution.

There’s almost no impeachable offense that he has not committed. We have drafted over 23 impeachable articles and we’re talking impeachment now and removal from office. That’s the only thing left under the Constitution that he has not ravaged and been able to control.

He has turned the Justice Department into a crooked, illegal persecutor of innocent people. He is self-enriching himself and his cohorts using the office of the White House. He lies seriously and violently, turning realities into fantasies.

He is basically laying the groundwork with tariffs and other policies that are going to increase prices to the American people, which has already started. Unemployment is increasing, people are having a hard time finding new jobs and they’re having a very hard time in terms of housing and other necessities of life to protect and nurture their families.

So you have but all the criteria — repression of free speech, cracking down on dissent, kidnapping people with masked ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] agents including people who have green cards and they stumbled over people who are actually American citizens, thrown into dungeon concentration camps. They’re called “detention centers” by liberals as well as right wingers.

The second thing in addition to dropping the word authoritarianism is to show that the Democrats, they don’t have a party per se. They contract out their campaigns, their fundraising, their strategies, their tactics, their choice of schedules and traveling to corporate conflicted consulting firms, which have been immune from investigation by the Washington Post, New York Times and Wall Street Journal for years.

And I have talked to all the reporters and I said, you’re missing a big story. This is the only party we have that can save the republic from the ravages of what JD Vance in 2016 before he turncoat called America’s Hitler, meaning he’s referring to Trump.

So having said this, it’s so easy for the Democrats to throw the Republicans on the defensive on issues that are supported by left/right voters but they don’t stand for anything because they’re not in charge of their campaign policies and programs.

They got all these greedy consulting firms that go back and forth between the Democratic apparatchiks and their own business. It’s a huge scandal that needs to be exposed. So if the Democrats made a big issue out of increasing the minimum wage to at least $15 federal from $7.25, that’s 25 million workers who would live better.

They can say, vote for a raise. You’ve long denied it. They can raise Social Security benefits frozen for over 45 years and pay for it by raising the Social Security tax on higher income individuals.

In 2022, 200 House Democrats voted for such a bill by John Larson, congressman from Connecticut, but Nancy Pelosi wouldn’t take it to the floor. That would help 65 million retired Americans.

You could restore this child tax credit, providing $300 a month to 61 million children from both liberal and conservative families. The Republicans are against all of these. So you cut the difference between the priorities sharply with huge polling.

If you went into the next issue, which is cracking down on corporate crooks that are stealing the hard-earned earnings and savings of all Americans, that comes in at 85% in the polls. What’s there to lose?

Campaign money from Wall Street to Chuck Schumer and to Hakeem Jeffries. And then the other big one is, which Kamala Harris raised but never really emphasized, it was a throwaway line, raise taxes on the hugely under-taxed, supe