Page 7
News
Street Roots • Oct. 14-20, 2016
NADER, from page 5
the next step to highlight and give visibility
to citizen groups that are actually trying to
change things all over the country, and with
great ideas. No! They’re into their next
exposé and denunciation, which are
important, but if you don’t go to the next
step of action, and give visibility to people
who are doing things, you produce
widespread cynicism and withdrawal from
the political and electoral arena.
Because people just say, “Look at these
terrible situations. Who can do anything
about it? It’s so terrible.” They never read
about people who are trying to do
something about it You have “60 Minutes”
exposés, New York Times exposés, and
when people try to do something about it,
they don’t cover them; they go on to their
next application for a Pulitzer Prize.
Do you want a comment on the indie
press’s ignoring of eight days of “Breaking
Through Power”? That’s the scandal here:
There are a lot of press conferences that
they should show up for, and they don’t
show up.
E.G.: Why do you think that is?
R.N.: I think they’re lazy. I think they like
to mimic the headlines of the day, and give
their take on it, and that, of course, brings
them completely away from things that are
going on that the mass media is ignoring.
Basically they’re being led by the nose by
what the mass media turns into headlines,
so if there are a lot of police shootings, they
spend a lot of time on that, and if 700
people a day die from mishaps in hospitals
and induced infection, negligence,
malpractice, it’s not in the headlines.
That figure comes from Johns Hopkins
University in March 2016 - 700 a day, a day,
preventable deaths, just in hospitals. Do you
listen to Democracy Now!?
E.G. Yes.
R.N.: Well she’s (Amy Goodman) having a
hard time resisting that. She has to follow
the headlines, and give a progressive take
on it Well that’s fine, but if that’s all you do,
you are not lifting up budding new initiatives
and studies and reports and lawsuits that
are not in that mass media headline!
E.G.: You mentioned hospital malpractice.
What other areas would you like to see more
coverage of?
R.N.: The totally inadequate budgets to
enforce the law against corporate crime. No
law and order for corporate crime, not
enough federal cops on the corporate crime
beat.
E.G.: How do you think that would be best
addressed?
R.N.: Again, that’s where the Congress
watchdog comes in. They’ve got to counter
the obvious starving of the FDA, EPA,
OSHA and other budgets, upgrade the
severity of fines, strengthen the laws.
That’s a major thing - that destroys far
more people than street crime. OSHA:
60,000 workplace-related deaths. EPA:
65,000 from air pollution dead a year. Johns
Hopkins: 250,000 people in hospitals,
preventable deaths - we’re not even talking
about the injuries and sicknesses.
And 14,000 street homicides - see the
comparisons?
The issue is preventability. They don’t
The little measure that could
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STAFF WRI ri H
n Nov. 8, voters in Multnomah County
will decide on a ballot measure that
could make it possible to reel in
n naway political campaign funding
nationwide.
While Measure 26-181 is written as a
county charter amendment specific to
Multnomah County races, it contains
provisions capping independent expenditures,
which is prohibited under the U.S. Supreme
Court Citizens United decision of 2010.
■ Thar tilling held that political spending is a
fcim of free speech. It allowed for
corporations and unions to begin spending
unlimited sums of money on political
H
campaign promotions and attack ads. and it
contained loopholes making it difficult to
know where dark money flowing into political
action committees is coming from.
These unlimited independent expenditures
are dollars spent to sway voters one way or
another, without any money going directly to
a campaign and. therefore, avoiding limits on
campaign contributions.
P Attorney Dan Meek, who assisted in
drafting the measure, explained it was written
with the intent of being challenged.
3 And he expects it will be challenged, both
in federal court for the. limits it places on
independent expendiLineb $5.000 from an
■ulividual and $10.000 Horn a political
committee and in state court for setting
limits on direct campaign contributions in
Multnomah County to no more than $500
from any individual or political committee.
■ Direct campaign contribution limits are not
allowed under Oregon’s Constitution, thanks
to a 1997 Oregon Supreme Court decision.
WanNatta v. Keisling. in which the court ruled
Shest limits are a violation of free speech.
■ Fred VanNatta. ol the Center to Protect
Free Speech, is expected to bring challenges
to the county'’s measure, should it pass, as he
See BALLOT MEASURE, page 8
talk about that You can’t get them to write
anything about the Pentagon budget,
unaudited.
If you want a list, go to my website,
votenader.org (under “Issues” tab), which I
kept open since 2008 at some expense, so
you can see the issues we were espousing,
many of which have majoritarian support,
that were taken off the table completely by
the Democratic and Republican parties -
not even discussible.
E.G.: Are there any people who have
jumped out at you, that might be some of the
next progressive leaders in our country?
R.N.: Well, you wouldn’t know their
names, would you?
E.G.: Probably not,
R.N.: So why should I tell you? And I
don’t know 1 percent of them. There are
budding leaders who aren’t allowed to turn
into flowers. They don’t get on the evening
TV news anymore, which is a caricature of
itself. Therefore, they don’t command an
audience. They can’t have a news
conference and anybody come, because
they’re not known.
The censorship of any prospect of civic
celebrities - local, state and national - is
very little discussed.
If I said to you, name me the leading
women’s rights and civil rights and
environmental rights leaders, if you’ve been
around for 40 years or so, you’d name
people who are in their 70s and 80s,
because they got on TV, they got on “The
Phil Donahue Show” - that’s 10 million
people. They got on “The Mike Douglas
Show,” Merv Griffin; they would get on the
nightly news, the network news - well
nobody gets on there anymore. All those
programs are gone, and they’re replaced
with total junk, masochism, sadism, who did
this to who - that’s the way they’re using
our common properly, our public airwaves.
They’re not going deep enough.
E.G.: You mention the need for an audit of
the Pentagon’s budget. Can you elaborate on
why this audit is so important?
R.N.: Yeah, because in the first 10
months of the Iraq War, the Pentagon
admitted they couldn’t locate $9 billion
worth of money. Because years before that,
the Air Force bought billions of dollars of
supplies that they had in warehouses
around the world, in countries that they
didn’t know about.
An audit requires more proficient
expenditure, or they have to explain why. It
reduces cost overruns and corruption within
See NADER, page 8