{news} Nader speaking for Green candidates-Zeese and Boyd

[Green Party-CT]

Ralph Nader Speaks in Baltimore: “Americans Need Moral Courage!”  -->  by William Hughes 


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Ralph Nader at the U. of Baltimore
“Self-government isn’t just a slogan," Nader railed. "People need to be in charge, but in order to do that, they need to show up!”
Baltimore, MD— -->On Saturday afternoon, June 10, 2006, Ralph Nader, a 3rd Party candidate for the presidency in 2004, spoke at a political rally held in a conference room at the University of Baltimore’s Langsdale Library. The primary purpose of the affair was to boost the candidacy of Kevin Zeese, who is running as an Independent candidate for the U.S. Senate in Maryland. In 2004, Zeese served as Nader’s press secretary.   Nader’s message emphasized that Americans need a good dose of “moral courage” to take on the corporate controllers of this country. A vast majority of the people, he said, need to get over “their own sense of helplessness and powerlessness.” He railed against the fact that power in this country is exercised “by the few” over the many. The reason for that, he explained, is that “self-government isn’t just a slogan. People need to be in charge, but in order to do that, they need to show up!”   
           
The longtime champion of citizens’ rights underscored how 46 million people in the U.S. don’t have any health insurance at all and claimed that “18,000 a year die because they can’t afford it.” He lamented the fact that we live in a society that says, “You either pay or you die.” He noted that 48 million people in the U.S. make “less than $11 an hour” and charged that, because the government manipulates statistics, in reality, “half of the population lives in poverty in the richest country in the world.”   Nader has led the way on so many different fronts, he’s hard to categorize. Trained in the law, he has for decades championed the consumer and the fragile environment against the perpetual excesses of Corporate America. His book, Unsafe at any Speed, propelled his name into the public’s consciousness. Despite setbacks, he wrote that the essence of a citizen’s movement “is persistence.” Born in Winsted, Connecticut in 1934 to Lebanese immigrant parents, Nader graduated
 magna cum laude from Princeton and with distinction from the Harvard School of Law. From Public Citizen to the Pension Rights Center, the many organizations he has helped to form and energize continue to be in the forefront of the struggle for social and economic justice.   
  Nader praised the singing group Dixie Chicks for having "more courage than 150 members of the U.S. Congress."
Nader praised the popular “Dixie Chicks,” a country music group, for standing up against those who had abused and boycotted them for criticizing the Bush administration. He said that they came back with an album that “stood tall and was one of defiance. They made no apologies. In their little hands, they had more courage than 150 members of the U.S. Congress.”   Nader asked: “Why do people vote against their own interests? The clear example of that, is the people who voted for George W. Bush.” He ripped into Bush for funding the Missile Defense Program (MDP) to the tune of $9.5 billion a year, while allowing AMTRAK “to crumble.” He labeled the MDP “a boondoggle that will never work. It is too easily decoyed.” Because of the huge deficits established by the present regime, Nader called Bush “a taxer of grandchildren,” since they are the ones who will have to pay the debts, assuming there is still an economy around to allow them to do so.   Nader concluded, “The big secret in
 a democracy is that the people have the power. If they would realize it, exercise it, organize it and focus it, with a fraction of the their free time.” If the people want a living wage, universal health care, their public works restored to a decent level, to stop the tax cuts for the rich, to have clean water to drink and clean air to breath, he said, “They need to get involved in the political process...get motivated.” If they don’t, he warned, they will get “more criminal wars, fabricated wars...bringing home our dead soldiers, sick soldiers, traumatized soldiers." In order to turn the present situation around, he said, “The people need to believe in themselves, believe that they have the power...and then to take action.”   Kevin Zeese, who recently won endorsements for his bid for the U.S. Senate from Maryland’s growing Green and Libertarian parties, also spoke at the event. He is strongly anti-Iraq War and pro-environment, and opposes any U.S. attack on Iran. He
 criticized one of his opponents, Rep. Ben Cardin (D-MD), for telling the electorate that he’s for peace in Iraq, while he’s “voting for the war” in the U.S. Congress. Cardin, he added, is also against any “exit strategy.” Zeese said the U.S.'s “lopsided” relationship with Israel means that “the U.S. taxpayer is complicit in what is going on there,” and that the Israeli-Palestine question “can’t be ignored any longer. It needs to be debated. It’s the root cause of our own security problems and the root cause of terrorism against the U.S.”   Also speaking at the spirited affair was the Green Party’s nominee for governor of Maryland, Ed Boyd, a U.S. Navy veteran. Boyd charged, “Marylanders are being ‘Enroned’ by the corporations.” One of the main problems confronting the state’s voters, he said, is that the local utility, Baltimore Gas & Electric (BGE), is planning to hike its rates a staggering 72% this July, a move he strongly opposes. He is demanding that the incumbent GOP
 governor, Robert Ehrlich and one of his Democratic challengers--Baltimore’s Mayor Martin O’Malley--return the substantial campaign contributions they have received from BGE’s parent company, Constellation Energy. Ehrlich, who also grabbed a $16,000 contribution in 2002 from the corrupt lobbyist Jack Abramoff, took in $54,000 from CE; while O’Malley, who poses as a foe of Big Business, reined in $45,000.   As part of the event, R.B. Jones, a Baltimore-based journalist and poet, read three of his anti-Iraq War poems. Musical entertainment at the rally was provided by Bilal Salaam, a lively jambe drummer and rapper.   
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    © William Hughes 2006. Hughes, a Baltimore attorney, is the author of Saying ‘No’ to the War Party (IUniverse, Inc.). He can be reached at liamhughes at comcast.net.   To see a video of R.B. Jones reading his anti-Iraqi war poems, visit here. 


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