The Rats Revolt
By Chris Hedges
The cover art of Ralph Nader's new book is by Truthdig contributor Mr. Fish.
There is no American who has fought with more tenacity, courage and
integrity to expose the crimes of corporate power and to thwart the
corporate coup détat that has destroyed our democracy than Ralph Nader. Not
one. There is little he has not tried in that effort. He has written
investigative exposés on the unsafe practices of the auto industry;
published best-sellers such as Who Runs Congress?; founded citizen action
and consumer groups; testified before countless congressional committees;
written a raft of environmental and worker safety bills that were passed in
Congress under the now defunct liberal wing of the Democratic Party; and,
when he was locked out of the legislative process by corporate Democrats,
been a candidate for president. He even helped organize the first Earth Day.
His latest assault is a fable called How the Rats Re-Formed the Congress.
(And though at times the prose can be a bit stilted and the scatological
jokes on par with the humor of the average 10-year-oldthe rats crawl up out
of the toilet bowls as congressional leaders are taking a dumpNader is
deadly serious about the revolt the rats engender.)
The key in Naders story to the citizens retaking control of Congress and
the government is sustained mass nationwide demonstrations and rallies.
These demonstrations, like all protests that are effective, are organized by
full-time staff and steadily build in numbers and momentum. The
demonstrations are funded by three enlightened billionaires. I dont share
Naders faithalso expressed in his other foray into fiction, Only the
Super-Rich Can Save Usin a renegade wing of the oligarchy funding the
overthrow of the corporate state, but he is right that successful movements
need to be sustained, grow in size and power, have dedicated organizers and
amass significant cash and resources so they do not disintegrate.
Nader writes in his new book:
Protests rise and fall in the ether for the most part. They generally dont
ripple out from the core group of concerned people who originate them.
Experts on crowds attribute this to little planning, minuscule budgets, poor
leadership, and the lack of focus which induces protest fatigue among the
core before they make an impact. The core never convincingly answers the
questions, Just How Far Do the Majority of Our Fellow Citizens Want To Go
and How Do They Expect to Get There?
Another explanation for the lackluster showing of protest movements in this
country is that American politicians, over the past twenty-five years, have
learned to quietly dismiss big rallies, demonstrations, and even temporary
occupations, because they have gone nowhere. The lawmakers never consider
them when making decisions. Remember, too, that in Washington, giant
rallies, such as those against the Iraq War, for the environment or for a
jobs program were traditionally held on weekends when neither the members of
Congress nor the journalists were around. These crowds are lucky to get a
picture in the Sunday newspapers. The lack of publicity curtails any impact
they might have had. The smaller gatherings, even those by Veterans for
Peace, get zeroed out completely, rating at best a paragraph squib deep in
the paper.
The demonstrations for the restoration of our democracy take place in cities
around the country. They also see enraged citizens pour into Washington,
D.C., to surround and occupy the Capitol and the headquarters of other
government agencies and institutions to demand a return to democratic rule.
The ruling elites become afraid.
Indeed, it is only when the elites become afraid of us that there will be
any hope of destroying corporate power. Politics, as Nader understands, is a
game of fear.
As Nader points out, elected officials have surrendered their constitutional
power to do the bidding of corporations in return for corporate money. It is
a system of legalized bribery. The consent of the governed has become a
joke. Politicians in the two ruling parties are the agents of corporate
exploitation and oppression, the enemies of democracy. They no longer hold
public hearings at the committee level. They govern largely in secret. They
pass bills, most written by corporate lobbyists, and appoint judges to
protect corporations from lawsuits by those these corporations have wronged,
injured or defrauded. They deny our standing in the courts. They divert
money from the countrys crumbling infrastructure and social services to
sustain a war machine that consumes half of all discretionary spending. They
run up massive deficits to give tax cuts to the ruling oligarchs and
orchestrate the largest transference of wealth upward in American history.
They suppress the minimum wage, break unions and legalize the debt peonage
that corporations use to exact punishing tribute from the citizenry,
including from young men and women forced to take on $1.5 trillion in debt
to get a college education. They revoke laws, controls and regulations that
curb the worst abuses of Wall Street. They abolish our most cherished civil
liberties, including the right to privacy and due process. Their public
proceedings, as was evidenced in the one held for new Supreme Court Justice
Brett Kavanaugh, are shameless political theater that mocks the democratic
process.
Congress itself is a clear and present danger to our country, Nader
writes. It feasts on raw global corporate power and is oblivious to various
fateful degradations of life on the planet. He calls Congress a
concentrated tyranny of self-privilege, secrecy, exclusionary rules and
practices.
Nader warns that any uprising has to be swift to prevent the ruling elites
from organizing to crush it. It has to capture the public imagination. And
it has to have a sense of humor. He writes of the fictitious uprising in
How the Rats Re-Formed the Congress:
A contingent from New York and New England, led by nurses and students,
delivered a truck load of Wall Street Rats with the sign explaining that
they would obviously be welcomed by the Congress that had refused to pass a
Wall Street speculation tax, such a sales tax would have provided $300
billion a year that might have been utilized to provide healthcare and
reduce the student loan burdens. Millions of postcards were being sent
showing one giant black rat on the Capitol Dome with a sign saying, You
Didnt Listen to ThemThe PeopleBut Now Youre Going To Listen To Us. This
was only a sliver of the corrosively critical anthropomorphism attributed to
the rats and their imagined political agenda. They had become the voice of
the public! Little statuettes of [House Speaker] Blamer, [Minority Leader]
Melosay, and [Senate Majority Leader] Clearwater, wearing crowns upon which
lolled a pompous rat, were selling like hotcakes. Poster art rose to new
heights of imaginative, symbolic, and real-life portrayals of what was
increasingly being called the perfidious Withering Heights of Washington,
DC.
The calendar was filled with non-stop street action: rallies, soapbox
speeches, marches, and sit-ins at zoos where the protesters said the rats
should be given luxury cages as reward for their heroic takeover. The media
couldnt have enough of it. Ratings soared and increasing print, radio, and
TV time was being devoted to what was making a very deep impression
everywhere. Protestsacross the country, red state, blue state, north,
south, east, and westwere moving into mobilization stages with overdue
specific demands for justice, fairness, and participation qua citizens
replacing control qua wealth as the sine qua non of government functioning.
And, the most ominous sign of all for incumbents: there were early
indications of candidates, holding the same beliefs as the protesters,
readying challenges to the lawmakers in the upcoming primaries.
Petitions were circulating on the Internet demanding the members go back to
their jobs regardless of the rat infestation. Millions of workers show up
every day at jobs far more dangerous. They dont cower in fear. If they did,
they would have their pay cut or be fired by their bosses. The petition
pointed out that Members of Congress were getting paid while they stayed
home in bed. Outrageous! These petitions contained common left/right
demandsthe kind that really scare politicians.
No revolution will succeed without a vision. Nader lays out the basicsa
guaranteed living wage, full government-funded health insurance, free
education including at the university level, the prosecution of corporate
criminals, cutting the bloated military budget, an end to empire, criminal
justice reform, transferring power from the elites to the citizenry by
providing public spaces where consumers, workers and communities can meet
and organize, breaking up the big banks and creating a public banking
system, protecting and fostering labor unions, removing money from politics,
taking the airwaves out of the hands of corporations and returning them to
the public and ending subsidies to the fossil fuel industry while keeping
fossil fuels in the ground to radically reconfigure our relationship to the
ecosystem.
He writes of the popular convergence on the centers of power:
Meanwhile, by car, bus, rail, plane and even by bicycles and by foot, people
of all ages, backgrounds, and places continued to pour into Washington. They
filled the restaurants and the motels. They usually had to find a room in a
city where there were few affordable apartments but many large,
under-inhabited houses whose longtime owners wanted to make some money to
pay for their property taxes and repairs. So they were renting to the new
arrivals.
The ways these visitors made their voices heard were quite imaginative.
There was a cavalcade of horseback riders in a procession down Constitution
Avenue resplendent with the signs, Pass this
or Pass that
always
ending with the ominous or Else. One horseman was using his trumpet to
raise the emotional level of the demonstration, which was fully covered in
the press. Others joined the daily resign
or else rally going on at the
backside of the Capitol while mini-demonstrations were becoming daily events
in front of the White House and at other major government buildings
containing departments and agencies. Even those agencies in the suburbs,
such as the Pentagon, the CIA, the Patent Office, or the Food and Drug
Administration, where the employees had thought they would be beyond reach,
did not escape the rallying.
It is a wonderful vision. I hope it comes to pass. But even if it does not,
we should try. Appealing to the ruling elites and the two corporate
political parties, as well as attempting to have our voices and concerns
addressed by the corporate media, which has blacklisted Nader, is a waste of
time. The corporate state will be overthrown by a citizens revolt or we
will continue to barrel toward a political and ecological nightmare. Nader
dares to dream. We should too.
