What's with all this apoplexy over Nader? What barbarous, villainous, and depraved acts did he commit that labor leaders and heads of national liberal groups denounce him as the enemy of minorities, the poor, women, and the environment? That Senator Joseph Biden says that Nader will not be welcome in Senate corridors? That James Carville vows on TV to walk out of the room should Nader enter? That the First Lady jokes about killing him? That NY Times Corporation editorial writers label him "beyond the reach of reason," "a political narcissist"?

For heaven's sakes, what did this man do?

It appears that he and the Green Party gathered signatures to qualify for the ballot in 43 states plus Washington, D.C. He encouraged hundreds of Green Party candidates to run for local and state offices. He barnstormed the nation, speaking in living rooms, village squares, universities, and even huge sports arenas. Despite being kept out of televised Bush-Gore dialogues, Nader and the Greens encouraged millions to get involved in the gritty work of self-governance. Isn't that what high school civics books teach is the life blood of democracy? But then an inconclusive election launched an extraordinary national educational experience. Just look what people are talking about now: * Machines vs. humans. * The electoral college, that left-over contrivance concocted by slave state politicians to establish their domination (slave-holding Virginians served as president for 32 out of the nation's first 36 years). * Local-state-federal jurisdictional struggles over who's in charge; legislative, executive, and judicial branches crossing paths and swords: It's U.S. Constitutional theory in action! * Hitherto obscure constitutional offices of state attorney general and secretary of state. * The will of the people. Not a bad list. What if people were to pursue these topics? Let's explore the "will of the people."

As Nader and many others have been pointing out, U.S. law regards basic decisions affecting jobs, wealth, communities, commerce, life and death as beyond the will of the people. Democratic and Republican free marketers do not exactly put it this way, but that's what they mean. Over and over again, the courts have so affirmed. Joe Lieberman echoed this on the campaign trail when he insisted that it is the private sector - corporations - that We the People must depend upon for jobs.

So is anything else private? What else is beyond the authority of the American people? * the money supply, which is set by one unelected man at the Federal Reserve; * corporate decisions on investments in technology and production processes, such as genetic engineering of foods, nuclear power, toxic chemicals, siting of giant corporate chain stores, etc.; these decisions are regarded as corporate "private property"; * laws which corporate officials demand federal judges to nullify, such as a Massachusetts law limiting the state's contracting with corporations which do business with Burmese dictators, a Vermont law requiring the labeling of foods containing bovine growth hormone (rBGH); laws banning transit of toxic waste through states; laws banning corporate spending in state elections. . . and on and on; * judicial interpretations of the Constitution giving corporations First Amendment free speech powers, 14th Amendment equal protection powers, 5th Amendment due process powers. . . and denying workers on corporate property any Bill of Rights protections; * the economy as a whole, which is private, not public; it is not democratic self-governance which rules, but "the market." The economy runs society, not the other way around.

As has happened time and again throughout U.S. history, public discussions about men of property and their corporations squashing the will of the people, about elected officials and judges siding with corporations instead of with human persons, have been intensifying of late. So have civic actions against corporation after corporation. Any reporter or politician paying attention to the hundreds of teach-ins which civic groups and academics have organized, who has glanced at the thousands of books and newsletters civic groups have published, who has talked with some of the tens of thousands of protesters in Seattle, Philadelphia, Los Angeles. . . or visited any of the hundreds of thousands engaged in community-based struggles against corporate destruction of whole forests in the Northwest, against corporate factory farms in South Dakota and Pennsylvania, against transit racism in Los Angeles, against coal corporation mountaintop removal in West Virginia, against toxic chemical production along the lower Mississippi River, against incinerators in Ohio, against oil refineries around San Francisco's East Bay, against corporate foreclosures of family farms, against corporate genetic engineering of foods, against corporations writing the rules for health care, energy, strip malls, banking, organic foods, against corporations usurping We the People's fundamental human and constitutional rights, would know that this is so.

Why now? People are weary of the iron fist of the wealthy enforced by their great global corporations and their government officials. Despite intensive organizing on single issue after single issue, people have not been able to reverse: the USA as number one arms seller to the world; the USA's continuing bombing of Iraqi children; the USA giving away the people's digital TV spectrum to global corporations and forbidding communities to ban microwave cell phone towers; NAFTA selling out the people's sovereign power to global corporations; the USA spending over a billion dollars to train the Columbian military in the tradition of aid to Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile, Peru, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Angola, ad nauseum, and to spew poisons upon Columbian forests and people; corporate and governmental policies destroying family farms and farming communities; the expansion of NATO into central and eastern Europe; the bloated and still growing US military budget; Congress and state legislatures freeing corporations to bring us electricity shortages, escalating prices, and no solar transition, state legislators giving hundreds of billions of taxpayer and ratepayer money to energy corporations to compensate for their stupid investments and accelerate global warming; real wages still low for most people who must work; vast and growing gaps between the top few percent who own wealth and everyone else; the USA as jailer of the Berrigans, Leonard Peltier and hundreds of others working to repair sordid idiocies in our midst; the nation's ongoing institutionalized discrimination against gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transsexuals, Native Americans and other peoples of color; the USA's Immigration and Naturalization Service budget shooting way up to pay for more and more armed troops and electronic hardware, while denying its human targets Bill of Rights protections like free speech, due process and equal protection of the laws; quickening commodification and privatization of public treasures like water, seeds, and medicines; the USA government's undermining of people's struggles for freedom and justice around the world by supporting dictators and tyrants; police and prison violence against people here at home; the nation's idiotic, racist, anti-human drug laws; the filling of prisons; the corporatization of our schools. . .

These realities are all regarded as legal. And this is a nation of laws!

Gore, Bush and the corporate press ignored such matters. For Nader, they were central.

Nader sometimes lapsed into shorthand. But overall he spoke clearly about ending corporate dominance over people supposed to be sovereign, alleged to be the source of all political authority. In clearly about ending corporate dominance over people supposed to be sovereign, alleged to be the source of all political authority. In lengthy speeches he discussed history, power, law, current events, the constitution. Like all candidates, he had his good days and his not so good days. He didn't eat so well. But during five months on the road, in 50 states, to audiences large and small, he talked with people about their yearnings for democracy, about what was happening in their communities, and about the hope out there that the USA could still evolve from the elite-driven, violent, nuclear bomb building, anti-working people, ecologically arrogant commercial corporate global empire. . .

That apocalyptic apoplectic, Thomas L. Friedman, summed it up for the New York Times Corporation (10 November): Ralph Nader is ". . . anti markets, anti-globalization, anti-multinationals."

That "egomaniacal narcissist" enraged the people and institutions accustomed to controlling public debate and education.

So that's the story behind all this apoplexy. Ralph Nader and the Greens nurtured people who will continue to think, talk, and act towards liberating the will of the people.

So while Bush and Gore go on about democracy (and they do go on!), they, their parties, their lawyers, their advisers. . . along with the owners of radio, television, newspaper and information corporations, state attorneys general and secretaries of state, Supreme Court justices, university presidents, and most very important people all agree that * the Federal Reserve is beyond the will of the American people; * corporate decisions are private, beyond the will of the American people; * judges can respond to corporate complaints by nullifying laws passed by the people's elected representatives; * judges may give Bill of Rights powers to corporations to enable them to overturn the will of the people; * defining the economy is beyond the will of the American people.

Alas, self-governance is beyond the will of the American people. Self governance is beyond the authority of the American people. That is the law of the land.

What the people who run the United States and their attendants fear most about this election mess -- even as they blather about the will of the people -- is that too many Americans may conclude that democracy has not yet come to the US of A; that too many people will stop swallowing corporate and politician's crap, understanding with Bertolt Brecht that:

"Those who lead the country into the abyss Call ruling too difficult For ordinary men."

Thanks, Ralph. Watch out for Hillary.