"The Seventeen Solutions"

(BOLD IDEAS FOR OUR AMERICAN FUTURE)
-by ralph nader
2012
Who is this conservative fusspot? Who is this ralph nader?
Oh, wait. He's not a conservative. He's the progressive, socialist civic idealist at the forefront of the attempt to establish a viable third party in the american political system, in the hopes that the actual democracies of the world will stop laughing at us (though admittedly, there's nothing funny about american foreign policy).
But i hope i won't be faulted for pointing out that nader sometimes sounds like a conservative. He's a defender of the two-parent family paradigm, which i promise you is NOT forward-thinking, and he's far less of a global citizen than an "imagine no countries" hippie like me might prefer. If he can be called a conservative, it harks back to a time (goldwater?) when republicans were genuine fiscal conservatives. But yes, his socialist credentials are otherwise strong...even though he doesn't lead with them. The most he offers in that direction is an unguarded admiration for european democracies, with their health care, child care, and tuition treated as basic human rights, not luxuries. European democracies also provide their citizens better pay and benefits all around.
For better or worse however, ralph is a reformer, not a revolutionary. He's an ardent fan of the constitution, and believes that the democratic mandate of our republic can be wrested back from the corporate/military/congressional pirates. He points out that eisenhower's original speech warning of the military-industrial complex included congress as the third member of that axis. Not wanting to alienate his associates, he thought better of it...but shouldn't have, as congress has become little more than a panting lapdog for big business (and for the president as well, as congress has rolled over for both bush and obama, in abrogating their prerogative as the only body who may declare war - they've also allowed the executive branch to trample the rights of citizen privacy).
Nader presents solutions to get this country back on track, and in and of themselves, they're pretty comprehensively inarguable. His most resonant attacks are on corporate welfare, corporate tax evasion, and corporate crime. He outs the idiocy of those who complain about the "welfare problem", as personified by single mothers and people of color. A true understanding of the numbers shows that civic welfare is literally a drop in the bucket of corporate welfare (and that more white people are on the dole than colored, i might add). Similarly, those who think we need to get "tough on crime" tend not to realize the economic bucket-drop that personal crime is compared to corporate crime.
Nader also makes some searingly salient points about the salutary effects that comprehensive congressional reform would accomplish...give them no job benefits not available to all americans, take away their golden parachutes, reduce their salaries to minimum wage, and require their offspring to be on the front lines of any war this country declares.
Does he come perilously close to glamorizing crappy blue collar jobs? Yes, in the sense that he doesn't seem to realize that "crappy eight-hour blue collar job" is a redundancy. But the deeper fatal flaw of this book is that nader paints such a crystal-clear picture of how deeply we've been corrupted by the ruling class (a certain mr. gates, for example, being allowed to control as much wealth as the poorest 130 MILLION of us), that it comes off as preposterous to propose that anything short of revolution (peaceful or otherwise) might put this country in the hands of those who have allegedly owned it all along - the people.
This book is fantastic on two levels, then. In research and insight, nader gets high marks. But his optimism ultimately feels like a fantasy.