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ralph nader
The Harvard Law School Dean's Deafening and Dangerous Silence
What does a tyrannical president like Donald Trump have to fear from a law school leader like this? It seems like the answer is clear: not very much to fear at all.
Apr 06, 2025
Tyrant Donald Trump, mega-violator of federal laws Wrecking America, has targeted Harvard University. Trump illegally threatens to cancel $9 billion in committed grants and contracts. One would think that the mighty Harvard Law School – loaded with professors having litigation and federal government experience – would be the vanguard of resistance and counterattack against the critical extortions of Trump, the fascistic dictator.
Wrong!
The Law School is under the control of the University’s Board of Overseers and the University Administration. This exalted edifice of higher education is quivering with fright and bending to the vicious Trumpsters instead of fighting back in the courts and enlisting their vast influential alumni. Such a Law School would have turned a deaf ear to Paul Revere’s Ride on the 18th of April in ’75.
I learned this firsthand as an alumnus of the Law School when I co-sponsored the first VIGOROUS PUBLIC INTEREST LAW DAY on April 1, 2025.
Here is the story in brief. Last December Interim Dean John Goldberg returned my call for a substantial conversation on the need to address the various forms of corporate power and corporate coercion over the rule of law. As a former Tort Professor (tort law deals with wrongful injuries) his awareness of corporate abuses was greater than his less learned predecessors.
I mentioned articles written by me for the Harvard Law Record in recent years that urged more attention by the Harvard Law School to the systemic lawlessness of these corporate supremacists along with more study of congressional surrender to the Executive Branch. He welcomed me sending materials on these topics and said he would read them over the Holidays and we would have another conversation.
A Harvard graduate, John F. Kennedy, wrote a best-selling book titled “Profiles in Courage.” I recommend it to the Dean and all the Harvard law faculty who looked the other way.
That was the last time I ever heard from him. Since that conversation came the second inauguration of Donald Trump and his tactics of winning through criminal intimidation. Many emails, voicemails, and requests in January and February through the Dean’s polite secretary for us to speak went completely unanswered.
Come March, my calls and emails became focused on informing him about the Vigorous Public Interest Law Day events, with speakers of great distinction for their contributions to a more just society. I wanted to invite him to greet the assembly and urge students and faculty to be part of this rare event at the heavily corporatized law school. After all the rule of law was under wholesale destruction because of Trump’s illegal, enforced executive orders.
No answers from his Deanship. Instead, the feedback from students revealed evidence of their anxiety, dread, and fear. Especially by foreign students and supporters of Palestinian rights against U.S. funding and co-belligerent support of Netanyahu’s mass murder genocide in Gaza. As April 1st neared, I sensed that the two large reserved lecture rooms would be too large.
What I saw unfolding was a quiet boycott, almost all the contacted faculty went incommunicado and those that showed some enthusiasm ended up being strange no-shows. The Law School has numerous student associations and over thirty legal clinics run by full-time directors. Students and staff overwhelmingly failed to attend.
It’s not that our organizers, a full-time person and several stalwart students, didn’t publicize these sterling presentations – some in-person and some by Zoom. There were posters and handouts everywhere. Emails, telephone calls, meetings, and word-of-mouth efforts were substantive. Burritos were provided as a free lunch. Requests to Dean Goldberg to meet with the speakers (mostly Harvard law alumni) with hundreds of experience years of pursuing and achieving justice went unanswered. The speakers wanted to share their views with him and the assistant deans as to how best to have the curricula, extracurricular experience, and admission criteria better reflect the law school’s own declared mission: “to educate leaders who contribute to the advancement of justice and the well-being of society.”
Sadly, there was not even the courtesy of a response from his Deanship.
What explains this crude and rude rebuff, unlike how the Administration lays out the red carpet for rich corporate alumni from Wall Street and other plutocratic venues?
The Law School is controlled by the overall University policy to shy from challenging Trump and demonstrate flexibility. Harvard retained Ballard Partners, a lobbying firm with close ties to Trump. Astonishingly, the Harvard administration ignored antisemitism against the Palestinian slaughter, with U.S. tax dollars and military support in violation of the Leahy Law, instead adopting a definition of antisemitism closer to Netanyahu’s racist state coverup. Two leaders of Harvard’s Center for Middle East Studies were discharged. This led the New York Times to report that: “To some faculty members, the move was more evidence that Harvard was capitulating at a moment of creeping authoritarianism.”
The Law School is part of this capitulation, notwithstanding its historical knowledge that yielding to newly installed tyrants emboldens their tyranny to move against other universities and colleges.
So here is what poor, frightened Dean Goldberg of the once mightiest law school in the world could have seen by looking at our program:
The first speaker was Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen which has already filed eight suits against the Trump regime’s illegal orders, such as the shutting down of serious humanitarian support by the life-saving U.S. Agency for International Development.
He was followed by John Bonifaz, president of Free Speech for People, who is starting an “Impeach Trump Again” national drive against Trump with more than 250,000 signatures. Then came Mark Green, a primary co-author with me of two books on Trump – one presciently called “Wrecking America: How Trump’s Lawbreaking and Lies Betray All.” Then James Henry, a strong advocate of justice for Palestinians, and so on. The Dean’s reaction was not to come within miles of this crowd. He made like this program didn’t exist. Follow the white flag of calculated surrender to Trump, a convicted felon, the most impeachable president in American history (See, Is any Member of Congress ready to impeach Trump? If so, we’ve drafted 14 articles of Impeachment, in the February/March 2025 issue of the Capitol Hill Citizen). Avoid strongly calling out Trump for his masked, ICE plainclothesmen kidnapping students and disappearing them to a Louisiana prison. Look the other way at this fast-emerging dictatorship and police state electing Napoleon in lieu of James Madison. Gloat over succeeding in keeping the audience down to about 40 people by going dark as if it never existed. Bruce Fein pointed out that the 56 signatories to the Declaration of Independence signed their death warrants on July 4, 1776, and we should be inspired by their example to rescue their handiwork from Trump’s mutilations.
Some Law School Deans are speaking up. A leader is Erwin Chemerinsky at the University of California Berkeley School of Law, who is networking with other Deans in standing tall and resolute. He wrote in the Washington Post that “… despite the risks of speaking out, silence itself comes at enormous cost. Giving in to a bully only makes things worse.”
It is not hard to feel sorry for Interim Dean Goldberg. He wants to become the permanent Dean. Toward that quest, you learn how to get along by going along with the wobbly Harvard president Alan Garber and his rubber stamp Board of Overseers.
A Harvard graduate, John F. Kennedy, wrote a best-selling book titled “Profiles in Courage.” I recommend it to the Dean and all the Harvard law faculty who looked the other way.
Former federal judge and now law professor Nancy Gertner did show up, did urge resistance and challenge to what she forthrightly called, on Democracy Now! Trump’s burgeoning coup d’état.
Aristotle would have liked Nancy Gertner. He once wrote that “Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees the others.”
The entire Day’s proceedings were videotaped and will be streamed in due time for nationwide viewership. Watch it in a dark room, Dean.
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The Worst Political Decision Since Nixon Taped Himself Committing Crimes
How the Democrats handed Trump the election on a bitcoin-plated platter—and most still don't think they did anything wrong.
Apr 01, 2025
Each day the Democrats are outraged about another outrage coming from Trump and his enablers—stomping on immigrants, undermining the courts, attacking Canada, claiming Ukraine started the war, violating campus free speech, destroying the EPA, firing forest rangers—and on and on and on.
But why the surprise? Did anyone doubt that Trump would act on his anger and his resentment, and then follow through executing the detailed plans laid out in Project 2025? Did anyone believe he would turn the other cheek at those who tried to impeach him and send him to jail? Surely every single elected Democrat knew that Trump’s election would be a disaster for everything the party claimed to stand for.
Nevertheless, the Democrats handed Trump the election on a bitcoin-plated platter. They stuck with Biden—make that sucked up to Biden—until it was too late to run primaries and find the strongest Democratic candidate. (I’m not saying Kamala Harris necessarily was the weakest one, but four years earlier she flunked out before the first presidential primary. Just saying.)
Why the hell did they do that?
I’m no political genius, but nearing Biden’s 81st birthday, in November of 2023, I begged him not to run again. It was clear to me, based on polling, his lack of energy, and my own intuition, that he had no business running again.
I was alone, but not entirely so. Obama’s campaign maestro, David Axelrod was pounded for suggesting Biden wasn’t the best candidate. That so successfully quelled any dissent that it wasn’t until six months later (July 2, 2024) that Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) became the first sitting Democratic congressman to ask Biden to withdraw. Profiles in courage, the Democrats were not, including all the governors lining up for 2028.
If I could see the trainwreck coming why couldn’t the Democrats?
I think I know why. They didn’t get upset about it because they were blinded by power and wealth.
Biden represented power. You cross him and you lose access to that power even while his grip on reality is diminishing. You become a target for party loyalists, and risk losing credibility in the party if you call for him to step down. You become an outsider. Even Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) didn’t want to lose their influence over Biden’s pro-worker agenda as they continued to support his candidacy until the bitter end.
The Democrats today are imploding, and that’s exactly what they deserve. They blew it.
The attraction to wealth is an even bigger problem. Far too many Democrats are enamored by the rich and famous. They went to school with them. They lean on them for campaign funds. They plan to join them when they leave public office. The wizards on Wall Street and in corporate America form the class they see themselves as part of, or in the class they aspire to.
It is not a coincidence, therefore, that the Democratic Party has become the representatives of the managerial class. Too many party members with working-class roots tore them out long ago.
Many probably discounted their worries about Trump, thinking that the rich and powerful would tame him. Because that’s where the Democratic Party thinks real power lies. The financial class wouldn’t let Trump wreck the economy, would it? Surely, the corporate class wouldn’t back down on DEI programs or forgo their access to inexpensive immigrant labor. The wealthiest Democratic law firms aren’t going to cave, right? Wouldn’t the elites prevent Trump’s excesses the way they did last time? Hmmm.
Along the way, most Democrats lost their anger. They lost their fight. They lost their connection to the working people who have seen their way of life crushed after 40 years of neoliberalism. Which is why many modern Democrats found it easy to cavalierly go along with the worst political decision since Nixon taped himself committing crimes during the Watergate scandal. (Please see Wall Street’s War on Workers for why working people abandoned the Democrats, and visa vera.)
Along the way, most Democrats lost their anger. They lost their fight. They lost their connection to the working people who have seen their way of life crushed after 40 years of neoliberalism.
Biden clearly did not have the capacity to run again. The Democrats knew that even before he proved it to the world during his disastrous June 2024 debate with Trump. But they didn’t care enough to oppose his decision, publicly, where it would matter. He told his advisors during the 2020 race that he wouldn’t run for a second term, he would be 82 years old by his second inauguration, but the party refused to hold him to it when he changed his mind.
The Democrats today are imploding, and that’s exactly what they deserve. They blew it. They can’t be reformed into a working-class party, because that’s not who they are or what they want to be. From my perspective, reforming them is an utter waste of time and energy, an exercise in window dressing and spin. Instead, we need a new party, an Independence Party that comes with the slogan: The billionaires have two parties, we need one of our own!
Stop with the Spoiler Argument
All I hear from friend and foe is that third parties are impossible in America, that they only serve as spoilers and can never succeed.
Ralph Nader’s run, they tell me, elected Bush. We can argue about whether that’s true, it might be, but there’s very little argument against the idea that Biden’s run in 2024 elected Trump—for the second time!
So, we start with identifiable targets. There is nothing to spoil if we concentrate on running independent working-class candidates in one-party Congressional districts of which there are many!
In 2022, five out of every six races were decided by more than 10 percentage points, according to FairVote.org. One out of every 13 races went entirely uncontested! These districts are where the battle should be joined. The call for a new Independence Party is a call for a vibrant second party, not a third!
Dan Osborn, a former local labor leader, was surprisingly competitive in the 2024 Senate race in Nebraska, running against an unopposed Republican and far ahead of Kamala Harris. Bernie Sanders always runs as an independent as well, and he has now come out urging others to do the same.
The need for a new party could never be clearer. The time could never be more urgent.
There’s a hunger out there for something new, but it will take courage and guts to create it. That can only happen when key labor unions decide to do what their membership has been telling them to do for a generation – get away from the corporate Democrats!
Private sector unions, diminished as they may be, are still the seat of worker power in the U.S. And they can galvanize the working class around an agenda that enhances the well-being of all working people. They are key to building a new political formation that protects us all from Wall Street-driven job destruction.
The need for a new party could never be clearer. The time could never be more urgent. The opportunity is there staring us in the face, if only we have the nerve to grab it.
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Democratic Leaders—Get Tough and Hold Unofficial Congressional Hearings By and For the People!
If the Democrats stand with the fast-growing resistance by the people, they can stop the Trump madness and save what is left of our democracy.
Mar 08, 2025
Enough already with the Democrats’ confused disarray in responding to Tyrant Trump’s vicious, illegal destruction of critical federal programs for all Americans so as to favor the insatiable greed and power of the Super-rich and giant corporations. The plutocrats are demanding more tax escapes, corporate welfare, and green lights for lawlessness.
No more excuses for the failing Democratic Party and its contracting out of electoral campaigns to profiteering corporate-conflicted political/media consulting firms
Progressive Congressional Democrats like Al Green, Elizabeth Warren, and Independent Bernie Sanders know exactly what needs to be done to Stop Dangerous Donald and Marauding Musk from their lawless, fascistic overthrow of our government and our Constitution.
Enough already with the Democrats’ confused disarray in responding to Tyrant Trump’s vicious, illegal destruction of critical federal programs for all Americans.
First and foremost, House and Senate Democrats can hold UNOFFICIAL public hearings on Capitol Hill, highlighting an all-time winning agenda supported by the citizenry and opposed by the Trumpsters. These are the long-overdue, immensely needed, and widely popular programs abandoned by the corporate Democrats who allowed the disastrous loss last November to the most corrupt, cruel, bigoted, and greedy GOP since its founding in 1854.
To see what I and Mark Green and two dozen civic leaders urged the Democrats to AUTHENTICALLY adopt in 2022 and 2024 (see winningamerica.net and my 2024 book titled Let’s Start the Revolution and The Inflection Election by Mark Green). The following are the election winners:
- Raise the frozen $7.25 federal minimum wage to at least $15 per hour. (Twenty-five million workers would get a long-earned raise.)
- Raise Social Security benefits, frozen for nearly 50 years for over 65 million retirees. Pay for this by lifting the income cap on the social security tax for the rich and super-rich (now at just $176,100).
- Restore the child tax credit by sending $300 a month to over 60 million children, cutting child poverty nearly in half.
- Pay for this and other necessities by raising taxes on the severely undertaxed rich, super-rich, and giant corporations (over half of which pay no federal income taxes). Eighty-five percent of Americans support this tax fairness reform.
- Crack down on corporate crooks and swindlers eating away at the income of hard-pressed workers. We are talking big money stolen from consumers and workers. The polling support for this LAW AND ORDER reform is huge.
There are many more pro-people reforms shelved by the Democrats and their mendacious for-profit consultants. But these initiatives are the “Big Five” that draw overwhelming support from liberal and conservative voters, from Red and Blue States. An unstoppable coalition of political power over their legislators. (See my 2015 book, Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State.)
The second parallel wave of UNOFFICIAL hearings could strongly rebut and reject dictator Trump’s cruel and mostly illegal Executive Order Dictates. In her largely feeble and dull response to Trump’s lengthy lying, deceptive, and distracting propaganda show before the U.S. Congress, Senator Elissa Slotkin used the weak words “reckless” and “chaotic” to describe Trump’s lying boasts. She should have called Trump “criminally insane” and “knowingly homicidal.” Trump’s vicious actions are harming many Americans and desperately poor people abroad.
The Trump/Musk Axis of Evil is knowingly leaving Americans defenseless by strip-mining programs dealing with pandemics, climate violence, toxic pollutants, unsafe air and surface transportation, and contaminated food, water, and air here at home. Abroad, cutting the lifelines of AIDS medicines, food supplements to near-starving children, and other emergency American help, long supported by previous Republican and Democratic Presidents, brings arrogant glee to these GOP gangsters. One new, obsolete aircraft carrier costs taxpayers more than the vital work of dismantled federal agencies.
Senator Schumer’s choice of Senator Slotkin (D-MI) to present the Party’s response shows that he has not learned anything from his self-inflicted losses to the GOP. It would have been far more popular and persuasive to have Senator Sanders or Senator Warren make the specific, devastating case against the vengeful, scapegoating, egomaniacal, delusional Trump.
Slotkin, a former CIA employee, used her 10 minutes of fame to be self-promoting and repeated the vague affirmations behind “the middle class” (of course, no mention of the vast poor), “national security,” and “economic security.” Like so many of the Democratic politicians, she just couldn’t get herself to be specific, as with the aforementioned Big Five, which, after all, are just updates of the successful New Deal policies under Roosevelt and Truman.
Letters decrying another lost opportunity for the Democrats to unmask the Trump Dump rising in Washington, DC poured into the newspapers. The Washington Post published many of them. One writer wanted this to be said: “Resign, Mr. President, Resign and you’ll hear a thunderous ovation.” A long-time Republican, Grant Grissom, took this a broader step forward by paying for a full-page ad in the New York Times on March 2, 2025, titled “A PLEA FOR DONALD TRUMP TO RESIGN” and presented cogent reasons for not waiting for Impeachment. (Grant Grissom: trumptimetoresign@gmail.com).
To conclude where I began: Democrats hold regular UNOFFICIAL hearings, which will get good mass media coverage and reach millions of registered voters who are increasingly indignant over what is being taken from them. If the Democrats stand with the fast-growing resistance by the people, they can stop the Trump madness and save what is left of our democracy.
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