Ralph Nader: Workplace Surveillance + The Luddite Club

Reading

Image by Paul Bence via Flickr

Dandelion Salad

with Ralph Nader

Ralph Nader Radio Hour on Feb 4, 2023

Ralph welcomes professor Karen Levy, who talks to us about how regulations aimed at making trucking safer have been turned into a tool of corporate surveillance as chronicled in her book Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance.

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2008 Holiday Reading List by Ralph Nader

Dandelion Salad

by Ralph Nader
The Nader Page
Dec. 11, 2008

It’s time for that Holiday reading period and here are some deserving but little publicized recommendations:

1. Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Spectre of Inverted Totalitarianism by Sheldon S. Wolin (Princeton Univ. Press, 2008). Princeton Professor emeritus Wolin examines how the pathology of concentrated corporate power and its control of government is shattering our democratic institutions and traditions. Brings the abstractions down to the hard earth of reality.

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Surviving the Fourth of July By Chris Hedges

Dandelion Salad

By Chris Hedges
07/07/08 “Truthdig

I survive the degradation that has become America—a land that exalts itself as a bastion of freedom and liberty while it tortures human beings, stripped of their rights, in offshore penal colonies, a land that wages wars defined under international law as criminal wars of aggression, a land that turns its back on its poor, its weak, its mentally ill, in a relentless drive to embrace totalitarian capitalism—because I read books. I have 5,000 of them. They line every wall of my house. And I do not own a television.

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Tomgram: Chalmers Johnson, 12 Books in Search of a Policy By Tom Engelhardt

Dandelion Salad

By Tom Engelhardt
October 22, 2007

They came in as unreformed Cold Warriors, only lacking a cold war — and looking for an enemy: a Russia to roll back even further; rogue states like Saddam’s rickety dictatorship to smash. They were still in the old fight, eager to make sure that the “Evil Empire,” already long down for the count, would remain prostrate forever; eager to ensure that any new evil empire like, say, China’s would never be able to stand tall enough to be a challenge. They saw opportunities to move into areas previously beyond the reach of American imperial power like the former SSRs of the Soviet Union in Central Asia, which just happened to be sitting on potentially fabulous undeveloped energy fields; or farther into the even more fabulously energy-rich Middle East, where Saddam’s Iraq, planted atop the planet’s third largest reserves of petroleum, seemed so ready for a fall — with other states in the region visibly not far behind. Continue reading