Former TV CEO Says U.S. Should Ban ‘Straight White Males from Voting’

Steven Clifford, author and former CEO of the King Broadcasting Company and National Mobile Television, told PJM that the federal government should “prohibit straight white males from voting” in U.S. elections as a way to “save” democracy.

“I think it’s the only hope for democracy in America and I will be leading a great movement to prohibit straight white males, who I believe supported Donald Trump by about 85 percent, from exercising the franchise and I think that will save our democracy,” Clifford said during an interview after speaking at the forum “Destroying the Myths of Market Fundamentalism,” which was organized by the Center for Study of Responsive Law – a group former independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader founded in 1968.

Clifford, author of the book CEO Pay Machine: How it Trashes America and How to Stop it, urged Democrats to explain their policy proposals to voters rather than focus on the reasons they oppose President Trump.

“I’m not a campaign consultant and I think they have to get off the fact that Donald Trump is Donald Trump. Every voter knows that Donald Trump is Donald Trump. Hillary Clinton spent $450 million to say every day that Donald Trump is Donald Trump,” Clifford said, referencing the 2016 presidential election campaign.

“I think they’ve got to tell the voters why they’re going to be better off with a Democratic House or a Democratic Senate rather than just say Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Donald Trump every day… ‘Anti’ doesn’t get people out to vote enough,” he added. “It’s got to help me.”

During the forum, Ralph Nader suggested that public schools teach contract law and tort law to students, given the rising rate of Internet use among young people.

“Young people have to sign these agreements, fine-print agreements, or click on to Facebook and so on, Instagram. It’s not like it’s foreign to their experience, and we don’t teach it so I think we’ve got to make lawlessness a political issue – an election-year issue because in a state of lawlessness, the people who have the most money and the corporations with the most raw power are going to run the country into the ground as they already are,” Nader said.

“Half the country’s population is poor,” he added. “Forget all the other statistics, half of the county’s families are told to make it under $50,000 per year gross for a family of four – that’s before deductions – two parents, two children, in the land of the free and the richest land in the world.”