It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s Warren

Ralph Nader says he has talked with Warren Buffett by phone but would like to meet him in person for the first time during Nader’s visit to Omaha Tuesday.

After all, Buffett is a main character — perhaps the main hero — in Nader’s “Only the Super-Rich Can Help Us,” a new fictional book he bills as a “practical utopia.”

Nader booked Omaha as the ninth stop on a 21-city book tour because Buffett lives here.

In an interview from Toronto, Nader said Buffett is “central to the book. He’s not a predictable mega-billionaire. He’s got a mind of his own and he’s independent. He’s very skeptical toward Wall Street and its excesses.

“This is the brightest superhero role that any multibillionaire has ever been given.”

Nader’s 1965 book, “Unsafe at Any Speed,” helped launch the modern consumer movement, and he has run for president as an independent. The new book explores what would happen if the world’s richest progressives decided to bring their agenda to the nation.

It’s a practical utopia rather than simply a description of an ideal world, Nader said, because it follows through with what could happen in real life given the right set of conditions and decisions by the right people.

In the book, Buffett is in his living room in Omaha, watching news reports of Hurricane Katrina. He organizes a convoy of trucks with food, clothing, tents and medical supplies. In New Orleans, a grandmother looks into his eyes and says, “Only the super-rich can help.”

Buffett resolves to enlist the nation’s richest like-minded people to turn the country away from corporate greed, political corruption and other evils.

Even billionaires return Buffett’s phone calls, Nader said, so he was the logical character in the book to bring together 17 people, known as Meliorists, to a meeting in Hawaii.

Ted Turner, George Soros, Bill Cosby, Barry Diller, Phil Donahue, Yoko Ono and others map out a one-year campaign to bring America to progressivism.

In the book, Nader has Buffett saying: “Our country is sinking deeper and deeper into troubles that are sapping its collective spirit and blinding it to the solutions that are ready at hand. From my observations of the rarefied world of business leaders, I’ve concluded that the vast majority are not leaders except for themselves.

“A society rots like a fish — from the head down. I want no part of that lucrative narcissism, that abdication from the realities that are blighting our country and the world.

“I am here to do my part, my duty, in persuading some of my very wealthy peers to live by the words of Alfred North Whitehead: ‘A great society is a society in which its men of business think greatly of their functions.’”

Among the issues winning public approval because of this super-rich group are union representation at Walmart, a new political party, universal health care and publicly financed elections.

The villains in the book are composite characters representing obstacles Nader has faced in real life: corporate lobbyists, conservative talk-show hosts, supporters of big-business and others.

Some are identifiable, including “Brover Dortwist,” a reference to anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, and Bush Bimbaugh, a version of conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh.

Nader, 72, said he has talked with some billionaires in their 70s, 80s and 90s and found many of them frustrated and disheartened.

“In the real world they are remarkably discouraged in their advanced years about the state of the country,” Nader said. “They can’t believe what’s happening on Wall Street, the reckless risk-taking. I’ve talked to a lot of them, and they want to save their beloved country.”

Nader said he doesn’t oppose free markets but believes corporations shouldn’t have unfair advantages over small businesses.

He’s not a shareholder in Berkshire Hathaway Inc., the investment company headed by Buffett, but wishes he had bought the stock long ago.

He sent copies of the book — about 45,000 have been printed — to the people who appear in its pages, and he said other readers of the book may be inspired to act, too.

“Everyone who works in any public struggle or arena has a book like this in them,” Nader said. “You start figuring, ‘If only I had this strategy, if only I had that money or that media, it would be different.’

“It tumbles out in a nice fictional story.”

Contact the writer:

444-1080, steve.jordon@owh.com