The World According to Nader
Dreifus, Claudia
The World According to Nader The more corporate power, the less freedom BY CLAUDIA DREIFUS Ralph Nader is an American original. At fifty, he is this country's best-known consumer activist,...
...That's the kind of people you're dealing with here...
...The Freedom of Information Act victory—I'm very proud of that, too...
...But you know, some of your critics complain that your work is rather limited, that all it does is produce better cars and television sets—that you're not really doing much to change things...
...Ecological disasters...
...NADER: I don't like the word despair...
...In 1981, Reagan revoked the Crash Protector Standard for new cars, which President Carter had issued and which was about to go into effect...
...For instance, I wanted to get a major corporate accountability statute through Congress...
...Q: Ralph Nader, you're a man who's spent his life working for justice...
...I didn't like that much...
...I think I was born with a lot of empathy...
...Q: How many lives have you saved...
...Police-state practices...
...In fact, over the last four years the Reagan Administration has busily dismantled reforms that it took you fifteen years to achieve...
...Are you sure there aren't moments when even Ralph Nader despairs...
...NADER: I anticipated a lot of this stuff...
...And I didn't get airbags in cars...
...He went on to found Public Citizen, a national research and lobbying organization, as well as dozens of Public Interest Research Groups, the Health Research Group, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, the Critical Mass Energy Project, and the Center for the Study of Responsive Law...
...The answer was to get some more cars with airbags onto the road and to try to get the Government to buy airbag-equipped vehicles for itself...
...There have to be some people that help save them, protect them...
...As a result, the Government is going to buy 5,000 airbag-equipped cars...
...There are just thousands and thousands of youngsters who went through the PIRGs and got their taste of citizen action...
...You can spend the next fifty years doing this and you'll never do much about the problem...
...NADER: I wouldn't say they were "partisan" political...
...Doing my kind of work, there never was enough time...
...With the Reagan Administration, the problem is that enforcement of the statutes is terrible...
...So, when you've got real people up against artificial entities like corporations, they really have to exert themselves...
...The number could be much bigger if there were airbags in the cars...
...Being a lawyer meant having a versatile profession...
...What I've got is a collection of projects—six-month projects, one-year projects...
...It isn't getting $200 off the price of a car...
...Instead of saying, "Terrific, Providence has given me an opportunity to save more Americans in the next twenty-five years than possibly any other person," they come in determined to destroy the lifesaving programs...
...And I even read Schopenhauer to try to get an answer...
...From Winstead came the New England ideal of citizen participation...
...I'd done a lot of hitching and seen an awful lot of crashes, mangled bodies on the highway...
...And this isn't just what you buy...
...Not in this kind of work...
...NADER: Sure: He will try to cut out all programs that service or protect or educate unorganized and nonpowerful constituencies...
...NADER: I can see things getting worse—much worse...
...Q: Can you give us a scenario of what life might be like under four more years of Ronald Reagan...
...He's a small businessman from New Hampshire, a dyed-in-the-wool Republican, but he has a suspicion of big business...
...This relates to pollution...
...NADER: Yeah, sure...
...What you've got to do is just get past it and, boom, come right back...
...And, if given a second term, Reagan will appoint five people to the Supreme Court worse than William Rehnquist...
...You can't have both...
...I never needed to go out and see people killed on a highway every six months for a refresher course in indignation...
...All kinds of articles have been written because researchers had access to materials and information through the FOIA...
...What I wanted to do was prevent injuries...
...Nowadays, I don't even have an organization, and that's as it should be...
...A lot of this was articulated later for me in my studies and by traveling...
...The World According to Nader The more corporate power, the less freedom BY CLAUDIA DREIFUS Ralph Nader is an American original...
...Did you like Harvard in the 1950s...
...How can one know...
...Q: When did you start your first public-interest organization...
...NADER: It's something procedural, giving people the opportunity to participate...
...Of all of your accomplishments, which would you say you're most proud of...
...Millions of people can create kids...
...All this is reversible—if Reagan doesn't get a second term* But even if he does, he won't be able to harm the statutes...
...Reagan will do nothing about money in politics— except relish it and profit from it...
...A lot of other things—dealing with pollution and worker health and safety, for example—are not quite as proximate...
...Q: Was the Nader family political...
...Q: Speaking of GM—some years ago, their executives hired a group of private eyes to see if they could get some personal information on you, something compromising...
...But I'm saying there's a very proximate cause and effect with auto safety...
...I stumbled on a guy who ran the General Services Administration, a fairly good fellow...
...Q: And the book was an immediate sensation...
...I'm surprised that people don't say more...
...I did a lot of other things first—free-lance journalism for the Christian Science Monitor, magazine articles on car safety...
...Do you know that there's never been a male consumer adviser to the President...
...After he's done all that, Reagan will freeze out access to the Government, making it more difficult for the average citizen to find out what's going on...
...Another thing, for me, was the matter of risks...
...NADER: I mean, I find that type of response very mild...
...The corporation is now in charge of the economy...
...Q: Not all your efforts have been successful...
...Civil liberties is the function of a decentralized economic power—and that's what is at stake...
...But you can't...
...And in this case, we're not talking about one human being—we're talking about hundreds of thousands...
...There was always a deep interest in my family in public matters— a sense that it was important to be a citizen, that you had civic responsibilities...
...We'll see a complete inversion of national priorities in terms of supporting the corporate state: cutting environmental protection, transferring more Federal lands by lease or sale to corporations...
...Nader, tall, dark-haired, and dark-eyed, sat amidst stacks of papers and books as we chatted about his past and current political passions...
...Q: And what was Drew Lewis's response to that...
...If Tom Paine were alive today, he'd no doubt be living as Ralph Nader does...
...They were fighting a high rate of inflation and also contaminated foods...
...But I was able to use it sort of like a jai-alai ball...
...As a child, growing up in a small town in Connecticut, I used to go down to the local courthouse about three blocks from where we lived...
...Q: One of the things that's said about you is, "Ralph Nader's a great guy, but he's impossible to work with...
...NADER: It was like water off a duck's back...
...Do you regret having so little private life, no children, no family...
...Furthermore, you're up against adversaries that know no shut-down time...
...You can't get anywhere being a Lone Ranger...
...Also, legal work was an approved way of learning about power...
...They deal with disease prevention rather than trauma prevention...
...Despair means diminishing one's ardor and determination, however temporary...
...Yet we're all equal under the law, GM and you...
...I'm talking about the auto safety statutes, the food and drug laws, product safety commission laws, environmental laws, worker health and safety...
...You're on a plane and there's no reason for you to read the Arkansas Gazette...
...NADER: Well, one tries not to be discouraged...
...Q: What else would they say...
...Q: When you say you saw conflict in the courtroom— that's not the same as seeing injustice...
...But they were concerned people...
...Obviously, I'm proud of my work on auto safety...
...NADER: I didn't start the first one until three years after the book—1969...
...I'll give you an example...
...I always wanted to create Johnny Appleseed kind of projects that would eventually run on their own...
...I bounced off it and tried to shake it up...
...I was different: a Harvard lawyer, someone who knew power, how it worked, someone willing to play the power game rather than come up begging...
...Q: So the combination of all those experiences led to Unsafe at Any Speed in the mid-1960s...
...NADER: Because it was a way of working for justice...
...The last organization is Nader's current home base, and it was at the Center's P Street office in Washington, D.C, that I caught up with him for an interview...
...This guy could manage concentration camps...
...And no, I didn't particularly like that...
...An attorney can poke his nose into other areas and no one says, "What are you doing here...
...You could see it coming...
...The Government won't do anything about self-reliant economic development—like energy efficiency or solar energy...
...It had taken us years to get this, and instantly it was gone...
...Q: Did you ever think that things would get to be as bad as they are...
...Nader attended Princeton and Harvard in the 1950s...
...That's really gratifying...
...I was twenty-nine before I wrote the book...
...His parents endowed him with an unswerving sense of hard work and purpose...
...Q: Surely this awful spectacle of seeing your hardwon reforms being dismembered, destroyed, dismantled, all of this "defensive" lobbying, must leave you with a certain amount of despair...
...The subject appealed to me because I was interested in seeing if you could apply the law to humanize a technology...
...There's no point in having children if you don't have the time to pay real attention to them...
...NADER: Well, in the long run, it did...
...And he saw that he could make a mark for himself for what he's doing...
...The more corporate power there is, the less freedom you have in this country, the more invasion of privacy...
...Born to Lebanese immigrant parents and raised in the small northern Connecticut town ofWinstead, Nader is, in many ways, the synthesis of those two influences...
...There, at five or six, I got this sense of "A versus B" conflict in criminal cases...
...It relates to the lack of emphasis on preventive health care...
...Q: Those are all rather frightening predictions...
...A lot of the movement had been perceived that way...
...There are tens of thousands of people every year who are saved because of the auto safety standard...
...Ever since then, consumer issues have been regarded as women's issues, and thus "soft...
...Q: Over the years, you've waged and won quite a few public-interest battles...
...NADER: Not all...
...So I sat down and asked, "What would I do now if there had been no revocation...
...So it's very serious...
...He will pour all his support into the areas driven by mega-corporate pressures...
...It doesn't have any function, so you eliminate it as much as you can...
...That standard would have put automatic seatbelts and/or airbags into new cars...
...NADER: There are only twenty-four hours in a day...
...My parents owned a bakery-delicatessen, and it was kind of a community center...
...Anyway, if you don't get that kind of reaction as a leader—you're not a leader...
...Aw, people don't say that I'm impossible to work with...
...NADER: Just look around the world...
...And after law school, I went into private practice for a few years in my home state...
...People who'd worked on this for a long time were saying, "It's over...
...The sellers have charge of it: in the way they develop the health system, in the way they develop the energy system, in the way they develop agribusiness...
...Participation in public decisions will become tougher because the procedures will be tightened up to exclude the citizen from various regulatory agency proceedings...
...I mean, there I was representing people injured in car accidents, and I kept thinking, "What is this...
...I never was alienated by it...
...One example: In January 1981, right after Reagan's inauguration, I went up to see the new Transportation Secretary, Drew Lewis, and said, "The way you have to look at auto safety standards is that there is a human being hanging by a string ten floors up, and when you revoke those auto safety standards, you'll be going 'snip' to that string...
...Q: No, you didn't...
...The way I see the consumer movement is that it is a force to put the citizen in charge of the economy...
...That means that probably 100,000 injuries have been prevented...
...A long time ago I asked myself, "Does pessimism have any function...
...It's really implemented the old point that information is the currency of democracy...
...Q: Was that paper the beginning of your commitment to automotive safety...
...Obviously, the consumer movement would have developed without me...
...Congress will still be able to block him...
...A man without a family doesn't have to say, "I can't take this risk because I have a wife and two kids...
...Major epidemics of local violence...
...Q: Is there a nonconsumerist side to Ralph Nader...
...Q: So if you weren't discouraged when Reagan began tearing into reformist programs, what was your reaction...
...It's the organizations I helped build...
...For me, that's really it: showing people what could be done and giving people some tools with which to do things...
...You just pick them up everywhere...
...This relates to genetic damage...
...Some of the things that are common abroad could start to happen here...
...At fifty, he is this country's best-known consumer activist, founder of the modern consumer rights movement, and the author of twelve books...
...Consumer, Mr...
...Before that, the work was done with students who were off for the summer: "Nader's Raiders...
...All that's still intact...
...Surely that must be discouraging...
...Just people who can't put in a day's work say that...
...NADER: Yeah...
...Q: After doing undergraduate work at Princeton, you went to Harvard Law School...
...Q: That's really quite terrific...
...I made that choice, and no, I don't regret it...
...Ford is going to make them available as an option...
...This one thing has opened up the system tremendously...
...That way the multiplier effect gets going...
...That didn't get through...
...Is that true...
...I also worked in Washington on a Federal car safety program...
...For instance, in my third year, I did a paper entitled "Automotive Design Safety and Legal Liability...
...Q: Do you have any addictions...
...The fact is, statutes that produced the changes have not been dismantled...
...In other words, the movement goes to the core of the value systems of the society...
...NADER: I don't count...
...NADER: Just the same Claudia Dreifus's interviews appear regularly in Playboy, The Dial, and Mademoiselle...
...But you got a sense that things were wrong when you walked into a courtroom...
...We were a prime factor in the 1974 amendments to the Freedom of Information law, which passed despite Gerald Ford's veto...
...NADER: It was one thing—not the only thing...
...Nader believes that being a full-time citizen is one's highest calling— and that's exactly how he lives his life: devoting himself double-time to lobbying, muckraking, organizing, and general troublemaking...
...Reagan hasn't even been able to touch the Freedom of Information Act, which is one of his prime targets...
...Still, what I was doing wasn't seen as "soft"—which was a plus...
...Historically, the consumer movement began with the women's magazines at the turn of the century...
...NADER: Newspaper reading...
...Do you think there would have been a national consumers' m o v e m e n t if y o u hadn't been o n the scene right when you were...
...You can get too contemporary in your information acquisition...
...It quickly established you as a national institution: Mr...
...Some people canbut they don't have the intensity...
...NADER: To say that is not to understand the depth of the consumer movement...
...NADER: It's hard to say...
...NADER: It can come to be...
...Public Citizen...
...There'll be more military contracts and higher military spending...
...Q: Specifically...
...General Motors operates world-wide twenty-four hours a day...
...Q: That's not an addiction...
...I went to Mexico in the early 1950s and saw some real raw poverty up in the mountains and especially in Mexico City...
...In 1965, as a young Washington lawyer, he wrote Unsafe at Any Speed, which became a bestseller and spurred important auto safety reforms...
...What a real leader does is prod, prove, inspire, initiate...
...NADER: Well, that's said about anybody who has demanding standards...
...People came there and talked about how they felt about issues...
...Also, the Public Interest Research Groups—I'm tremendously proud of them...
...Actually, I never needed too much of that kind of thing...
...After tailing you for almost a year, they discovered that you had no personal life and that you were as "compromisable" as a friendly local priest...
...That's a fundamental unfairness that's developing in this country—corporations have all the rights that human beings have, but they have privileges and immunities that human beings don't have under our Constitution...
...NADER: Well, there's a tendency for people when they come up against a loss to get derailed...
...There will be no curbs on new harmful technologies...
...There will be more governmental secrecy...
...NADER: Well, Harvard was a very career-oriented kind of place—technical...
...Repression...
...You lose at a lot of things...
...NADER: I don't know...
...Q: What do you think you'll be like when you're old...
...When did you first notice that the world was an unjust place...
...Q: When you were picking a career, why did you choose law...
Vol. 48 • July 1984 • No. 7
