RALPH NADER RECONSIDERED
Rowe, Jonathan
RALPH NADER RECONSIDERED By Jonathan Rowe On a blustery evening last month Ralph Nader was speaking at the city hall in Takoma Park, Maryland, a community just over the District of Columbia...
...it's hard to talk about corporate power through media that are prime examples of that power...
...He complained about institutions like Harvard Law School ("a high-priced tool factory") that train professionals without an ethic of commitment or service...
...Everyone who worked with Nader in those years remembers the thousands of letters, many on ruled dime-store paper and addressed simply to "Ralph Nader, White House, Washington, D.C.," imploring his intervention in all manner of life problems and complaints...
...It's a way of thinking about economics and life that precludes the need for thinking— let alone commitment and sacrifice—at all...
...Fifteen years ago that would have been front page news," he said...
...If this could seem a specter in the nation's boardrooms, it was also unsettling in Washington, D.C., where commitment is expected to remain within polite limits, and where many people see no inconsistency between aspiring for a six-figure salary on the one hand and social values that include a cleaner environment or helping the poor on the other...
...Power has got to be insecure to be responsive,' Nader has observed...
...To date Buyers Up has signed up almost 3,000 members in the Washington, D.C...
...Nader has spoken at business schools about the social possibilities of business...
...Patiently, he leads the gathering through the steps that connect a 25-cent-per-gallon discount on heating fuel to the larger idea of an economy in which consumers—or-"buyers" as Nader now prefers to call them—have real say...
...The answer, Nader said, was the erosion in law of a very old-fashioned value—personal responsibility...
...Trying to make a democracy work better—what could be more pleasurable...
...A "corporation" back then was granted a special charter by a state legislature to perform a specific public function, such as building a toll road or a canal...
...But there hasn't been a corresponding effort to develop better candidates and mobilize a genuine electoral base...
...The smallscale business in particular can serve a social as well as economic function...
...But often he lapses into a Manichean universe in which the consumer is always right and the producer— especially if it is a corporation—always wrong...
...There was a touch of defiance, too, in the narrow collars and ties that were decidely uncool at the time...
...Pollution, for example, was really a form of socializing costs...
...GM's snooping on Nader helped ensure passage of the Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966, the basic auto safety legislation...
...For the past 15 years he has goaded every conceivable audience, from trial lawyers and doctors to psychologists and engineers, to do more...
...A hundred years ago companies subjected workers to conditions that were tangible and given to graphic depiction...
...They'd just be pushed around:" Nader was interested in the idea of an ombudsman—a sort of public advocate for such people within the government—and traveled to Scandanavia to explore the idea...
...His own work centered on highway safety, an interest prompted by the accidents he had observed while hitchhiking around the country...
...Then there was the broader realm of corporate economic crime, which was similarly elusive because abstract...
...We are "biologically obsolete" regarding the new violence that surrounds us, Nader said...
...The starting point was simply to apply to these institutions called corporations the same standards of civil behavior that we apply regularly to individuals...
...Nader had written a long paper in law school on the liability of manufacturers for unsafe automobile design and had pursued this issue in his legal practice and writing...
...Loving the law This is not to say that Nader is above criticism...
...After a talk in Virginia the week before, also on the subject of Buyers Up, Nader was approached by a little man of the type that always seems to show up at his speeches—a thick European accent, a clutch of papers under his arm, eager to confer on a highly important matter...
...They don't count votes in court, they count rights...
...People nod in agreement when Nader raises questions such as why they can't have more say in the insurance policies they buy or the kinds of food that the supermarket carries on its shelves...
...But how were they going to recruit talented young people if these kids insisted on asking bothersome questions about the worth of what the company was doing...
...The results he achieved in the early years did arise more from the way members of Congress feared the bad publicity he could generate than from the clout of an actual army of citizen supporters...
...But my hope is that Nader puts more stress on the citizen role—and responsibility—and less exclusively on the consumer, because the latter isn't big enough, and doesn't do justice to what Nader represents...
...The subject of the meeting was Buyers Up, Nader's latest undertaking, in which homeowners and small businesses combine their purchasing power to negotiate a lower price for home heating fuel...
...When the needs of production come first, then producers resort to every strategy and artifice to get us to consume more, even if such consumption is unnecessary or unhealthy...
...But when Nader speaks before audiences, as he still frequently does, the response seems indistinguishable from what it was a decade ago...
...But at the same time, Nader has shown an impatience with representative government when it is slow to see the light...
...The mood was represented by a memo Lewis Powell wrote for the U.S...
...But while we are building new institutions, don't we have to attend to the oldest and most basic, the way the Right wingers like Richard Viguerie are...
...The corporate form shielded investors from personal liability for the actions of their business...
...When the manager approaches you, inform him that you represent a group of several hundred households and that if his store passes, your group will call to set up an appointment to negotiate on such things as the nutritional value of the food he carries...
...Enormous waste results...
...The industry had always preferred to keep safety discussions focused on the driver and the road...
...Then I realized that you have to be more concrete if you want to reach people!' Start with the cars, then people might begin to ask questions about the kind of companies that make them...
...At the hearings on GM's snooping, in 1966, Robert Kennedy was able to shame the GM chief by asking him how much the company spent on safety research and how much it made in profits...
...The groups now operate largely out of modestly comfortable offices at Dupont Circle and on Capitol Hill...
...If consumerism alone is not large enough to define the political movement the country needs, neither is it as large as what Nader really represents...
...We gotta do something...
...To grouse about the inadequate returns of public service, to declare government itself the enemy, is to deny the dignity of working toward public solutions to common problems...
...But these hardly define the universe of important issues, let alone the qualities of citizenship and commitment Nader has embodied so eloquently...
...in which leases are written more in favor of the tenant...
...Then too, there are tight strictures upon public debate in this country...
...It was enough to make people squirm a bit, and reporters were not exceptions...
...The cases were too small," he said...
...Guys are takin' pills to stay up, then it's booze to go to sleep...
...Are goods good...
...Nader seemed to personify the nation's concerns aroused earlier in the decade by books, such as Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, about the mounting detritus of industrial society...
...The consumer movement is an important way to mobilize a constituency group to counteract corporate power...
...people are going to do something, instead of just being protected by a government agency, and it gets the blood moving...
...I am responsible for my actions," he said, "But who is responsible for those of GM...
...And how many countries in the world can you do that in these days...
...On the whole, Nader has kept at arm's length from the electoral arena...
...There would be more time for other activities such as civic affairs...
...Now we have a burgeoning "leisure industry" from health spas to dish antennae to fill that time with consumption...
...When Reagan assures us that we can entrust life's cares to the "invisible hand," what he's really saying is, "Don't bother me, Jack...
...The most important question that can be asked about any society at any time is how much effort do citizens spend exercising their civic responsibility," he said...
...They can enjoy a healthier connection to their workplace than mere employees...
...It is common, for example, for by-laws to provide that corporations will pay for the legal expenses of officers and directors accused of breaking the law...
...The proposed Consumer Protection Agency, for which Nader worked tirelessly for almost a decade, illustrated a tendency to seek solutions in this judicial mold...
...RALPH NADER RECONSIDERED By Jonathan Rowe On a blustery evening last month Ralph Nader was speaking at the city hall in Takoma Park, Maryland, a community just over the District of Columbia line...
...And that's consumption...
...I'd like to thank him for being...
...Like the federal bureaucracy, they were not anticipated in the system of checks and balances which the framers devised to prevent the concentration of power...
...Rarely are representatives of a larger public able to weigh in with equal measure on the other side...
...In a blunder that has entered the American folklore, General Motors put a private detective on Nader's tail to dig up dirt about his personal life...
...months now and look at this...
...Consumer values aren't the only important ones...
...A few years ago," he says, "I thought the government would defend the American public...
...Addressing these concerns as consumer issues allows Nader to reach an audience broader than the readers of the leftish magazines...
...He's also spoken about the value of small business...
...People are gonna get killed, Ralph...
...Granted, Nader's unconventional manner, and frugalities such as buying 12 pairs of shoes and four dozen socks at the PX before leaving the Army, might understandably arouse curiosity...
...In Nader's mind a real consumer movement represents much more than the smart shopper mentality of Consumer Reports...
...Which one was the Andrew Carnegie, the builder and originator, and which one was the Khruschev or Chernenko working his way up the bureaucratic ranks...
...Enterprise can be a locus of community values, no less than a buyers coop can be...
...When Nader starts talking about consumer information banks at shopping centers and "professional consumers" to help people make wise shopping decisions, it really does begin to sound like the gospel of Consumer Reports...
...The anger brewing on the telephone rates could almost do it alone...
...Free market conservatives accused him of trying to substitute his own judgment for that of the "market"—as though you and I actually get to stand over the shoulder of the auto designers and choose the safety features we would like built into our car...
...The movement goes to the core of the value system of the society," Nader told a recent interviewer...
...For example, at CENEX, the cooperative oil company started in a burst of idealism years ago by the North Dakota Farmer's union, officials speak today like members of the oil industry, not a social movement...
...He was being called a "consumer advocate...
...Oh, don't you worry about that," Nader replied, chuckling, in a way that I found surprisingly reassuring...
...Chamber of Commerce before he was appointed to the Supreme Court, urging a corporate counteroffensive against the Nader menace...
...Look here, Ralph, look at these logs...
...Production would be geared to needs rather than wants...
...I don't know of any hoard of hippies or yippies who have managed to smog New York City or contaminate the Gulf of Mexico," he would say...
...These problems of course had implications for consumers, but they raised much broader questions of public policy...
...Is it so implausible, so distasteful," Nader said, "that a man would believe deeply enough in his work to dedicate his life to it...
...Instead of cleaning up its smokestacks, the company shifts the costs onto the people in the community who have to pay doctor bills for emphysema resulting from the plant's pollution...
...But more significantly, he tapped a vein of social concern among scores of young people then in college or law school, myself included...
...Nader was saying that there was an individual price to be paid, and ordered his own life accordingly...
...From Ricardo to Marx on down, he writes, Western economists have viewed the world "from the production side of the market—from capital and labor and selling" This fixation with production, Nader argues, causes us to ask the wrong questions...
...It is the number of cars and drugs sold that is the measure, not what the auto and drug industries add and subtract from the transportation usage and health of people," Nader writes...
...But since we see the equation from the production side, and automatically deem production as "good," we don't even raise that question...
...A fixture now on the Washington scene, it was inevitable that the Nader media presence would fade somewhat...
...As a student, he said, he used to talk in terms of broad world problems...
...Before that, decades had gone by...
...The idealism that isn't supposed to be there any more still is...
...How could you be committed to citizenship, to achieving your ideals, if you were preoccupied with making money...
...Federal agencies like the Federal Trade Commission and the Food and Drug Administration are besieged by industry lobbyists on hundreds of matters affecting daily life, from fairness standards for advertising to the drugs permitted on the market...
...The corner pharmacy If this is what the consumer movement really means, then let's have more of it...
...I remember the day, in a law school dorm, that I happened upon a Playboy interview with this Nader fellow...
...Worker ownership in particular holds promise in this regard...
...Nader is wary of worker ownership because there's no guarantee worker-owners will be any more enlightened on consumer issues than absentee shareholders are...
...A justifiable concern...
...But such hazards as radiation and carcinogenic additives to food assault us silently and invisibly...
...Corporations could deal with a government agency...
...He's about as close to a nonconsumer as you will find...
...It isn't just $200 off the price of a car...
...Still others have,taken Nader's reputation as a test of their journalistic spurs...
...How were they going to market consumer goods to abstemious people...
...What would we say about a neighbor who poured toxic wastes into our air and water...
...A true consumer economy, in other words, would be measured in terms of consumer wellbeing, not in terms of the amount of production...
...In the Takoma Park meeting, one man raised his hand to suggest that Nader keep 5 cents of the 25 cent per gallon price differential on the heating fuel to build the Buyers Up idea and extend it to other goods and services...
...Nader really regards consumer issues like unsafe cars as teaching devices...
...Nader seems genial and relaxed—a side of the man that only close associates used to see now breaking through the guarded public persona...
...No thoughtful person can question that the American economic system is under broad attack," Powell wrote, calling Nader "perhaps the single most effective antagonist of American business...
...The day we spoke, Nader pointed to a tiny auto recall story on the federal page of The Washington Post...
...He's the only one in Washington I'd like to be like...
...When two of his young attorneys helped tiny (population 905) Anmoore, West Virginia curb Union Carbide's plant, which was spewing horrendous industrial wastes over the town, Buck Gladden said simply, "I'd like to say one thing to Ralph Nader...
...In a recent essay in a volume titled, Beyond Reagan, Nader gives the consumer movement a surprisingly rich theoretical basis, sketching out the links between his personal nonconsumption and his "consumerist" concerns...
...Charters became an exemption from responsibilities rather than a statement of them...
...Once you've cast the movement in consumer terms, can you ever get it up to the high ground Nader surveys...
...It's got to have something to lose'.' Electoral politics are our basic engine of governmental responsiveness, messy and imperfect as they are...
...As Nader and two associates pointed out in Constitutionalizing the Corporation, the U.S...
...Upon his return he drafted bills for the Massachusetts and Connecticut legislatures and wrote on the subject, but with little result...
...Roche had joined GM at age 21 and stayed with the company all his life...
...I was there because I had fallen somewhat out of touch with Nader since leaving his organization in the seventies...
...A senior at Tufts University told the journalist Ken Auletta, "One of the reasons he's important is that he tells me to be idealistic...
...Sure, there are some sharks...
...Carping and obsessive as Nader can sometimes be on the subject, it was an analysis that rang true and was rooted not in foreign ideologies but in native American values...
...It is the production premise itself—and not the consumer movement as Nader defines it—that is really responsible for the commodity fetish that people associate with "consumerism...
...They're makin' us run 12, 13 hours—can't make those runs in the time they say...
...If you were to send ten pickpockets to New York and each of them were to do 50 jobs a day, that would, I suppose, make front-page news...
...metropolitan area...
...Richard Levick of the Michigan Public Interest Research Group told Post reporter Williams, "He's a hero to me...
...An example is David Sanford, who, when with The New Republic, wrote a mean little tract that inflated petty failings into high matters of state, in a manner that suggested Sanford might have a promising second career in divorce law...
...The corporation had become an institutional shield buffering people from the consequences of their own actions or omissions...
...But worker-owners are less likely to want to pollute the community they live in, and are less likely to want to move the plant to Singapore...
...The icons were not those who had sacrificed at all" Nader was even talking about the need for "secular monks" to commit themselves to the work of change with the same single-mindedness and indifference to material rewards of the religious orders of past ages...
...but in exchange for this extraordinary exemption from common law rules of responsibility, the enterprise had to keep strictly within the bounds of the specific project for which it was chartered...
...Electoral democracy is not, of course, the only kind...
...But on what really counts—a commitment to making democracy work and a willingness to sacrifice to that end—he is profoundly right...
...Sheer economic power is part of it, but also at fault is the form of corporation that has evolved in this country...
...Or go to the supermarket resolved not to buy anything but just walk up and down the aisles taking notes...
...They are now enjoying heating fuel prices 25 cents per gallon lower than those offered to the average consumer...
...Nothin...
...I've always suspected that one of the things that so unhinges Nader's corporate critics is how much closer his own life is to the rags-to-riches American archetype than are their own...
...Nader has done his share to put heat on congressmen he regards as wrong...
...Nader reminds us that enterprise isn't just in the pecuniary realm, that citizenship is no less a channel for individual initiative in which imagination and innovation are desperately needed...
...When people like Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp talk about enterprise, it is always in the pecuniary realm, always something we might be bribed to do by a cut in taxes...
...And again, "We can't possibly have a democracy with 200 million Americans and only a handful of citizens...
...He was, in short, drawing the connection between social policy and life practice...
...Powell was bewildered at this turn of events...
...He's the bad guy because he can't sell as low as Walgreen's out at the shopping center...
...Nowadays I don't even have an organization, and that's as it should be," he recently told an interviewer...
...He may not be on the news as much, but the auditorium is almost full, despite the nasty weather...
...Often, such behavior violated the corporation's own professed standards of free market principle...
...Why do institutions called corporations behave in this manner...
...As every business executive knows," he went on, "few elements of American society today have as little influence in government as the American businessman, the corporation, or even millions of corporate stockholders...
...The sin of the Reagan administration has not been in neglecting the consumer so much as in disparaging the concept of public life...
...I thought that I knew just exactly how he felt...
...And incidents like the time, during the ICC study, a group of truck drivers drove seven hours from upstate New York to show us firsthand evidence of the safety violations in which their companies were engaged...
...Furthermore, many of the issues he addresses are not the kind that individually stir a continuing groundswell of support...
...By the late seventies you couldn't shame an American auto executive by asking him about profits...
...Here's a man who came to Washington with nothing and built an organization and a movement by dint of his own diligence and persistence and who has maintained complete independence of thought and action...
...Buyers' groups can be the early links that bond people together...
...I had watched years go by and nothing happened," he said afterwards regarding his decision to come to Washington...
...Then too, the climate today is not what it was in the sixties...
...If Nader became an inspiration for young people, he also became a national symbol for taking on the big guys, an indication that one man still could make a difference...
...The auto companies had become objects of national solicitude instead...
...This was understandable...
...Nader's circle of associates grew into teams of students, unfortunately dubbed "Nader's raiders," investigating everything from the ownership of land in California to the company state of Delaware to (in my own case) the Interstate Commerce Commission, the oldest federal agency and assuredly the most boring of them all...
...Nader was asked recently for the three-zillionth time what he did for pleasure...
...The implications of this production bias are enormous...
...People with hundreds of life concerns will never work up as much intensity on an issue like automobile bumpers as the industry for which those bumpers are a form of daily bread...
...Sometimes he could provide tangible assistance...
...Combatting corporate self-interest with consumer self-interest is better than not combating it with anything...
...As long as we are preoccupied with our own advancement, we are not asking the questions that need to be asked...
...You are too high on rhetoric, too short on commitment, and perhaps too self-indulgent," was a typical remark to college audiences in the early seventies...
...Then too, one man can't do everything...
...It's a refreshing change from the mainly topdown consumer protection style of the seventies...
...Cooperative buying efforts like Buyers Up are great ideas...
...Quoting Fortune, Powell went on to warn that Nader "aimed at smashing utterly the target of his hatred, which is corporate power...
...Look at these equipment reports, Ralph...
...We need some way to bring together large amounts of capital, and worker ownership is a more benign way of doing so than the absentee-owned corporation...
...For one thing, he says, it's a question of community...
...The problem was that those agencies were set up to protect the public in the first place...
...One is a lingering ambivalence regarding the electoral arena...
...Yes, you can call the environment a consumer issue because dirty air is a form of "involuntary consumption" But at some point the lines on the graph cross and our self-interest as consumers must take back seat...
...The driving force in the economy becomes getting us to consume more rather than to serve our needs, which might be better served by consuming less...
...To get in the mood," Nader continues, "the next time you go to Sears and they give you a form to fill out, cross out everything you don't like and put in things you do like, such as doubling the warranty!' He's enjoying this...
...Nader had stepped into the breach and become a lobbyist for the public when no one else was...
...Nonconsumption is not even a tolerated item of public discussion, Nader observes...
...Nothing...
...Self-indulgence has become a form of social control...
...But in the middle of the last century, this bargain unraveled...
...Almost every significant breakthrough," he once told an audience, "has come from the spark, the drive, the initiative of one person...
...But Nader is the first to acknowledge that history is not encouraging on the possibility of their becoming a movement with larger political goals...
...The CPA was to be a sort of institutional lawyer that would make up for this failing, participating in—or initiating—proceedings at the other agencies on the consumers' behalf...
...The consumer movement that Nader envisions would put less emphasis on consumption—and on the income necessary to support it...
...The only ones that haven't changed much, despite three moves, are Nader's own...
...Ultimately, it's a political movement the country needs...
...Early on, Nader was accused of operating in a "Lone Ranger" manner, using the press and congressional allies almost single-handedly to generate momentum for legislative reform...
...Not all the social harm comes from the production side...
...You don't see him on the news as much as you used to, and it's no longer true that every other bright young person you meet in Washington is hankering to work with him...
...That the question itself sounds naive suggests how inured we have become to an unsatisfactory system...
...Their stock epithet became "self-appointed," as in "self-appointed consumer advocate," as though Nader should have gotten an official appointment before presuming to act like a citizen...
...You can disagree with Nader here and there...
...The public—as consumers—would be better off without them—with less tobacco and alcohol and fewer automobile accidents...
...Then followed a spate of laws on kindred subjects, such as contamination of meat and poultry, natural gas pipelines, and coal mine safety...
...Business mavericks like Robert Townsend of Avis, author of Up the Organization, liked the way Nader was jostling the sacred cows, but in the boardrooms alarms were sounding...
...Nader is commonly called "anti-business," but the overriding theme in his work has been to find ways to bring corporations back within the pale of individual responsibility...
...Compare that to a James Roche, the GM chairman who had to apologize to Nader for the company's spying on him...
...He goads them with a little trademark Nader sarcasm: "What are you getting for the extra 25 cents a gallon [that dealers are charging...
...The groups and causes Nader has supported certainly enrich the climate in which electoral politics take place...
...Jonathan Rowe is an editor of The Washington Monthly...
...Harvard Law School never raised the question of sacrifice...
...But at some point, self-interest itself becomes the problem, in whatever form...
...Then there will be something worthy of being called a community!' Betraying a bit of a preoccupation, he adds, "and not isolated citizens ready to be prey to multinational corporations...
...The charter thus served to keep the corporation generally within the compass of community values...
...Chernenkos in the boardroom If Nader tends in some ways to neglect enterprise, he broadens our horizons regarding what enterprise can be about...
...It was Nader's commitment to the old-fashioned virtues of individual hard work, thrift, and civic responsibility that put him right at the geological fault line between profession and practice in American life—between the values a Reagan kitchen cabinet member might profess and the values his company spreads among the populace through its advertising...
...The new nature of corporate violence tended to make us oblivious to it...
...Here was a man who lived in a cheap rooming house, owned no car, and kept his material wants to a minimum so he could do the work he really cared about...
...It reinforced a feeling I have had that Nader's star is going to rise again on the national scene...
...Is it so implausible, so distasteful, ' Nader asked, 'that a man would believe deeply enough in his work to dedicate his life to it?' Fifteen years ago, when student leaders wanted to change the "system," Nader was relentlessly empirical, talking about hot dogs and automobiles...
...After graduation Nader had traveled as a freelance journalist and then worked in a small law practice in Hartford, Connecticut, where he saw that most of the legal problems of ordinary people went without redress...
...But Powell was right that Nader was raising fundamental questions about a subject that had receded from public debate in the prosperity of postwar America and has been swept aside again today—the economic and political power of the large corporation...
...They could enjoy the benefits of limited liability without the corresponding responsibilities...
...But the large corporation does not define the universe of production...
...I don't want to worry about it...
...I've been reporting this brake problem for...
...Constitution doesn't even mention corporations, as improbable as that would seem today...
...How could you expect to deny corporate power in the political arena without saying no to its intrusions in the personal arena in the form of consumption that we don't need or that may be harmful...
...And nobody has done more speaking around the country to build a constituency for the kinds of reforms he represents...
...Enormous skill, artifice, and resources are used in getting consumers to buy what the sellers want to sell notwithstanding the availability of efficient, safe, economical durable and effective alternatives, including that of buying nothing at all" (emphasis supplied...
...But what if the little corner pharmacist is like the one I know who contributes to clean-up campaigns on a declining Main Street and takes a personal interest in his customers, often suggesting that they just go home and get a good night's sleep instead of taking more drugs...
...Now that the nation has reverted back to the conservatism of the fifties, it is Nader who is saying, as he did to a law audience recently, that "it is time for us to move on the structure and strategy of power and build the institutions that can deal with these problems" "We gotta do something" When Ralph Nader arrived in Washington in 1964, Lyndon Johnson was president, there was no such thing as a consumer or environmental movement, and most of the members of Nader's class at Harvard Law School (1958) were well on their way to remunerative careers...
...Generally it is the little corner pharmacy that comes out at the bottom...
...These teams evolved into the network of organizations that today employ between 75 and 100 people carrying on the research and lobbying work that Nader started...
...Television alone takes 25 hours a week," Nader noted recently...
...He spends his time on "empowerment" projects like Buyers Up and Citizen Utility Boards (CUBs), organizations that represent rate payers before public utility boards and that are financed through solicitations the utilities have to include from time to time in utility bills...
...You've got to practice what you preach," he said, "so you can preach what you practice...
...To undertake projects like these required large amounts of capital, which investors would not put up if they were to be personally liable for the whole enterprise...
...But set up a system of acquisition that is derivative and obscure, like the oil depletion allowance or import quotas and nobody pays any attention...
...I'm constantly told, 'Be realistic...don't be a dreamer' He tells me that's not true, that I can make a difference...
...I mean, they aren't giving you gourmet oil!' Then to the larger view: "The consequences of homeowners banding together goes far beyond saving a few dollars, as important as that is for the family budget...
...Bad neighbors Not everyone, of course, was thanking Nader for being...
...In Washington, Nader developed networks among public-spirited reporters and congressional staff members, feeding them stories and issues...
...Early on, Nader's imagination was captured by the role of the crusading attorney who prevailed because law, facts, and tactics, rather than a majority, were on his side...
...I often cringe at the results of consumer price surveys—of drugs, for example...
...The days of working out of fraternity houses with crumbling plaster ceilings are long past...
...When GM President James Roche had to apologize publicly, before a Senate committee, it propelled Nader out of his backroom obscurity in Washington and made him a national hero...
...Secular monks But Nader saw that it wasn't enough merely to point the finger at corporations...
...I decided it took total commitment...
...Still, I worry about the gap between the theory and the actuality...
...The problems often seemed overwhelming, and you could see why Nader was thinking in terms of new organizations and agencies to do something about them...
...Given the current infatuation with the "supply side:' it's especially important to raise questions about the social impact of production...
...And Ralph, you call yourself a citizen...
...Why does this man call himself a "consumer advocate" in the first place...
...As states like Delaware and N ew Jersey began to bid against one another to attract the burgeoning corporations, the erosion of individual responsibility extended to the managers of the business as well as the owners...
...A female law student broke in, "I just wanted to say, 'Keep it up, Mr...
...now Nader was changing the premise of the debate, directing attention to the car and the company that made it...
...Exxon doesn't go home and the consumer advocates can't either...
...in which "big buying groups will have more leverage and power to set their own terms in the market place...
...If in the last 50 years the consumer value had the power to prevail, our nation would be humming along on one-third of the energy...
...But reporters have tended to dismiss Nader's life habits as eccentricities or as dark symptoms of psychological disorder, and have been reluctant to come to grips with the life values that inform them...
...His book, Unsafe at Any Speed, was a stinging indictment of the Corvair and, more fundamentally, of a business enterprise that showed more concern about styling considerations than about the basic question of safety...
...Media that live off advertisements urging people to buy are not about to give much time to announcements or programs urging people not to buy...
...Now we have to develop a new kind of power, based on the interest of the buying group...
...By design, the Nader network has become an institution...
...The consumer issues strike a chord as well, at least among the middle class audiences I witnessed...
...But what if a closer examination reveals that the larger GNP was due primarily to increased consumption of alcohol and tobacco and to a rash of automobile accidents that caused the purchases of medical services and replacement parts to soar...
...Sure there are consumer problems, like one-sided warranties and defective products...
...Free incorporation" laws permitted anyone to adopt the corporate form for any undertaking they desired...
...Nader sees the consumer movement as a fundamental challenge to the premises of Western economics both left and right...
...If the gross national product goes up next quarter, the economists will break out the champagne...
...The best hobby of all When I return to most of the Nader offices these days, I state my name and business, just like any other visitor...
...You must believe this...
...Typical was the somewhat querulous observation by Juan Williams in The Washington Post Sunday magazine a couple of years back: "He's too busy for fiction, just as he's too busy to own a car, too busy to have a family, too busy to care about clothes, or anything but reforming the nation for consumers...
...Nader reminds us that this is not the only possible channel for individual initiative, that citizenship is a form of endeavor calling forth no less the qualities of imagination, persistence, risktaking, and pluck that are commonly associated with business success...
...How is he faring in these conservative times...
...Doesn't he risk trivializing his movement by casting it in the image of Consumer Reports...
...Members of a Buyers Up are likely to be more attuned than others to consumer issues...
...The judiciary is the citadel for the minority view," he told Rolling Stone...
...Nader has pretty much withdrawn from the Washington news scene and has turned his network of organizations, called Public Citizen, over to his closest associates...
...Nader conjures up a future in which consumers have their own attorneys sitting across the table from the insurance companies negotiating policies...
...At Takoma Park, a young engineer nervously volunteered his services...
...Nader can even sound like the individualists of the bygone era...
...For all the talk about innovation, it is the realm of citizenship, from PTAs to electoral politics, where this quality is most needed...
...Today people have no need to connect with their neighbors...
...When production comes first, then more and more of our lives get redefined as new frontiers for consumption...
...The pictures on the opening spread showed him in varying degrees of discomfort, as though defying the feel-good aura of the magazine...
...If they aren't doing their job—which in many cases they aren't—isn't the answer to elect a president and a congress who will give us tough minded regulators who really want to protect the public...
...The magazine dubbed him the "zealous consumer crusader," but it was the crusader rather than the consumer part that lit the fire...
...Americans are starved," he said, "for acts of the individual in a conflict situation outside the sports arena...
...Then they'll start asking questions about municipal services, the schools, pollution...
...And also, when it works well, it works because courts are insulated from the usual manipulative power plays in the executive and legislative branches," such as campaign contributions and the like...
...What we now call "leisure," for example, used to be the time when people visited with neighbors, got involved in the PTA or civic association or politics...
Vol. 17 • March 1985 • No. 2
