How the Corporations Broke Ralph Nader and America, Too

AP / Carolyn Kaster
Apr 5, 2010
By Chris Hedges
Ralph Nader's descent from being one of the most respected and powerful men
in the country to being a pariah illustrates the totality of the corporate
coup. Nader's marginalization was not accidental. It was orchestrated to
thwart the legislation that Nader and his allies-who once consisted of many
in the Democratic Party-enacted to prevent corporate abuse, fraud and
control. He was targeted to be destroyed. And by the time he was shut out of
the political process with the election of Ronald Reagan, the government was
in the hands of corporations. Nader's fate mirrors our own.
"The press discovered citizen investigators around the mid-1960s," Nader
told me when we spoke a few days ago. "I was one of them. I would go down
with the press releases, the findings, the story suggestions and the
internal documents and give it to a variety of reporters. I would go to
Congress and generate hearings. Oftentimes I would be the lead witness. What
was interesting was the novelty; the press gravitates to novelty. They
achieved great things. There was collaboration. We provided the newsworthy
material. They covered it. The legislation passed. Regulations were issued.
Lives were saved. Other civic movements began to flower."
Nader was singled out for destruction, as Henriette Mantel and Stephen
Skrovan point out in their engaging documentary movie on Nader, "An
Unreasonable Man." General Motors had him followed in an attempt to
blackmail him. It sent an attractive woman to his neighborhood Safeway
supermarket in a bid to meet him while he was shopping and then seduce him;
the attempt failed, and GM, when exposed, had to issue a public apology.
But far from ending their effort to destroy Nader, corporations unleashed a
much more sophisticated and well-funded attack. In 1971, the corporate
lawyer and future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell wrote an
eight-page memo, titled "Attack on American Free Enterprise System," in
which he named Nader as the chief nemesis of corporations. It became the
blueprint for corporate resurgence. Powell's memo led to the establishment
of the Business Roundtable, which amassed enough money and power to direct
government policy and mold public opinion. The Powell memo outlined ways
corporations could shut out those who, in "the college campus, the pulpit,
the media, the intellectual and literary journals," were hostile to
corporate interests. Powell called for the establishment of lavishly funded
think tanks and conservative institutes to churn out ideological tracts that
attacked government regulation and environmental protection. His memo led to
the successful effort to place corporate-friendly academics and economists
in universities and on the airwaves, as well as drive out those in the
public sphere who questioned the rise of unchecked corporate power and
deregulation. It saw the establishment of organizations to monitor and
pressure the media to report favorably on issues that furthered corporate
interests. And it led to the building of legal organizations to promote
corporate interests in the courts and appointment of sympathetic judges to
the bench.
"It was off to the races," Nader said. "You could hardly keep count of the
number of right-wing corporate-funded think tanks. These think tanks
specialized, especially against the tort system. We struggled through the
Nixon and early Ford years, when inflation was a big issue. Nixon did things
that horrified conservatives. He signed into law OSHA, the Environmental
Protection Agency and air and water pollution acts because he was afraid of
the people from the rumble that came out of the 1960s. He was the last
Republican president to be afraid of liberals."
The corporations carefully studied and emulated the tactics of the consumer
advocate they wanted to destroy. "Ralph Nader came along and did serious
journalism; that is what his early stuff was, such as 'Unsafe at Any Speed, " the investigative journalist David Cay Johnston told me. "The big books they [Nader and associates] put out were serious, first-rate journalism. Corporate America was terrified by this. They went to school on Nader. They said, 'We see how you do this.' You gather material, you get people who are articulate, you hone how you present this and the corporations copy-catted him with one big difference-they had no regard for the truth. Nader may have had a consumer ideology, but he was not trying to sell you a product. He is trying to tell the truth as best as he can determine it. It does not mean it is the truth. It means it is the truth as best as he and his people can determine the truth. And he told you where he was coming from."
The Congress, between 1966 and 1973, passed 25 pieces of consumer
legislation, nearly all of which Nader had a hand in authoring. The auto and
highway safety laws, the meat and poultry inspection laws, the oil pipeline
safety laws, the product safety laws, the update on flammable fabric laws,
the air pollution control act, the water pollution control act, the EPA,
OSHA and the Environmental Council in the White House transformed the
political landscape. Nader by 1973 was named the fourth most influential
person in the country after Richard Nixon, Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren
and the labor leader George Meany.
"Then something very interesting happened," Nader said. "The pressure of
these meetings by the corporations like General Motors, the oil companies
and the drug companies with the editorial people, and probably with the
publishers, coincided with the emergence of the most destructive force to
the citizen movement-Abe Rosenthal, the editor of The New York Times.
Rosenthal was a right-winger from Canada who hated communism, came here and
hated progressivism. The Times was not doing that well at the time.
Rosenthal was commissioned to expand his suburban sections, which required a
lot of advertising. He was very receptive to the entreaties of corporations,
and he did not like me. I would give material to Jack Morris in the
Washington bureau and it would not get in the paper."
Rosenthal, who banned social critics such as Noam Chomsky from being quoted
in the paper and met frequently for lunch with conservative icon William F.
Buckley, demanded that no story built around Nader's research could be
published unless there was a corporate response. Corporations, informed of
Rosenthal's dictate, refused to comment on Nader's research. This tactic
meant the stories were never published. The authority of the Times set the
agenda for national news coverage. Once Nader disappeared from the Times,
other major papers and the networks did not feel compelled to report on his
investigations. It was harder and harder to be heard.
"There was, before we were silenced, a brief, golden age of journalism,"
Nader lamented. "We worked with the press to expose corporate abuse on
behalf of the public. We saved lives. This is what journalism should be
about; it should be about making the world a better and safer place for our
families and our children, but then it ended and we were shut out."
"We were thrown on the defensive, and once we were on the defensive it was
difficult to recover," Nader said. "The break came in 1979 when they
deregulated natural gas. Our last national stand was for the Consumer
Protection Agency. We put everything we had on that. We would pass it during
the 1970s in the House on one year, then the Senate during the next session,
then the House later on. It ping-ponged. Each time we would lose ground. We
lost it because Carter, although he campaigned on it, did not lift a finger
compared to what he did to deregulate natural gas. We lost it by 20 votes in
the House, although we had a two-thirds majority in the Senate waiting for
it. That was the real beginning of the decline. Then Reagan was elected. We
tried to be the watchdog. We put out investigative reports. They would not
be covered."
"The press in the 1980s would say 'why should we cover you?' " Nader went
on. " 'Who is your base in Congress?' I used to be known as someone who
could trigger a congressional hearing pretty fast in the House and Senate.
They started looking towards the neoliberals and neocons and the
deregulation mania. We put out two reports on the benefits of regulation and
they too disappeared. They did not get covered at all. This was about the
same the time that [former U.S. Rep.] Tony Coelho taught the Democrats,
starting in 1979 when he was head of the House Campaign Finance Committee,
to start raising big-time money from corporate interests. And they did. It
had a magical influence. It is the best example I have of the impact of
money. The more money they raised the less interested they were in any of
these popular issues. They made more money when they screwed up the tax
system. There were a few little gains here and there; we got the Freedom of
Information law through in 1974. And even in the 1980s we would get some
things done, GSA, buying air bag-equipped cars, the drive for standardized
air bags. We would defeat some things here and there, block a tax loophole
and defeat a deregulatory move. We were successful in staunching some of the
deregulatory efforts."
Nader, locked out of the legislative process, decided to send a message to
the Democrats. He went to New Hampshire and Massachusetts during the 1992
primaries and ran as "none of the above." In 1996 he allowed the Green Party
to put his name on the ballot before running hard in 2000 in an effort that
spooked the Democratic Party. The Democrats, fearful of his grass-roots
campaign, blamed him for the election of George W. Bush, an absurdity that
found fertile ground among those who had abandoned rational inquiry for the
thought-terminating clichés of television.
Nader's status as a pariah corresponded with an unchecked assault by
corporations on the working class. The long-term unemployment rate, which in
reality is close to 20 percent, the millions of foreclosures, the crippling
personal debts that plague households, the personal bankruptcies, Wall
Street's looting of the U.S. Treasury, the evaporation of savings and
retirement accounts and the crumbling of the country's vital infrastructure
are taking place as billions in taxpayer subsidies, obscene profits, bonuses
and compensation are enjoyed by the corporate overlords. We will soon be
forced to buy the defective products of the government-subsidized drug and
health insurance companies, which will remain free to raise co-payments and
premiums, especially if policyholders get seriously ill. The oil, gas, coal
and nuclear power companies have made a mockery of Barack Obama's promises
to promote clean, renewal energy. And we are rapidly becoming a third-world
country, cannibalized by corporations, with two-thirds of the population
facing financial difficulty and poverty.
The system is broken. And the consumer advocate who represented the best of
our democracy was broken with it. As Nader pointed out after he published
"Unsafe at Any Speed" in 1965, it took nine months to federally regulate the
auto industry for safety and fuel efficiency. Two years after the collapse
of Bear Stearns there is still no financial reform. The large hedge funds
and banks are using billions in taxpayer subsidies to once again engage in
the speculative games that triggered the first financial crisis and will
almost certainly trigger a second. The corporate press, which abets our vast
historical amnesia, does nothing to remind us how we got here. It speaks in
the hollow and empty slogans handed to it by public relations firms, its
corporate paymasters and the sound-bite society.
"If you organize 1 percent of the people in this country along progressive
lines you can turn the country around, as long as you give them
infrastructure," Nader said. "They represent a large percentage of the
population. Take all the conservatives who work in Wal-Mart: How many would
be against a living wage? Take all the conservatives who have pre-existing
conditions: How many would be for single-payer not-for-profit health
insurance? When you get down to the concrete, when you have an active
movement that is visible and media-savvy, when you have a community, a lot
of people will join. And lots more will support it. The problem is that most
liberals are estranged from the working class. They largely have the good
jobs. They are not hurting."
"The real tragedy is that citizens' movements should not have to rely on the
commercial media, and public television and radio are disgraceful-if
anything they are worse," Nader said. "In 30-some years [Bill] Moyers has
had me on [only] twice. We can't rely on the public media. We do what we can
with Amy [Goodman] on "Democracy Now!" and Pacifica stations. When I go to
local areas I get very good press, TV and newspapers, but that doesn't have
the impact, even locally. The national press has enormous impact on the
issues. It is not pleasant having to say this. You don't want to telegraph
that you have been blacked out, but on the other hand you can't keep it
quiet. The right wing has won through intimidation."