disinformation | ralph nader: millionaire lawyer for president

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ralph nader: millionaire lawyer for president
by Nick Mamatas (Laddertrick@gvny.com) - January 21, 2002

Consumer advocate Ralph Nader portrays himself as an ideological Outsider - and a crusader for social justice against corporate rule.

Nader ran for President of the United States on the Green Party ticket (2000). He actually got his start working with Daniel Moynihan, former assistant Secretary of Labor and New York Senator. Nader's path to success in government work was not dissimilar to many other Ivy League grads of his generation (Princeton and Harvard Law) until he penned Unsafe At Any Speed (1965).

This book exposed unsafe cars, most famously, the General Motors Corvair. The battle between GM and Nader encompassed dueling press releases, a smear campaign on the part of GM, and an invasion of privacy suit against the carmaker. GM settled the case and Nader used the money as the seed fund for his consumer protection movement.

Nader, while living simply, has amassed a fortune and poured it into his consumer protection campaigns. He worked to change laws regarding the environment, taxation, occupational safety and corporate responsibility. He also fueled the Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) movement, founded the Essential Information foundation and supported the magazine >Multinational Monitor out of his own pocket for years.

While putting his money where his mouth is, Nader spent most of his career allying with the Democratic Party. He didn't stray from his roots until the early 1990s, when his stands on union organization and NAFTA conflicted with the conservative Clinton administration's own free trade goals.

In 1996, Nader ran for President on the Green Party ticket, and got nearly 700,000 votes, in spite of the fact that his budget was only $5,000, almost all of it earmarked for his lunchtime sandwiches. The continued rightward drift of the American center inspired him to try harder in 2000; Nader hopes to raise $5 million, get on the ballot in every state and bring the Green Party enough votes to qualify the party for federal matching funds.

However, Nader's elitist roots continue to manifest. Nader is pro-union, unless it comes to his own employees. He engaged in lockouts, nuisance lawsuits and even filed bogus crime reports against staff members of Multinational Monitor in 1984, when the employees there tried to form a union. He also crushed a union drive within the PIRGs. Sixteen years later, while appealing to union workers and gaining the endorsement of California nurses, Nader still believes that his projects should be off-limits to unions.

Many of Nader's positions show how one can move from left to right without changing one's opinion. He is against expanding immigration, even as the AFL-CIO is finally shaking off its hateful anti-immigrant and anti-foreign rhetoric. Nader's positions on free trade and the economy put him closer to Pat Buchanan than any other Presidential candidate, and Nader has even explicitly called his platform a conservative one. Nader is also largely silent on the issue of abortion, and spent much of his career waving away gay rights issues as "gonadal politics."

Finally, Nader's anti-corporate politics are aimed on increasing the powers of the legal establishment. With more than a whiff of conspiracy theory, Nader has said that most of the problems with corporate America can be traced to the fact that corporations are legal entities with rights, rather than legally controlled vehicles for the "owners."

In addition to ignoring the long history of imperialism, the slave trade, privateering and other instances of pre-modern corporate abuses, Nader's recipe for reform is guaranteed to enrich trial lawyers and policy wonks, at the expense of the grassroots. Nader's appeal to social movements and local groups comes only after decades of sidestepping them while playing crusader, barrister and boss.

The views expressed above represent the writer and not necessarily those of The Disinformation Company Ltd.

The Concord Principles: An Agenda For A New Initiatory Democracy
Nader's 1992 statement of principles for rebuilding democracy in the United States. This document also includes a lot of silly "whereas" statements and populist generalities. Like a conservative, Nader is for term limits (the democracy of limiting choices arbitrarily) and for rolling back Congressional pay to teach them to humility (and to guarantee that Congressional seats are held only by those for whom the salary is an irrelevancy). He is also for increasing the power of owners of corporations, the shareholders, even though most shareholders seem content to sell off their ownership with the movements of the market. A confusing mish-mash.

Essential Information
Essential Information is an organization founded by Nader in 1982 to spread information about consumer protection politics and corporate abuses to citizens across the country. In 1984, Nader "sold" Multinational Monitor to EI, the day after the magazine's employees filed for union recognition with the National Labor Relations Board. In spite of containing an enormous amount of information, this page has nothing on that particular story of corporate abuse.

Public Citizen
Protecting health, safety and democracy in 1971, Public Citizen was founded by Ralph Nader to study the influence of corporations on political life and to empower the citizens. There are many different projects and great gobs of useful information, from the mundane to the incredibly important. You can even join Public Citizen, provided you have $20 and a credit card. Activism begins with your wallet, it seems.

Nader on Nader
This Village Voice interview (16 January 2002) by Geoffrey Grey examines the post-election status of the Green Party, how the "War on Terrorism" will affect third-party candidates and why the new corporatism undermines sovereignty.

1.75 Cheers for Ralph
In 1996, Doug Henwood's newsletter Left Business Observer endorsed Ralph Nader for President, albeit with many reservations. The Multinational Monitor scandal, his economic nationalism (and occasional incompetence, important for an economist like Henwood) and his mighty 1996 sandwich budget were good reasons not to vote for him then. In 2000, Nader is more serious, but is he really any different than Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber? Aside: this endorsement was a step forward for the LBO, which foolishly endorsed Jesse Jackson for President in 1988.

Labor-Backed Third Parties
This Capital Research article by Eric Heubeck examines the occasional spasms of independence of the labor movement. In recent years, progressive unions have toyed with breaking with the Democrats (and the rest of the AFL-CIO) in order to create a class conscious, left-wing party. The Greens are barely mentioned, but the Labor Party and the New Party are examined and rightly found wanting.

The Two Faces of Ralph
This Village Voice review (16-22 January 2002) takes Ralph Nader's book Crashing the Party (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2002) to task for bad writing and mixed metaphors.

Ralph Nader - Millionaire Hypocrite?
This Salon Magazine article (20 June 2000) by Joshua Micah Marshall reveals that Nader is a millionaire with a stock portfolio to drool over: Cisco Systems, Comcorp, Iomega and Ziff-Davis are all spitting out money for the reformer. Not surprisingly, Nader's public views and the actions of Cisco and other firms in his portfolio are at loggerheads. What is surprising is that Cisco has a better and more liberal position on immigration than Nader. The article loses a pyramid for some moralizing that seems designed to make sure that Salon's BoBo (Bourgeois Bohemian) readers feel guilty and suspicious of Nader while claiming to tell them that they should not feel guilty at all.

The Microsoft Menace
Nader is good for something. Here he attacks Microsoft's monopolistic practices and more importantly, examines the potential for further expansion into one-actor markets with a base in the browser niche. This Slate article (27 October 1997) is simple, well-argued, important and brought to you, ironically, by MSN (the Microsoft Network).

Unforgiven
This Willamette Week interview (1 August 2001) by Patty Wentz covers Ralph Nader's campaigning in Orlando, the ideology and plans of the Green Party, targetting Democrat Party seats, and divining Orlando's political mystique.

US Green Party Candidate Ralph Nader Courts Buchanan Supporters
A report on the Green Party convention from the World Socialist Web Site finds Nader wanting. The article (June 27th, 2000) by Jerry White raises good points about Nader's ties to the Democrats, his immigrant-bashing and his appeals to economic nationalism, but drops the ball when defending Clinton against the reasonably fair impeachment process. If one should defend Clinton against the Republicans, why not defend Nader against the Democrats? The WSWS wasn't invited to the Green Party party, possibly explaining their sour grapes.

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