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THE PROGRESSIVE REVIEW - April 8, 2010
How the Corporations Broke Ralph Nader and America, Too
By Chris Hedges
Ralph Nader's descent from being one of the most respect-
ed 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 target-
ed 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. Regula-
tions 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, (http://www.anunreasonableman.com/) "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, corpor-
ations 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
(http://old.mediatransparency.org/story.php?storyID" ),
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."
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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,'
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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 corpor-
ations 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 publish-
ers, 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 progress-
ivism. 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."
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"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 congress-
ional 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 Inform-
ation 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 spook-
ed 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-terminat-
ing 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 compens-
ation 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 work-
ing 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."
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