From: Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Paul Krugman informs me that this sounds conspiratorial, as if he takes
orders from the editorial board of the NY TIMES.
Well who ARE his little helpers, then? The ones in Jo'burg are
certainly leading him astray...
***
24 July 2000
Letters to the Editor
New York Times
(email and also via fax, 091-212-556-3622)
To the editor,
Paul Krugman is wrong in implying that Ralph Nader opposed
post-apartheid South Africa's new constitution ("Reckonings," July 23,
2000). At our behest, four years ago, Mr. Nader urged revision of a
particular provision only, which grants corporations the same bill of
rights protections as real persons (not just "some legal status as
individuals," as Mr. Krugman writes).
From Mr. Nader, South Africans learned how similar protections in the
United States -- not embedded in the U.S. constitution, incidentally
-- undermine efforts to control tobacco advertising and restrict
corporate campaign contributions. Although our constitutional
challenge to that clause failed, the Constitutional Court in
Johannesburg has left the door open to later consideration of whether
real people's constitutional protections should trump those of
"juristic persons." Even if does not please Professor Krugman, a great
many people here will continue to support the jurisprudential route
urged by Mr.Nader, of prioritizing people's rights over those of
corporations.
Signed,
Patrick Bond (Associate Professor, University of the Witwatersrand)
Darlene Miller (Research Associate, University of the Witwatersrand)
Langa Zita (Member of Parliament)
__
July 23, 2000
RECKONINGS / By PAUL KRUGMAN
Saints and Profits
Saints," wrote George Orwell, "should always be judged guilty until
proved innocent." I don't think he was talking about garden-variety
hypocrisy -- although many supposed ascetics do turn out to have
something to hide. The more important point is that there are other
temptations besides those of the flesh. And those who renounce small
pleasures may be all the more susceptible to monomania, to the urge to
sacrifice the good in pursuit of the perfect. In other words, beware
the cause of the rebel without a life.
Some commentators have made much of the secrecy shrouding the accounts
of Ralph Nader's organizations, of the revelation that speaking fees
and stock market investments have made him a multimillionaire, and of
hints that his lifestyle might not be quite as austere as it seems.
But what should worry those sympathetic to Mr. Nader are not his
vices, if he has any, but his virtues -- and his determination to
impose those virtues on the rest of us.
Mr. Nader did not begin as an extremist. On the contrary: in the
1960's, when he made his reputation, the striking thing about Mr.
Nader was his relative moderation. Fashionable radicals were preaching
revolution; he was demanding safer cars. And because his radicalism
was practical and realistic, it left a lasting legacy: our tradition
of consumer activism, a tradition that rightly honors Mr. Nader as its
founding father, makes this country a better place. One might even
give Mr. Nader some credit for our current prosperity: if Japan had
shared our healthy distrust of claims that what is good for General
Motors is good for America, its current economic morass might have
been avoided.
But somewhere along the way the practical radical disappeared. The
causes that Mr. Nader and his organizations have pursued in the last
couple of decades seem to have less and less to do with his original,
humane goals. Everyone knows about Mr. Nader's furious opposition to
global trade agreements. But it is less well known that he was equally
adamant in opposing a bill removing barriers to Africa's exports -- a
move that Africans themselves welcomed, but which Mr. Nader denounced
because of his fear that African companies would be "run into the
ground by multinational corporations moving into local economies."
(Most African countries would be delighted to attract a bit of foreign
investment.) Similar fears led Mr. Nader to condemn South Africa's new
Constitution, the one that ended apartheid, because -- like the laws
of every market economy -- it grants corporations some legal status as
individuals.
Or consider another example, one closer to home -- my home, in
particular. When my arthritis stopped responding to over-the-counter
remedies, I brought it back under control with a new regime that
included the anti-inflammatory drug Feldene. But Mr. Nader's
organization Public Citizen not only tried to block Pfizer's
introduction of Feldene in the 1980's; it also tried to get it banned
in 1995, despite what was by then a firm consensus among medical
experts that the drug's benefits outweighed its risks.
If you look for a unifying theme in all these causes, it seems to be
not consumer protection but general hostility toward corporations. Mr.
Nader now apparently believes that whatever is good for
