How the Corporations Broke Ralph Nader and America, Too
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/how_the_corporations_broke_ralph_nader_and_america_too_20100405/
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 allieswho once consisted of many in the Democratic
Partyenacted 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 differencethey 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 movementAbe 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
disgracefulif 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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