Nader

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

New York Times, July 23, 2000

THE GREEN PARTY

Nader Talks, Labor Listens and Many Democrats Worry

By STEVEN GREENHOUSE

COLUMBUS, Ohio, July 22 -- Ralph Nader was on a tear, railing against chief
executives' salaries, the corporate-dominated campaign finance system and
cuts in factory inspections. Several of the steelworkers seated around him
were nodding, and then nodding again, in silent approval.

For a few minutes at least on Friday, it seemed as if the steelworkers'
cynicism about politics and politicians had evaporated, and they were
receiving the truth, or at least a truth they rarely hear.

"You're the guys who work hard," said Mr. Nader, the Green Party candidate
for president. "You're the guys who pay the taxes. You're the guys who
fight the wars, and then they say, 'Tough. We're closing the factory. It's
globalization.' And then they use factories overseas where dictators
repress the wages to compete against you."

Mr. Nader -- whose words, though not his speaking style, are laced with
emotion -- then laid into Vice President Al Gore and other Democrats,
saying they have done little for labor because they have been able to take
labor's support for granted.

"When you're taken for granted, you're taken," he said. "When organized
labor can say to these candidates, 'You're not going to take us for granted
anymore, we have an alternative and the alternative is Nader and the Green
Party,' then they'll start calling."

Afterward, the 20 steelworkers who had gathered in a small Ohio State
University classroom to hear Mr. Nader gave him rave reviews, and many of
them vowed to vote for him this November. Mr. Nader was in Columbus for
rallies with Green Party members, environmentalists and steelworkers.

"I'd say Nader is the best of anyone," said David Cole, an electrician at
AK Steel's mill in Mansfield, Ohio. "I really like him. I haven't seen much
from anyone else."

His friend and co-worker Larry Pugh was just as enthusiastic. "I think he
has the right answers," said Mr. Pugh, a crane operator at the plant, where
management locked out 620 workers last September. "He gives us a choice
because the Democrats and Republicans have sold us down the river."

Complete article at:
http://www.nytimes.com/library/politics/camp/072300wh-nader.html

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New York Times Op-Ed, 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 General Motors, or
Pfizer, or any corporation, must be bad for the world. To block
opportunities for corporate profit he is quite willing to prevent
desperately poor nations from selling their goods in U.S. markets, prevent
patients from getting drugs that might give them a decent life and prevent
a moderate who gets along with business from becoming president.

At times Mr. Nader's hostility to corporations goes completely over the
edge. Newt Gingrich disgusted many people when, in his first major speech
after leaving Congress, he blamed liberalism for the Columbine school
shootings. But several days before Mr. Gingrich spoke, Ralph Nader
published an article attributing those same shootings to -- I'm serious --
corporate influence.

And was I the only person who shuddered when Mr. Nader declared that if he
were president, he wouldn't reappoint Alan Greenspan -- he would
"re-educate" him?

Many of those who are thinking about voting for Mr. Nader probably imagine
that he is still the moderate, humane activist of the 1960's. They should
know that whatever the reason -- your amateur psychology is as good as mine
-- he is now a changed man.


Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/