Mr Nader Goes To Washington - Ralph Nader

Ralph Nader has been accused of costing AI Gore the White House. He has been called a crusader, an egotist, a hero and a fool. Zac Goldsmith lets him speak for himself.

Wednesday 7 November 2000 was the day American politics changed. As the result of the country's Presidential election unfolded, the media had a field day; making predictions, retracting them, declaring results, retracting them, passing judgement, apologising. The rest of the world sniggered at the sight of the self-proclaimed 'world's greatest democracy' making a pig's ear of its electoral process.

In the end, as we all know, it went down to the wire. The votes of fewer than 500 people raised Republican Bush above Democrat Gore. 500 of the 100 million or so who had voted. Bush, thanks to the courts and a conveniently-placed relative, went to the White House. But the slightest tremor in voter behaviour would have tipped the scale.

Someone had to be blamed. And vengeful Democrats, not in the mood to examine their own failings or blame their own candidate for his own defeat, found themselves a whipping boy that everyone could unite against: Ralph Nader.

Nader, leader of America's previously invisible Green Party, gained 97,000 votes in Florida. Democrats, blithely assuming that those votes would otherwise have gone to Gore, are still fuming. 'Nader cost us the presidency,' cried one member of Gore's team.' 'He's never going to be forgiven for that.' Even some environmental organisations condemned him. 'The public interest community is going to have to spend tens of millions of dollars a year for the next four years playing defence', said Ken Cook, director of the Environmental Working Group. 'There's an old labour song: which side are you on?' wrote John Sweeney, President of the AFLCIO, 'We think Nader clearly was on the wrong side.'

Phew. And then there was the media. The New York Times launched a hysterical campaign against Nader even before the election, claiming that he was cluttering the field for the big boys, undermining democracy and embarking on 'a self-indulgent crusade'. Following the election, they invited analyst Tom Friedman to comment on the results. 'My only hope', he wrote, 'is that no matter who wins, he will name Nader the first US Ambassador to North Korea. That way Nader can spend his days with another egomaniacal narcissist.'

During the campaign, particularly as things looked set to become a close contest, the anti-Nader bandwagon took a dive into the squalid, with Democrats suggesting both that he was gay (what will the First 'Lady' look like?, they sneered,) and that he was a hypocrite, with millions of dollars stashed away in hidden accounts. The man who had set out to expose the wrongs and weaknesses of the political system had become, perhaps unsurprisingly, the Washington Establishment's Public Enemy Number One.

AMERICA'S MOST WANTED

Meet Ralph Nader, America's most controversial citizen. The man who, depending on who you talk to, put Bush into the White House, made the Green Party a real political force and -- incontrovertibly -- brought a radical, anti-corporate citizens' agenda up from the underground and on to the public stage. Those who know, or know of, Nader, can't have been surprised. For this is a man who has made a habit of standing up for the little people against the big interests. A man who has made a career out of being, as he would put it, a Citizen -- with a capital 'C'.

Ralph Nader was born in Connecticut in 1934 to Lebanese immigrant parents. He studied law at Harvard, but abandoned his conventional law practice at the age of 29 and hitchhiked to Washington with one suitcase to begin a career change that would change his life -- and change America. He started by examining the issue of car safety, work which resulted in the publication in 1965 of a bestselling book, Unsafe At Any Speed, which accused the car industry of deliberately building unsafe cars to turn in a profit. When General Motors attacked him he sued them, and his action led to drastic law changes promoting car safety.

After that, there was no stopping him. He became a full-time consumer advocate, holding corporations to account on behalf of ordinary people. Activists flooded to Washington to work with him; they became known as 'Nader's Raiders'. He founded the activist group Public Citizen and the magazine Multinational Monitor. He has launched campaigns against insurance companies, labour laws, 'corporate welfare' and the framework of the global trading system.

He has been responsible for numerous law changes in favour of consumers, and has frightened endless corporate bosses into belated good behaviour. He is responsible, according to former US Senator James Abourezk, for creating 'for the first time in US history, a movement... whose sole purpose is to keep large corporations and the government honest' -- virtually singlehandedly.

RALPH VS OZONE MAN

It's quite a CV. And now he has topped it all by running for President. But why now? Why, after all these years, stand in an election where one candidate -- Al Gore, the great green, 'ozone man', author of Earth in the Balance -- seems genuinely to offer answers. Why cripple the chances of the most environmentally-minded candidate ever to stand a chance of winning the Presidency?

It's because, he tells me, it isn't true. 'Gore is engaged in weekly makeovers. I would not trust him. Look, he was in charge of the environmental portfolio for eight years. Clinton gave that to him. It was a powerful portfolio, and yet he surrendered to one industry after another. His rhetoric has been great, but the gap between what he says and what he has done has been staggering. The truth is, he really doesn't believe in anything other than his political career. He surrendered to the motor industry on fuel efficiency, to the biotech industry, to the chemical industry. He was bad on toxics in the workplace, and above all, he is responsible for pushing through the inherently anti-environmental NAFTA and WTO agendas. In fact,' he goes on, breathlessly, 'in eight years under Clinton and Gore, not one chemical control regulation was issued by the Occupational Safety and Health Agency. That's never happened before under either Republicans or Democrats.'

I get the point. 'Why Gore is so deceptive', he continues, 'is because he appears to be a friend. He understands what needs to be done, as we saw from his book, Earth in the Balance. Yet he still refuses to take any real action. That makes him worse. He neutralises the green movement. He is an anaesthetic. At least under Bush, the movement will be awakened... stimulated.'

ENEMIES WITHIN?

But if all this is true, why have even some of Nader's erstwhile allies turned on him? Why did Friends of the Earth US and the Sierra Club, amongst others, declare against Nader and for Gore? Why is it rumoured that some unions and environmental groups are even threatening to boycott Nader's creations, some of the most effective environmental organisations in the land, like Public Citizen, for instance? 'We call these people the frightened liberals, or well-intentioned cowards,' he answers. 'Basically, they are prepared, every four years, to settle for less and less, simply because less and less is not as bad as the worst. The vote for least worst legitimises the least worst.'

Maybe. But the rifts that have been created appear, at least on the surface, to be serious. 'Let the voters who said there's no difference between Bush and Gore wait until Big Oil's in the White House', declares the Environmental Working Group. 'Bush is going to take those Greens to school and we're all going to pay the tuition.' Does this worry him?

'Well, next time these groups need help, I don't think they're going to turn their backs on Public Citizen, because they're going to need Public Citizen more than Public Citizen needs them. And if we are going to win the battle, we need to work together.' Is that likely? 'Some will. Some won't. Some quite simply are irrevocably petty.'

It has been said on more than one occasion that a clever Nader would have approached Gore before the campaigns began, with the aim of brokering a deal, accepting a position in a Gore administration, mining agreements from the Democrats and so on. Did this occur to him? 'No. First of all I would never betray the hard working people who supported our candidacy, both greens and independents, and second, I don't trust him. Whatever agreements we could reach would be unenforceable. Say he agreed to pull out of GATT and renegotiate a 'pull up' trade pact. How could I keep him to his word?'

Such a deal would probably have made more sense for Gore, whose assumed monopoly of the green vote was fast dissolving. Did Gore ever seek to build a bridge? 'They put out feelers. Intermediaries for the Democrats wondered if I would accept a high level position. On other occasions, prominent Democrats in Congress tried to set up a meeting'. Did it ever happen? 'I was trying to meet with him for four years and he refused. Why am I going to meet with him now? The only possible reason I would meet with him is to have him concede his votes to us, and he wasn't about to do that. There's no trusting the man at all. The American people have seen him for what he is.'

TWO SIDES OF THE COIN

According to Nader, the Democrats are no better than the Republicans -- at least not significantly. This is his key argument, but it flies in the face of what most environmentalists probably hold to be true. So I ask him; are American greens wrong to align themselves with the Democrats? Should they not seek, as in many ways he will have done, to massage them further towards the green position? Will we not then see an honest divide between two parties offering genuinely different policy packages?

'No. I think what we are seeing is something strange. Take corporate globalisation for instance. A significant number of Democrats and a significant number of Republicans are sceptical, in similar numbers. It no longer cuts along party lines. Clinton for instance found greater support for his WTO agenda through the Republicans than he did through Democrats.'

Nader insists that most people are slow to grasp how politics has changed; how the battle ground today 'is no longer left/right. It is top/down. This is what we have been trying to explain throughout our campaign. And that is why a lot of conservatives found our message congenial. They don't like seeing a massive diversion of public money into corporate subsidies, the hand-out of natural resources, the bail-out of banks, the distribution of governmental pharmaceutical research to the big drug companies who can then charge what they like. They no more support corporate welfare than the left. Nor do they support the commercialisation of all things... childhood, religion, education, politics. No matter what you call yourself -- conservative, moderate, liberal, radical -- you are affected as a human being by the brunt of abuse of corporate power. Conservatives don't like drinking contaminated water, dying of cancer, seeing their taxes wasted. The similarities are limited of course. On certain social issues, like abortion and so on, they remain quite distinct.'

So what then will Nader say when he is blamed for all the atrocities that Bush will inevitably endorse over the next four years? What will he say when Bush grants oil drilling licenses in Alaska?

'I'll point to the Clinton/Gore performance in the Hague. I'll point to the architecture of WTO and NAFTA. I'll point out that Gore, who was big in his book on solar energy, never lifted a finger. We begged him to make one major policy speech on solar energy but he never did. He turned his back on the people of East Liverpool, Ohio, whom he had promised in 1992 to protect against a giant incinerator. He assured them it would never be built. It was, and within a year the mercury levels in the blood tested of the elementary school children who went to school 1,100 feet from the incinerator doubled. The list is endless.'

'You have to remember,' he says, his voice quickening, 'that if Bush senior had won in 1992, it's the widespread consensus here that we would never have seen NAFTA or GATT. It is because of that snakecharmer, William Jefferson Clinton, who managed to split the Democratic Party, that consensus on NAFTA was achieved. The Democrats who would have refused to sign up under a Republican were smooth-talked into it by Clinton.'

THE LONGER VIEW

Nader may well have changed the nature of American politics. He will forever be held responsible by bitter Democrats for their defeat, and he will forever be credited for having brought issues to the table that would never have been addressed without him. But what, I ask him, was his ultimate goal? 'To win, of course.' But he must have known he wouldn't. What did he really want? And why does he think politicians of both parties won't provide it?

'First,' he says, 'money is still a determinative issue. He who pays the piper calls the tune. Politicians too are often ill-informed. GATT is a good example. The media, together with the Clinton Administration and the corporate lobbyists, presented the agreement as little more than a means of reducing unnecessary trade barriers. It was presented as a battle between old-line protectionists and up-to-date free traders. But what we found was that not a single member of Congress or staff had actually read the 800-page document. They had been given summaries by US trade representatives. This is an agreement that has 139 nation members where the corporations write the rules. We tried to inform the media, but with little success. On the whole, they blacked us out.'

Eventually Nader's message did make it into the media, but only after he thought up an imaginative stunt. To prove his point, he threw down the gauntlet in Congress before their vote on the GATT. He offered to give $10,000 to the favourite charity of any member of Congress willing to sign an affidavit saying he or she had read the agreement, and then answer 10 simple questions on its contents in public. Only one man eventually came forward. His name was Hank Brown, Republican Senator of Colorado. He answered the questions at a press conference in Washington, and told his audience 'It's really interesting, I'm a free trader, I voted for NAFTA but I'm going to vote against GATT. I've read the agreement and it's wholly anti-democratic. I won't tolerate it.'

CLEANING UP AMERICA

So what measures would we need to begin the process of renewal, or political clean-up? Here is where Nader really gets excited. The 2000 election was more heavily financed than any other in history. Nearly a billion dollars was spent 'persuading' the people that the two main candidates would make perfect Presidents. Nader's Green Party was the third largest party, yet it accounted for less than one per cent of that money. 'We took no money from business, no soft money, no corporate money, no political action committee money. We took contributions only from individuals, and the legal limit from individuals is $2,000.'

Not surprisingly, campaign finance reform was high on Nader's list of campaign priorities. As he sees it, it is only with honest funding that the American people can expect honest leadership. He advocates, as he puts it, 'public funding of public elections,' with strict limits on what individuals can inject into specific campaigns. But this alone is not enough. There's the media to deal with too.

'We probably got about one per cent of the total media coverage in this country. Of that one per cent, 99 per cent was devoted to the "spoiler" issue. It was nothing to do with the issues, or my ideas. More important are the debates. I don't think people outside the US realise how entrenched the two parties are. They command the statutory barriers that keep third parties from getting on the ballot without an extraordinary effort in many states. Through their hoked-up debate commission they are able to deny third party candidates access to the Khyber Pass. It is through the debates that candidates can reach a massive number of people. If you don't get on those debates you can campaign as we did in 50 states, often several times over, and you can do that for 20 years and you won't reach a fraction of the 45-90 million people who have watched these debates.'

If the election had been fairly handled, I wonder, with equal access to debates, less corporate funding and better treatment by the media, what would he would have expected? 'It would have been a three way race. Just like Jesse Ventura in Minnesota. He was at eight per cent, and then he got on the statewide debates and in one month he jumped to 38 per cent and won.'

FOREIGN FIELDS

I found myself speaking, recently, to a Muslim subscriber to The Ecologist. We discussed the US elections, and he surprised me by saying that a number of people from his part of the world, Bangladesh, had been happy to see Bush emerge the victor. This, he explained, was simply because of Bush's ignorance of foreign affairs and foreign lands. If he didn't know about them, he didn't care about them, and would therefore most likely leave them alone. Such is the nature of US foreign policy, even where dressed up as humanitarianism, that many people in the 'developing' world would be happy if America ceased to exist. What does Nader think about this?

'We need desperately to rethink many of these terms, like humanitarianism and national defence,' he says. 'We have to get out of the post-Cold War foreign policy mentality of militarising everything and supporting dictators who happen to cut lucrative deals with our global corporations. We talk of national security, yet we do little or nothing to prevent the incidence and spread of deadly diseases like TB and malaria which are returning in drug-resistant force. We talk of defence, yet do almost nothing to combat global warming and climate change that pose a far greater threat to our nation than any human enemy.'

On the subject of humanitarianism, I raise the subject of Jubilee 2000's campaign of debt relief. 'That's the one thing that scares them,' he says. 'They've convinced themselves that if they don't do debt relief there are going to he huge upheavals. But there's another reason. Debt relief is tied to concessions. Let in the IMF, give us some concessions, and we'll let you off your debt. Thirdly, when a nation's debt is down they are ripe for future borrowing. The taxpayers relieve the counties of the debt and then the banks can loan more money.

CONNECTIONS

Nader is uncategorisable. He is not truly left. He is not right. He is perhaps not even a radical. In fact, talking to him is a lesson in perspectives. He is fundamentally critical of corporate-driven globalisation, but sees a value in 'civic globalisation' - international co-operation to deal with international issues like climate change, infectious diseases and so on. He believes in decentralisation and local economics, yet he sees the need for reclaiming power from the unaccountable, unelected global institutions to which politicians have handed control.

'The nation state which was so reviled decades ago as being militaristic is the only structure that has the power to defend people from dangerous global forces,' he insists. 'In fact, we need to reverse the undermining of the nation state through bodies like the WTO. As things are progressing, companies and their governmental puppets simply go to tribunals in Geneva and sidestep our courts or your courts. The result is that a nation's health and safety standards have to go through WTO harmonisation committees that are secret and will often result in harmonisation downward. We have open courts, for instance - the tribunals are closed. We have public transcripts - they don't in the tribunals. We have independent appeals - they don't in the WTO. This is fundamentally contrary to our democratic process.

It all comes down, he says, to connections. All the main problems today are interconnected. Poverty, environmental devastation, the arms race, disease etc. The reversal of one will nourish reversal of the other, and their advance will nourish each other. One way to alert people to the real issues we face today, is simply to ask them to list what in their view are the worlds' 10 biggest problems. Then ask them whether global corporations are not affecting the situation, or whether they are working to prevent those problems, reduce their impact, or worsen them. You can start with infectious disease, cancer, global warming, the arms traffic, dictatorships, poverty, the forests, whatever. Suddenly it becomes very clear that global corporations are highly dysfunctional to the finer pursuits of justice and elementary fairness in the world. It's really quite extraordinary to see it operate.'

But how does he believe we are going to be able to initiate the sort of change he advocates; this is the key question. Will change eventually result from popular pressure, from political action, from protest?

'All of them,' he says. 'We have to press to initiate a six-month notice of withdrawal from NAFTA and WTO, and renegotiate trade agreements. We need a massive public education campaign; we need to co-ordinate all those discussions taking place in union halls, church basement discussions, universities etc. We need to strengthen political movements like the Green Party. It all has to come together and every time the abuses of corporate globalisation manifest themselves, they have got to be widely disseminated. To feed this river of reform and recovery of our government under the sovereignty of the people, you cannot repeat these things too often, speak about them in more forums too often.'

GOING STRONG

Ralph Nader is 66. He has never been a member of a political party, ('the reason why I'm not a registered Green is I don't want to be involved in inter-Green-party disputes') though he has shaken one and brought another into prominence. He has attracted, with virtually no money, more than 3 million voters. He has endured hysterical scare campaigns - launched even by those he considered allies. He has attracted voters who had never intended to vote, and he is all set to lift the previously obscure Green Party onto a new level in the course of the next few years. 'What we are going to do is recruit thousands of candidates. So the Green party can build a solid base in one state after another, so by the year 2002 the Green party will be five to 10 times more powerful than they are now.' He is still, it seems, after all this time, a rising star.

There is only one question left to ask him. Will he run for President again in four years time? 'We will be making the relevant announcements in three years.' Suddenly, an indirect answer. I press him. Will you remain the Party's figurehead for as long as necessary? 'Yes, I'll remain involved in Party building'. So there's a possibility that you could carry the torch again? 'Well, we want to see a lot more leadership coming out at local and State levels and I think we helped invigorate some of the green efforts abroad too.'

It seems that even Ralph Nader is prepared to play the politician when he wants to.

Zac Goldsmith is editor of The Ecologist.

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