Ralph Nader

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Ralph Nader

Ralph Nader (born February 27, 1934) is an American consumer rights activist. He was the U.S. presidential candidate of the Green Party in 1996 and 2000. In both runs Winona LaDuke was his vice-presidential running mate.

He is an independent candidate in the 2004 U.S. presidential election.

Contents

Early career

Ralph Nader was born in Winsted, Connecticut to Lebanese immigrant parents, Nathra and Rose Nader. He graduated from Princeton in 1955 and Harvard Law School in 1958. In 1963, then 29, Nader hitchhiked to Washington, DC and got a job working for then Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan. He did freelance writing for The Nation and The Christian Science Monitor and advised a Senate subcommittee on automobile safety.

Consumer advocacy

In 1965 he released Unsafe at Any Speed, a study showing many American automobiles, especially those of General Motors, to be structurally flawed. GM tried to find information with which to discredit Nader including trying to trap him in a compromising situation, but the activist had a spotless past and no embarrassing weaknesses to be exploited. Upon learning of this harassment, Nader then successfully sued the company for invasion of privacy, forced it to publicly apologize and used the winnings to expand his consumer rights efforts.

Books

Hundreds of young activists, inspired by Nader's work, came to DC to help him with other projects. They came to be known as "Nader's Raiders" and, led by Nader, they investigated corruption throughout government, publishing dozens of books with their results:

Public Citizen

In 1971, Nader founded the NGO Public Citizen as an umbrella organisation for these projects. Today, Public Citizen has over 150,000 members and numerous researchers investigating Congress, health, environmental, economic, and other issues. Their work is credited with passing the Safe Drinking Water Act and Freedom of Information Act and creating the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and Consumer Product Safety Administration. Their various divisions include:

  • Buyers Up
  • Citizen Action Group
  • Congress Watch
  • Critical Mass Energy Project
  • Global Trade Watch
  • Health Research Group
  • Litigation Group
  • Tax Reform Research Group
  • The Visitor's Center

Non-profit organizations

In 1980 Nader resigned as director of Public Citizen to work on other projects, especially the dangers of large multinational corporations. He went on to start a variety of non-profit organizations:

  • Capitol Hill News Service
  • Corporate Accountability Research Project
  • Disability Rights Center
  • Equal Justice Foundation
  • Georgia Legal Watch
  • National Citizens' Coalition for Nursing Home Reform
  • National Coalition for Universities in the Public Interest
  • PROD (truck safety)
  • Retired Professionals Action Group
  • The Shafeek Nader Trust for the Community Interest

Presidential aspirations

1996

Nader ran for President on the Green Party ticket in the U.S. presidential election, 1996, qualifying for ballot status in relatively few states, and garnering less than 1% of the vote (he refused to raise or spend more than $5,000 on his campaign), but making major organizational gains for the party.

2000

He ran again in 2000, this time receiving almost 3% of the popular vote. (Many had hoped he would achieve the 5% necessary to qualify the Green Party for federal matching funds in the next election.) The exclusion of Nader and conservative Reform Party candidate Pat Robertson from events staged by the bi-partisan controlled Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) effectively marginalized both candidates and helped minimize their support on election day. The ability of the two dominant parties to exclude serious third party or independent candidates was, and is, a hotly contested issue. In 2000, an effort to build an independent Citizens' Debate Commission was initiated and readied for a serious run at displacing the CPD. However, Nader's 2004 candidacy likely will preclude the chance of success for this effort in 2004 by turning it into a partisan debate.

Some of Nader's main emphases were the pervasiveness of corporate power, the need for campaign finance reform, environmental justice, universal healthcare, affordable housing, free education through college, workers' rights, legalization of commercial hemp, and a shift in taxes to place the burden more heavily on corporations than on the middle and lower classes. He opposed pollution credits that make it more profitable to pollute than conserve, and giveaways of the public's assets.

Nader alternately argued that he was trying to save the Democratic Party and destroy it. When Nader argued that he was trying to hold the Democrats' "feet to the fire," he was suggesting that he only wished the Democrats were more progressive. However, at other moments Nader said he wanted the Democrats to go the way of the Whigs, and that he would support Green candidates who ran against the most progressive Democrats, such as Paul Wellstone and Russell Feingold. Nader also made an argument that a Republican presidency would energize progressive activists.

The extremely close race between the two major presidential candidates, Al Gore and George W. Bush, helped to create some additional controversy around the Nader campaign. Before the election, a number of those who supported Gore claimed that since Nader had no realistic chance of winning, those who supported the Nader platform should nevertheless vote for Gore, the theory being that a victory for Gore was preferable to a victory for a more conservative candidate, even if an individual voter might, in a perfect world, prefer Nader. Late in the campaign, the Gore campaign actually dispatched prominent liberal celebrities to present this argument to Nader voters in swing states. Nader, and many of his supporters, however, claimed that while Gore was preferable to Bush, the differences between the two were not great enough to merit support of Gore.

As it turned out, the number of Nader votes were more than the margin of Bush over Gore in two states, Florida and New Hampshire, meaning that Gore would have won the election if the Nader voters had all shown up (unlikely without Nader) and voted for Gore (less unlikely), a fact which made many new enemies for Nader and the Green Party. For their part, Nader supporters countered that the Democrats could handily have won the election with a better and more competent candidate than Gore, who made a series of blunders in his debates against George W. Bush. And, of course, the U.S. presidential election, 2000 was hounded by the Florida situation.

Some voters had attempted to minimize this problem by engaging in Nader trading, in which Nader-inclined voters in swing states agreed to vote for Gore in exchange for Gore-inclined voters in safe Bush states to vote for Nader. Even though Nader trading had the potential to win Al Gore the election AND earn the Green Party its 5% and matching funds, Nader himself rejected the idea. He and his campaign explained that they were running in every state.

The "A vote for Nader is a vote for Bush!" phenomenon is the so-called spoiler effect where candidates split the vote, and it is common to most third-party or independent candidacies, whenever such candidates draw most of their support from constituencies who would otherwise support one or the other candidate. The problem is endemic to the First Past the Post electoral system; according to Duverger's Law, such a voting method naturally results in a two-party system. Some, such as Democrat Dennis Kucinich, advocate approval voting or instant runoff voting to address the spoiler-effect - Nader has made strong statements supporting Kucinich, suggesting that he is seeking these reforms.

But since, in the long run, both the Democratic and Republican parties appear to be net beneficiaries of this state of affairs, many commentators conclude that electoral reform addressing the matter is improbable - unless of course one party consistently loses because of it. Many Greens hope to force the reforms by causing Democrats to lose until the situation becomes intolerable. Nader has not stated such a goal publicly, nor is he a member of the Party.

2004

Nader announced on December 24, 2003 that he would not run for president in 2004 on the Green Party ticket; however, he did not rule out running as an independent. On February 22, 2004, Nader announced on NBC's Meet the Press that he would indeed run for president as an independent, saying, "There's too much power and wealth in too few hands." Because of the controversies over vote-splitting in 2000, many Democrats have urged Nader to abandon his candidacy. The Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Terry McAuliffe argued that Nader had a "distinguished career, fighting for working families" and McAuliffe "would hate to see part of his legacy being that he got us eight years of George Bush."

External links

References

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