Naders Raiders

<div>11 22 also bit of bak/2</div><div>
</div><div></div><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/ralph-nader-democrats-lost-house/">https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/ralph-nader-democrats-lost-house/</a></div><div>no vid</div><div><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The midterm elections are over, and two more years of Congressional gridlock are likely in store. Republicans have taken a narrow majority in the House, while Democrats have held the Senate. What do we make of the current political landscape, where rhetoric runs so hot but so little gets done? And what can we expect from the 2024 presidential elections? <a href="https://twitter.com/RalphNader" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Ralph Nader</a> joins<b> The Chris Hedges Report</b> for a post-mortem on the 2022 midterm elections, and to discuss how the people can retake Congress from corporate influence.</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Studio: Adam Coley, Cameron Granadino</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Post-Production: Cameron Granadino</p><h3 style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">TRANSCRIPT</h3><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><strong style="">Chris Hedges: </strong>The total cost of the 2022 federal midterm elections is projected to exceed $9.3 billion. But what do we get from what must surely be the most expensive electoral system on the planet? There’s little real choice. </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The dismantling of our democracy which took place over the last few decades on behalf of corporations and the rich has been a bipartisan project, leaving only the outward shell of democracy.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);"> The courts, legislative bodies, the executive branch, and the media, including public broadcasting, are captive to corporate power.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> There is no institution left that can be considered authentically democratic. The corporate coup d’etat is over. They won. We lost.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The wreckage of this corporate coup is appalling, endless and futile wars to enrich a military-industrial complex that bleeds the US Treasury of half of all discretionary spending, de-industrialization that has turned US cities into decayed ruins, the slashing and privatization of social programs including education, utility services, and healthcare, which so o<b>ver one million Americans account for one-fifth of global deaths from COVID, although we are 4% of the world’s population.</b></span></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Draconian forms of social control embodied in militarized police functioning as lethal armies of occupation in poor urban areas, the largest prison system in the world, a virtual tax boycott by the richest individuals and corporations, mone- saturated elections that perpetuate our system of legalized bribery, and the most intrusive state surveillance of the citizenry in our history.</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">How are we to interpret these elections which will create even more political paralysis with Republican control of the House, and what should we expect in the next presidential election? Joining me to discuss the political landscape and the wake of the midterm elections is former presidential candidate and consumer advocate Ralph Nader. You can find him at ralphnader.substack.com.</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Ralph, let’s begin with the midterms. It wasn’t the blowout of the Democratic Party that many expected. How do you interpret what happened?</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><strong style="">Ralph Nader: </strong>Well, coming off the list that you just described about the situation in this country and its impact on the world, my first reaction was there are 535 people in the Congress who could change it all,<b> and they don’t all have to be unanimous. It could just be a plurality or a majority of members. So what are we waiting for? Check off your entire list, Chris, and we got the votes. The corporations don’t have the votes. They have money, but the members of Congress want the money to get the votes against their primary or general election opponents.</b></span></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">So it just is very intriguing that people thrash around groaning, moaning, being sickened, injured, blocked, discriminated against, deprived, and<b> they don’t focus on the Khyber Pass, which is Congress</b>. Whether we like it or not, that’s the institution that has the greatest authority to take on these big corporations and take on the predators and to drive peace in the world instead of war and empire.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> We’re listening to all these recountings of the ills, ailments, and injustices and the brutish scenarios coming up in the future with climate disruption and reneging on any kind of compact with posterity, and we don’t focus on Congress.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">So in the midterm election, they’re running around the campaigns like they’re ward bosses. We’re going to fix this pothole here and we’re going to make sure that there’s a public service there. Instead of looking at the big picture of the concentration of power, they’re doing this piecemeal retail assurances of the public, which of course drives the expectation of the people even lower. </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">When you drive the expectation lower as to what members of Congress are running for election, or challengers running to defeat them, when you control those expectations at such a low level, the members of Congress get away with their responsibility for the country under the Constitution, we the people.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>They’re the ones who get to tax new power in Congress,</b> the spending power, the confirmation of judges and officials in power, the right not to go to war. There’s no end to it. So I keep saying if all of these efforts for justice around the country, small, large, national, local, do not focus on Congress and the state legislatures and the town councils, they’re going to be spinning their wheels forever as this country is driven into the ground.</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><strong>Chris Hedges: </strong>I want to talk about the impediments, though. First of all, you have<b> redistricting. So most races are not actually competitive. The Democratic Party redistricted the seat that Dennis Kucinich had to drive him out. Number two, if you aren’t awash in money </b>and you saw this in your own campaign, you were drawing crowds. I think you filled Madison Square Garden. Everybody had to pay $5 to get in. So I don’t know how many thousands of people, but you didn’t have access to television, which would’ve given you an audience of millions. So there are serious impediments to essentially breaking the power of this duopoly.</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><strong style="">Ralph Nader: </strong>Yeah. But the impediments melt away if people organize in every congressional district to reflect the congruence of left-right opinion in this country, which is deleted from the news accounts who like to talk about polarization, red state, blue state, conservative, liberal. We know that on the fundamental necessities of life, there’s a huge convergence, 70, 80, 90% in the polls. There was one poll a few years ago, Chris, 90% of people wanted to break up the big banks. 90%.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">You got 75% or so want universal healthcare even without a major party pushing for it. It just goes on and on. Whether it’s cracking down on corporate crooks, whether it’s changing the campaign finance system, whether it’s controlling what people own, like pension funds and mutual funds which together own three-quarters of the stock of the companies on the New York and Nasdaq Stock Exchanges. So the people have the power, but they’ve allowed it to be seized because they don’t do their homework back home.</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">They don’t spend time on their civic responsibilities. They don’t say to the members of Congress, hey, we’re the ones who have the sovereign power. You’ve got it from us and you’re using it against us, and we’re not going to tolerate it anymore. So the only place where democracy comes before work is in a dictionary. So we have to stop spinning our wheels and recounting disaster after disaster when we can control the legislative bodies, local, state, and national. Look at the initiatives in Nebraska and right-wing states. They have passed minimum wage increases against massive corporate opposition, saturating the television, Florida, Arkansas.</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In one conservative state, South Dakota, the Republican dominated legislature, the governor, and the corporations all opposed an initiative to constitutionalize Medicaid, not just to send a statute, but to put the Constitution of South Dakota. Who won? The people won. Because they started working. They rolled up their sleeves. Otherwise, all we’re doing is documenting despair, perdition, pessimism, which discourages people and turns them into cynics, which leads to withdrawal from the political arena and which makes the corporation’s life all the way to the bank.</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><strong style="">Chris Hedges: </strong>I want to talk about fear because I think Matt Taibbi wrote that most Americans don’t vote for what they want, they vote against the political figure they hate.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> The divisions largely, as you point out, there’s a majoritarian opinion on many of the issues you just cited. But there is this cultural divide, and people employ fear. Biden’s own record in the Senate and even as vice president is pretty appalling, from supporting Anita Hill to I think five years before the invasion of Iraq he talked about taking Saddam down. He, of course, as rehabilitated Mohammed bin Salman, a fervent supporter of the apartheid state in Israel. He fought school busing.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Aggressively, he sponsored the 1994 crime bill and three strikes you’re out, third violent penalty law where you can’t get parole, NAFTA, Glass-Steagall. So these are not issues that we look back on and support, but the Democrats, like the Republicans, play on this fear, the fear of – And I do see, as you do, a figure like Trump to be frightening and these fringe candidates to be frightening, but it seems that that is the primary currency at this point of our political system.</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><strong>Ralph Nader: </strong>Yeah. Well, there are millions of people who don’t buy it. We need tens of millions of people who don’t buy it. We need people talking to one another in the neighborhoods. We need people to turn out for town meetings. There are all kinds of jurisdictions in this country that allow for the referendum to be stocked with all kinds of progressive legislation at the state and local level. Most people don’t even know about it. They don’t even use it. Why? Because our schools don’t begin teaching these children civic knowledge, civic skills, and civic experience. Learn by doing.</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">All of this comes down to how much time do people spend to produce a deliberative democracy that wages peace and justice, equality and foreseeing and forestalling the perils for our posterity like climate disruption. That’s what it comes down to. If we don’t address it at that level, if we don’t highlight the victories of the people over powerful interests that occur from time to time in this country, we’re just documenting despair, producing discouragement, producing withdrawal from the political system, and people then just dive into their own discouraging lives and watch entertainment, bet on sports. We gotta turn it around.</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The nice thing about this approach is you only have to turn around a supermajority of 535 people. You know what they want more than anything else. They want to win, and that means votes. S</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">o you focus votes to nullify the effect of money. I mean, look at the victory of Summer Lee coming out of Pittsburgh. She’s 32 years old and she’s going to be the next representative in the House from an area around Pittsburgh. She was opposed by corporations. She took on the dark side of the United Steelworkers. They opposed her.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>APAC put $1 million to $2 million just before the election to defeat her. She beat them all. How? She developed a grassroots coalition based on the principle that they all bleed the same color.</b> </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">It doesn’t matter what labels they put on themselves. She forged this coalition and beat them all. It’s a spectacular story, which The New York Times is not spending much time reporting on. They’re too obsessed with Taylor Greene, the madcap representative from Georgia, putting her on the cover of The New York Times Magazine.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">They give all kinds of attention to crazy right-wing groups and institutes. They give people the impression nothing’s happened on the progressive side during the election period. So Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh is not Ann Arbor, it’s not Cambridge. It has a lot of conservatives, and she beat them all. Energy. Civic energy is what’s needed. </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">You have 82% of Republicans against Citizens United, </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">which is a Supreme Court decision over a decade ago that said corporations could give unlimited money for or against candidates in elections. Unlimited. A lot of it dark money.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">You got over 80% of Republicans, when they’re polled that, are against. It has to be organized. Otherwise, the divide and rule strategy of the two-party duopoly fronting for giant corporations will forever control the people who are the only people who have the votes. I mean, bad as corporates are, Chris, they don’t yet have the vote. Not yet, at least.</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><strong>Chris Hedges: </strong>Let’s talk about the inevitable paralysis with the Republican control of the House. Biden’s already been stymied by Manchin and Democrats who essentially vote as Republicans. What is that going to mean for going ahead?</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><strong>Ralph Nader: </strong>Well, it’s going to mean that nothing’s going to be done other than the routine stuff of just passing budgets for government agencies. The Republicans have such a narrow margin. They’re not going to get anything done, and they’ll be blocked in the Senate. So it’s two years of very little being done. And it’s the Democrat’s own fault. I mean, it’s the worst Republican Party in history. You cannot find a Republican Party since 1854 that has so many positions that are against the health, safety, and economic interests of children, of women, of workers, of small taxpayers, of communities all over the country, of consumers, of patients.</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">This is a vicious, callous, inbred, ignorant, corporate indentured, corrupt party. What are the Democrats? They lose to them</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">, and then they say, hey, look at the pundits. They said it was going to be a red wave and it wasn’t a red wave. So it’s a victory. That’s how they fooled the people. Victory? What would happen if there were no polls and no pundits? Would the Democrats have pleaded victory? They lost the House of Representatives, for heaven’s sake.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><strong style="">Chris Hedges: </strong>Right. Well, they lost because, on all of the issues they just cited, they have surrendered.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><strong style="">Ralph Nader: </strong>Yeah, they lost because it starts with the nomination process. They exclude third parties, okay. Who’s they? Who’s they? It’s the state legislatures. They have these ballot access barriers and allow this to happen.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> They lost for reasons of their own making. For example, John Larson of Connecticut wanted to increase the benefits of social security. It hasn’t been increased, he said, in 40 years. So he puts in a bill and it’s very comprehensive, and he’s sweet-talked by Nancy Pelosi and his <b>chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, the crypto Republican, but Democrat in name only, Richard Neal from Western Massachusetts.</b></span></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">He starts pressing. He says, why aren’t you passing this through the House? He says, well, it’s not the right time. We don’t want to be accused of excessive spending. So he drafts the letter, which he wants his Democrats in the House to co-sign. He drafts the letter accusing the Senate of sabotaging the whole process, the Democrats in the Senate using the filibuster as an excuse. He says, let the Republicans filibuster. Let them go on the floor hour after hour after hour on natural television against increasing the benefits of social security for millions of elderly Americans. He was blocked and stymied.</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Now, any active citizenry, Chris, would’ve dug into that and made it a major issue inside the Democratic Party. That’s the way you start upending these indentured senior Democrats who have concentrated power in the hands of three members: Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, and the third one. And they control the subcommittees and the committees and all this started with Newt Gingrich, who did this when he was speaker in 1995, and the Democrats never changed it.</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">He cut budgets of committees, cut staff, cut the GAO, the monitor of spending, executive branch, waste, fraud, and abuse, eliminated the Office of Technology Assessment, which would’ve exposed some of these massive weapon and civilian technology boondoggles, and the Democrats inherited it. So you always have to go back to the people. What do they think? What do they know? What do they want for their families? You got to organize it. Look, labor never became unionized without rank and file people. Co-ops were never established without rank and file people. It never was top-down. It’s all bottom-up. So we got to focus on the people here.</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><strong>Chris Hedges: </strong>Let’s talk about Trump, who’s just announced. What’s your read on the Trump candidacy and the future tactics of the Republican Party?</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><strong style="">Ralph Nader: </strong>Well, first of all, under section 3 of the 14th Amendment, any state can ban him from running for election based on this Jan. 6 findings of insurrection.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> That’s the insurrection section of section 3 of the 14th Amendment. The Jan. 6 committee report is going to be out soon and they could recommend that to the states and say, start enforcing section 3 of the 14th Amendment. If he is banned from running for reelection in four or five states, he can’t possibly compete even at the primary level.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The second thing is, Jack Smith, the new special counsel, people have said that you couldn’t pick someone better for the Attorney General to pursue two criminal violations against Trump which could end in his indictment, and it’s very unlikely that he’s going to have much course to the primary victory if he’s under indictment from those two violations, not to mention the one that’s being prepared in New York state against him. One was stealing classified documents, that’s one that Garland is handing over to the special counsel to pursue. The other, of course, is the insurrection on Jan. 6.</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Of course, Garland left out about 10 other violations of federal statutes, including the Hatch Act, which was designed to prevent presidents from using the power of the federal government and property against their opponents. He had campaign events on the White House lawn. He signed millions of checks, twisting arms over at the treasury for the pandemic relief programs. Garland just is giving him a free pass on one violation after another. Bruce Fein and I have written Garland listing all these violations more than once. Never get an answer.</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">However, two criminal statute violations are more than enough to retire Trump. Now, if that doesn’t occur, Trump is going to want a lot of competition at the primary level. That’s how he wins</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. He had 16 Republican opponents in the primary in 2016, and he is the best known. He’s the most egregious attention getter, and he would like that. He’d split it 10 ways. He’d say, okay, Youngkin, Virginia, come on board. Primary me. Okay, DeSantis, come on board, primary me. But I don’t think he’s going to get that far.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><strong>Chris Hedges: </strong>So what do you see happening?</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><strong>Ralph Nader: </strong>I see he’s going to be indicted. There are civil suits against him, obviously, from assaulted women and other people that he’s fleeced. I think there may be a coordinated rebellion in the Republican Party itself. You just don’t get anywhere with other Republican candidates, senators, governors, if the head of the ticket is not only under indictment, but may have actually been convicted.</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><strong style="">Chris Hedges: </strong>But the Republican Party, which has essentially become this proto-fascist entity, and certainly while Trump held sway, cultish, isn’t going to change its stripes, is it?</span></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><strong style="">Ralph Nader: </strong>No, it changes its camouflage</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">They really pursue everything Trump has pursued, whether it’s immigration on the border. Wall Street, Trump and them are on the same page. The whole plutocratic system, the anti-union system, the tax cuts at an all time low for the super rich and the big corporations. But it’s the camouflage. He embarrasses them. He uses bad language. He attacks people specifically. He doesn’t have their style of control. But that’s serious. That’s a serious problem among politicians. That’s just not a matter of cosmetics. They know they can lose a lot of traction with his kind of blunderbuss and his lying and his mischaracterizing people and accusing people of homicides without a single bit of evidence like he has done in the past.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>They’re also afraid of the violence of his audiences that he can unleash, and that can make you lose an election</b>. That could scare a lot of conservative Republicans around the Midwest and elsewhere when they see the eruption of violence. He’s said there are going to be riots in the street if he’s denied the nomination. So there is a real deep conflict, not over economic issues, but over how the party presents itself to a public that it doesn’t want to scare. He scares people.</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><strong>Chris Hedges: </strong>Does the inevitable paralysis now within Congress empower the Republican Party for the presidential elections?</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><strong>Ralph Nader: </strong>No, because they’ll be viewed as the do-nothing House, can’t get anything done. If the Democrats are smart, they’d go on the floor of the House, as the Republicans did against them years ago, and throw the gauntlet down. Why aren’t you supporting Medicare, Medicaid, social security? Why are you against kids? Why don’t you extend the $300 a month child tax credit that went to 58 million kids from conservative and liberal families and you blocked the extension in January? Why are you freezing the minimum wage at a paltry $7.25 cents an hour when you’re making huge money in terms of what the taxpayer is paying you and all the benefits?</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>They could just throw one gauntlet: Why are you soft on corporate crime? </b>Why are you letting these corporate crooks get away with ripping off the people and endangering their health and safety? That’s what they got to do. If they don’t do that, we’ll just have another very, very close election. Any kind of idiosyncratic event can tip it one way or another regardless of the left-right polls supporting basic change in this country coming in at 70, 75, 80, 80, 85%. I mean, you can’t stop that. That’s an unstoppable coalition.</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">If the Democrats will get rid of their corporate political media consultants who are losing race after race for the Democrats because they have corporate clients throughout the year and they’re conflicted and because they don’t want to do a ground game, which is what democracy is all about</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">, and they want the 15% huge television buys. Right now in Georgia, there’s this runoff, Chris, between Senator Warnock and Herschel Walker. Warnock has spent $20 million already, charging that Walker is neither competent nor knowledgeable nor fit to be a US senator. Well, they’re going to put $200 million between them from Nov. 8 to Dec. 6.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Just imagine $200 million coming in there. How much of it is the ground game? Well, as little as possible, if the consultants have a say, which is what they do, they want the 15% commission. So Warnock should go around the state of Georgia and change his heavy focus on Walker, everybody knows about Walker now, and start saying, go vote for a raise. Go vote for universal health insurance. Go vote for cracking down on the corporate crooks that are on your back and in your pocketbook every day. Go vote for freedom to vote. Go vote for freedom for women, equal pay for equal work. Go vote for the children. Get that $300 back into poor families’ pocketbooks.</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">I mean, that’s the way you win an election. But the corporate consultants who should be the subject of major exposes by The Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, they got the reporters. They’re the ones who are destroying the Democratic Party, and they’ve been doing it for years.</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><strong>Chris Hedges: </strong>Well, if Walker or Warnock went around and called for those kinds of programs, that corporate money would dry up, wouldn’t it, Ralph?</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><strong>Ralph Nader: </strong>There’s no time for it to dry up. They already got it. Dec. 6 is the runoff. By the way, the more you can get people on your side by your message and your policies, the less money you need. I mean, the money wasted on these TV and social media ads is just staggering. Not only is it wasted, it’s the same ad, it’s dull, it’s repetitious, it’s not authentic, and it irritates people. In other words, it boomerangs against itself. Summer Lee was tremendously outspent, but she had a ground game.</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><strong>Chris Hedges: </strong>Right. That was former presidential candidate and consumer advocate Ralph Nader. You can find him at ralphnader.substack.com. I want to thank The Real News Network and its production team: Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley, and Kayla Rivara. You can find me at chrishedges.substack.com.</p></div><div>===</div><div>
</div><a href="https://www.pophistorydig.com/topics/tag/lewis-powell-ralph-nader/"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.pophistorydig.com/topics/tag/lewis-powell-ralph-nader/</font></a><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">nadersraiders</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Pop History Dig</font></div><div>
</div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Activism, Publishing, Politics</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Nader’s Raiders”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1968-1974</font></div><div>
</div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[pix: Ralph Nader and his “Raiders” – law, medical and engineering students – on the steps of U.S. Capitol in late summer 1969.  ]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">   Among notable activist “inventions” of mid-twentieth century America, few were more effective in shaking up the federal establishment than Ralph Nader’s swat teams of bright young college and law school students. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Loosed on official Washington in the 1960s and 1970s and dubbed “Nader’s Raiders” by Washington Post journalist William Greider, these teams of Ralph Nader acolytes churned out all manner of books, reports and investigative probes aimed at improving the law, making government work better, and/or holding corporate powers to account.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A small cottage industry of publisher-worthy paperbacks resulted, some becoming bestsellers, and all with messages that stirred the public policy pot.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the process, official Washington was challenged and changed, investigative journalism was re-ignited, and public interest advocacy became part of the culture.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What follows in this piece is a look back at some of that history, how the Nader teams and Nader reports came about, and what effect they had.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">     In the late 1960s, Ralph Nader was fresh from his own success with a best-selling book, Unsafe at Any Speed, which took the automobile industry and Congress to task about auto safety. In that fight, Nader also became embroiled in a battle with General Motors after the company hired private detectives to follow him and investigate his past, trying to discredit him as a Congressional witness and consumer spokesman.  That incident, covered in a separate story, backfired on GM, with the company’s CEO apologizing to Nader during highly publicized U.S. Senate hearings.  With his new national credential as a rising consumer advocate, Nader sought to expand the range of his activities beyond auto safety. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By summer 1968, Nader began assembling teams of law school students to undertake investigative studies of government agencies. He had a bigger vision of what might be possible and a long list of issues that needed attention – from food safety and environmental pollution, to anti-trust enforcement and energy policy.  What he needed was more Ralph Naders – though he never put it in exactly those terms.  In fact, the idea may have risen by way of students themselves who wrote toNader after his auto safety notoriety.  In January 1968, for example, Andrew Egendorf, a graduate of MIT who had entered Harvard Business School, wrote to Nader with a friend offering to work for him that summer if Nader would consider working with students.  Whether this was the genesis of the plan, or was already something Nader was considering, is unclear.  In any case, by the summer of 1968, Nader began assembling teams of law school students to undertake investigative studies of government agencies that dealt with consumer, environmental, food safety, and other issues.  He would start with one agency and one team. Seven law school students were recruited to focus on the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the federal agency charged with protecting consumers from shoddy products, fraudulent business practices, and deceptive advertising.  The students Nader gathered to focus on the FTC were: Edward F. Cox, Yale Law School; Robert C. Fellmeth, Harvard; John E. Schulz, Yale; Judy Areen, Yale; Peter A. Bradford, Yale; Andrew Egendorf, MIT/Harvard; and William Taft IV, Harvard.</font></div><div><span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">
</span></div><div><span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">     Nader’s team went about the business of investigating the FTC full bore, burrowing in at the agency, interviewing its people, and digging up whatever they could find in Congress and the public record.  In the summer of 1968, the Nader team gathered the material for their report, then returned to school.  Later that year, during the December college break, they returned to Washington for a marathon session of writing.  The full report would be released in January 1969. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">
</span></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">    <b> But even before the official release, the Nader team had begun making waves with some of what they were finding.  </b>They had one dust-up early on with FTC officials in the summer when they were conducting interviews and gathering data at the agency. In that incident, Nader team leader, John Schulz, had words with FTC chairman Paul Rand Dixon after some persistent questioning and was thrown out of Dixon’s office. Shulz had asked for a copy of a monthly FTC memo detailing complaints made to the agency. Dixon told him that the document was for FTC use only. Dixon also decreed by letter there would be no more Nader team interviews that summer, unless cleared with him. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">     However, Dixon’s letter made its way to Time magazine, where a story appeared on the incident in September 1968 titled, “Nader’s Neophytes.”  Time also divulged some of what the Nader team was finding, indicating their study would show the FTC as a toothless watchdog, reluctant to go after big advertising offenders, and sometimes withholding reports from the public.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">     Edward Cox, a member of the Nader FTC team, helped generate a Wall Street Journal story in the summer of 1968 on some political dirt he discovered in his research – a purely patronage office in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, which was manned by a friend of FTC Chairman Dixon.  As Cox would later tell this tale, recalling his stint with Nader that summer:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">…A memorable event for a Washington newcomer was the impact of a Wall Street Journal article.“…I began to see how our hard work and Nader’s guidance and contacts might have an impact after all.”        – Edward T. Cox </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">My research had identified a patronage office in Oak Ridge, Tennessee manned by a friend of Chairman Dixon’s, Judge Castro C. Geer, Jr. Judge Geer’s patron in Congress was Joe Evins, a Tennessee representative and chairman of the House subcommittee which approved the FTC’s budget.  Nader told me to take the information to Jerry Landauer, one of the premier muckraking reporters in the Journal’s DC office.  I will never forget the scene: Landauer, cigarette in his mouth, calling various sources to confirm the information, pounding out the story on his typewriter, and muttering genuinely sympathetic noises about poor Judge Geer who was about to get skewered by his story.  This was the first major story generated by our [Nader study team] work, and I began to see how our hard work and Nader’s guidance and contacts might have an impact after all.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[As the “Nader Raider” study teams were assembling, Ralph Nader was receiving national press as a consumer advocate, as in this November 1968 ‘Newsweek’ story. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">   Though the FTC was charged with protecting American consumers from deceitful and deceptive advertising and harmful and dangerous products, Nader’s team uncovered an agency that failed to detect violations and was reluctant to even use the weak enforcement powers it had.  The FTC then lacked some basic enforcement powers, including the use of temporary injunctions and the ability to levy criminal penalties – and it did not seek Congressional help to obtain the statutory authority it needed to improve its powers.  In mid-November 1968, Bill Greider of the Washington Post did a story featuring Nader’s FTC team, headlined: “Law Students, FTC Tangle Over Apathy,” in which he invoked his famous “Nader’s raiders” tag for the first time.  Greider’s opening line in that story: “The graying members of the Federal Trade Commission, an agency founded in 1914 to protect the little guy, were confronted yesterday by Nader’s raiders, a group of modish young law students who accused the FTC of having ‘tired blood’.”  The Nader team’s report, initially titled, The Consumer and the Federal Trade Commission, ran about 185 pages and was issued in January 1969.  It called for a total revamping of FTC practices and its personnel, describing it as a failed agency due to a combination of “cronyism, institutionalized mediocrity, endemic inaction, delay, and secrecy,” and an “iceberg of incompetence and mismanagement.”</font></div><div><span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">
</span></div><div><span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">.     The Nader FTC study received extensive press coverage including that by Time magazine, New York Times, the Washington Post, and others.  It also found support from a surprising source, as Advertising Age, a trade magazine for the industry, offered an editorial critical of the FTC’s weak enforcement.  That editorial said in part: “No community is well served if its fire department habitually reaches the scene after the last spark has been extinguished.”  The Nader FTC report was also published in the Congressional Record of January 22, 1969 and later that summer it was published as a book.</span></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">     In Congress, during the spring and summer of 1969, Sen. Abraham Ribicoff (D-CT), then chairman of the Government Reorganization Subcommittee of the Senate Government Operations Committee, was holding hearings on bills to establish an Office of Consumer Affairs.  FTC issues were also covered at those hearings, with the Nader group offering testimony on their study.  At one point during the hearings, Ribicoff praised the Nader FTC authors for their work, while leveling digs at the establishment press and the government: “Bureaucracy being what it is, I am fascinated by your ability to get in so deep, and get so much information.  I am sure that you gentlemen are the envy of the large number of reporters here.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">     FTC Chairman Paul Rand Dixon, however, described the Nader report for the Wall Street Journal as “a hysterical anti-business diatribe and a scurrilous, untruthful attack on the [FTC’s] career personnel and an arrogant demand for my resignation.”  The report had indeed called for Dixon’s resignation and a complete overhaul of the agency.  And by April 1969, the FTC had come to the attention of the new Nixon Administration.  President Nixon urged the American Bar Association to undertake an independent investigation of the FTC, which they completed that September.  The ABA’s report painted conclusions even more dismal than the Nader team had presented.  Paul Rand Dixon resigned.  When, under the new leadership of Casper W. Weinberger, reforms began taking place within the FTC, the New York Times announced the fact  in a front-page headline on June 9, 1970: “FTC Maps Change to Aid Consumer; Major Reorganization Set by Chairman– Agency Was Nader Target.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font><span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">.More Raiders</span></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">     While the FTC study was underway, plans were made to staff up several more Nader study teams to probe other agencies.  On February 10, 1969, a small ad was placed in the Harvard Crimson student newspaper at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts under the title, “Nader’s Raiders.”  The text of the ad read: “Graduate students in medicine, biology, life sciences, engineering, and law are needed this summer to work with Ralph Nader in an investigation of various government programs.  Call Robert Fellmeth, 868-1593.”  An avalanche of responses resulted.  By that summer, more than 100 students had been recruited from thousands of applicants.  In short order, several more study areas were set, generally focusing on food, agriculture, air and water pollution, and interstate commerce.  By this time, Nader had also founded his Center for the Study of Responsive Law based in Washington, which would serve as the operating base for the study teams and research.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[pix: Ralph Nader, back to the camera, meeting with “raiders” in 1969 – from left, Julian Houston, James Fallows, Marian Penn, and Robert Fellmeth, Photo, Life magazine.]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">     Life Magazine Story.  </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In early October 1969, a Life magazine story ran with the photograph that appears at the top of this article showing Nader on the steps of the Capitol with his legions of “Raiders.”  The story, by Jack Newfield, was titled, “Nader’s Raiders: The Lone Ranger Gets a Posse.”  In that piece, Nader explained to Newfield what he hoped to accomplish with his law-student swat teams, and specifically why some lawyers should work in the public interest:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“…Most lawyers are too hung up on clients. The most important thing a lawyer can do is become an advocate of powerless citizens. I am in favor of lawyers without clients.  Lawyers should represent systems of justice. I want to create a new dimension to the legal profession.  What we have now is democracy without citizens. No one is on the public’s side. All the lawyers are on the corporation’s side.  And the bureaucrats… don’t think the government belongs to the people.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“For example, the industries, corporations and lobbyists manipulate the federal commissions and agencies. The Interstate Commerce Commission has always been a tool of the railroads, the bus lines and the trucking industry. The Department of the Interior has been easily influenced by the oil and gas industries.  The Department of Agriculture has been an instrument of the tobacco industry. No one represents the public interest. Lawyers are never where the needs are greatest. I hope a new generation of lawyers will begin to change that.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">     During the 1969-72 period, more than a dozen “Nader Raider” reports were launched, most of which became paperback books. Among the earliest of these were the five Nader reports that followed the FTC study:  The Chemical Feast, Vanishing Air, The Interstate Commerce Omission,Water Wasteland, and Sowing the Wind.  A brief look at each of these studies, as well as a few others, follows below.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[1970, “The Chemical Feast,” 1st edition paperback, Grossman Publishers, 273pp. Click for book.]</font></div><div>
</div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">     Work on the background reports that became a landmark “Nader’s Raiders” book on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration began in the summer of 1968.  James S. Turner, a law student at Ohio State University, would become the project director and principal author.  But more than a dozen Nader-recruited researchers worked on the project over two summers, eventually distilling their findings into a 273-page book, The Chemical Feast, published as a paperback by Grossman Publishers in 1970.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">     As the title suggests, there was more to the nation’s food system than met the eye, and, in fact, an onslaught of chemical food additives and pesticides was part of the equation, which Nader’s team uncovered in chapters with titles such as: “Cyclamates,” “Hidden Ingredients,” and “Food-Borne Disease.” </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The book exposed the FDA’s lax oversight of the food industry, its corruption, and its connections with big food and drug companies.  FDA appeared more concerned with protecting industry profits at the expense of public health.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“What they turned up was truly shocking,” reported Choice magazine – “evasion of law enforcement, abdication of responsibilities, bureaucratic confusion, incompetence, favoritism, and even fraud… It should prove of interest to concerned citizens of all ages.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">     The major food safety laws – including the pesticide, food safety and color additive laws – were sabotaged by the FDA, according to the study. “While the FDA clings to the claim that American food is better than ever,” explained The Chemical Feast’s back book cover, “the life expectancy of Americans is lower than ever and American food in general is filthier and less nutritious.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">     A New York Times article in early April 1970 by reporter David E. Rosenbaum, used the following headline to describe the study: “F.D.A. Called Tool of Food Industry; Nader Unit Likens Its Rules to ‘Catalogue of Favors’.”  Rosenbaum further wrote that the Nader FDA study revealed an agency “controlled by political pressures and unable and unwilling to protect the consumer.” The standards and regulations of the agency, Rosenbaum said of the report’s findings, “read like a catalog of favors to special interest groups.” </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Time magazine said The Chemical Feast “may well be the most devastating critique of a U.S. government agency ever issued.”  The report was first published in book form by Grossman in 1970, then reprinted three times in 1971, 1972 and 1974.  In 1976, Penguin Books also published it in paperback form.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[“The Interstate Commerce Omission” by Grossman Publishers, 1970, 423pp. Click for book.]</font></div><div>
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ICC Blasted</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">     Another in the first batch of Nader reports was The Interstate Commerce Omission, a scathing review of the failings of the Interstate Commerce Commission, then an 83-year-old federal agency charged with regulating interstate commerce by rail, trucking, shipping and pipelines. The Nader study group undertaking this report was headed up by Robert Fellmeth, and his team delved deeply into the ICC’s record, sending out mail surveys, conducting more than 500 interviews, and doing detailed statistical analyses.  In March 1970, they issued a 1,200-page draft report, which Time magazine called “devastating in detail.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">     The essence of their report was that the ICC really didn’t regulate the 17,000 or so transport entities under its charge so much as operate a cartel on their behalf.  The commission, they found, was in effect presiding over thousands of local transport monopolies, protecting inefficient carriers from competition at the expense of the public.  They also found a cozy relationship between the ICC and the industries they regulate, with industry trade groups also paying for meetings, food and hotel accommodations on junkets to “surface transportation meccas” such as Hawaii, Puerto Rico and the Bahamas.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">     The Interstate Commerce Omission argued that the public good would best be served if the ICC were abolished altogether – and along with it, the Civil Aeronautics Board and the Federal Maritime Commission. All three of those entities could be replaced by a single agency, the Nader team charged, an agency that would then be able to set a coherent national transportation policy, relying less on regulation and more on markets to set rates.  Doing so, they argued, would sharpen competition among companies in all forms of transport.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Vanishing Air</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[Cover of “Vanishing Air” in paperback edition by Grossman Publishers, July 1970. Click for book.]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">     The release of the Nader study-group report on air pollution – titled Vanishing Air – was a well-timed report, coming exactly as the public and Congress were beginning to focus on environmental issues. On April 22,1970, the first Earth Day – the brainchild of Senator Gaylord Nelson (D-WI) to organize students and other citizens with teach-ins and demonstrations on behalf of action to clean up the environment – was a huge success, with more than 20 million people becoming involved in events and demonstrations across the nation. Meanwhile, the U.S. Congress and the Administration of Richard Nixon were then maneuvering with proposals for needed changes to an old and outdated Clean Air Act, as urban pollution episodes – fueled largely by automobile-generated smog – had raised national concerns about public health.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">     The Nader study-group report on air pollution came right in the middle of the growing national outcry over environmental pollution. The work of the study group had begun in 1969 led by John C. Esposito, who held degrees from Long Island and Rutgers universities as well as a law degree from Harvard. He was assisted by Larry Silverman, associate director of the project, who was a graduate of St Johns College and held a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania. This Nader task force included at least ten other members, including graduate students in medicine and engineering. They set about documenting air-pollution health hazards around the nation, using case studies of various cities while also focusing on the role of Congress and the outdated National Air Pollution Control Administration (NAPCA), which operated under the very weak 1967 Clean Air Act.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[Automobile pollution became a major concern in the late 1960s, and a topic for political cartoonists, illustrated by this sample from the “Washington Star” newspaper. ]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">    “…NAPCA bureaucrats never had a chance,” wrote Kirkus Reviews in its account of the Vanishing Air book in 1970.  “The report piles on incriminating facts, figures, and failures and devastating dismissals of NAPCA,” which the report called “a disorganized band of government officials acting out a pollution-control charade.” Among key chapters in Vanishing Air were two that skewered the auto industry – titled respectively, “Twenty Years in Low Gear” and “Nothing New Under The Hood,” a devastating critique of Detroit’s failure to innovate with pollution control technology. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">     Other polluters targeted in the Nader study included big manufacturing and the energy industry.  Congress and the political process were also hit hard, including a presumed champion of clean air, Senator Edmund Muskie (D-ME), whose subcommittee on pollution and federal environmental laws, the report charged, “resulted in a ‘business-as-usual’ license to pollute for countless companies across the country.” The report also charged that Senator Muskie had issued “politically expedient platitudes” rather than “real leadership.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>     Borrowing a page from Rachel Carson and her landmark 1962 book Silent Spring, which used an opening fictional story on pesticide health threats to introduce the urgency of her message, the Nader Study Group on Air Pollution also used this devise in Vanishing Air, </b>including a fictional account of an atmospheric inversion in a major city that trapped pollutants endangering public health.  In fact, as the paperback version of Vanishing Air came out in July 1970, a mass of stagnant air lodged itself over the eastern seaboard of the U.S., putting a meteorological lid on the entire region for several days and trapping all manner of industrial and automotive pollutants. The episode got public attention, while provoking a few editorials (see sidebar below) and several U.S. Senate speeches.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> “The Great Dirty Cloud”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">July 1970</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">     In July 1970, as an atmospheric inversion trapped pollutants all along the East Coast, the incident became the main topic of discussion throughout the nation and the media –including the possibility of banning cars from urban centers.  In one editorial, The New York Times wrote:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Through the polluted haze that for days has hung over the East Coast cities from New York to Atlanta, nothing is clear but a timely warning.  Urban areas are getting perilously close to the point where they have to choose between the internal combustion engine and breathable air…”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“…[W]hat has up to now been regarded as personally hysterical and economically unthinkable may yet become a reality. Until the gasoline engine can be made pollution-free or a clean substitute for it developed — eventualities at least ten years in the future — the automobile may actually have to be banned from the centers of major American cities…  In the present New York crisis a prohibition on all non-essential traffic may yet have to be invoked in certain areas… “</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">[pix </span><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A 1970s’ episode of smog enveloping New York’s Manhattan. Photo from EPA Documerica gallery /National Archives.]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">  The Washington Post also used the occasion to raise questions about the smog-control timetable that was then being considered by Congress for the auto industry – a ten-year timetable proposed by the Nixon Administration and supported by the automakers.  Calling the East Coast pollution cloud a “dangerous cesspool of air that now hangs over this city,” the Post said the incident “raises the immediate question of whether the public can wait the 10 years the automobile industry has said it needs to produce clean cars.”  The Post, in fact, wondered, “Has an independent group thoroughly looked into this timetable to see if 10 years really is needed?  Or is it a comfortable pace the industry has set for itself?”  On Capitol Hill, apparently, there were a few people listening to such appeals, among them Senator Edmund Muskie.  President Nixon’s pollution control package – offering a ten year timetable – was essentially industry’s proposal.  Muskie, however, would cut that in half, making the deadline for achieving auto emissions standards 1975, not 1980.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">     Vanishing Air and the Nader Study Group on Air Pollution, meanwhile, continued to have an impact that year, helping to create the pressure for enactment of the 1970 Clean Air Act.  That law, in fact, was the toughest anti-pollution measure ever approved by Congress up to that point and was signed grudgingly by Richard Nixon in December 1970, as Senator Ed Muskie in the end had proved a clean air champion and leader in the fight, setting tough 1975 goals for the automakers.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Ralph Nader report, “Water Wasteland,” Grossman Publishers, 1971, 494pp. Click for book.]</font></div><div>
</div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">     During the late 1960s and early 1970s water pollution, like air pollution, was a growing problem across the nation. In northeast Ohio, the Cuyahoga River was so polluted with oil and petrochemicals that is caught fire, and nearby Lake Erie was biologically dead. Added to these were any number of other lakes and rivers across the nation that were severely polluted, among the worst rivers, for example were: the Buffalo, the Escambia, the Passaic, the Merrimack, the Rouge, the Ohio and the Houston Ship Canal. Ralph Nader had formed a student Study Group in 1969 to investigate these and other water pollution problems across the country.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">     David Zwick was a young Harvard law school student when Ralph Nader recruited him to begin work on water pollution. After nearly two years of study, with a team of 26 student researchers and Radcliffe co-author/editor Marcy Benstock, Zwick released the study group’s 700-page report in April 1971. The study was later published in paperback book form by Grossman Publishers under the title, Water Wasteland.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">     What the Nader team found was a federal water pollution control program that was “a miserable failure.”  After 15 years of programs and $3.5 billion in spending dating to 1956, the level of pollution they found – except in isolated instances – had not been significantly reduced.  In fact, it had grown worse. Industrial pollution , they found, was by far the major problem, eclipsing domestic sewage sources by 4-to-5 times the volume.  More problematic were the 500 some new chemicals that industry was releasing into waterways, many of which were not being removed by water treatment systems.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Water pollution was a major problem in the 1970s.</font></div><div><span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">
</span></div><div><span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">    At the time, the nation’s water pollution control system was administered by Federal Water Quality Control Administration (FWQA) in the U.S. Department of the Interior, an agency then in transition to the newly created Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). FWQA and the pollution laws had given the states primary responsibility for enforcing water pollution controls. But the states yielded to industry pressures to either put off setting standards or to set them as low as possible. The result was no surprise: thousands of industrial polluters and very little prosecution. The Nader team documented numerous cases of pollution, but only rare FWQA requests for Justice Department legal action against polluters. In some localities, there were no actions at all, despite thousands of identified polluters. Nor was the Nader team optimistic about new legislation then pending in Congress; bills submitted by both the Nixon Administration and Senator Edmund Muskie (D-ME), calling those measures far short what was needed to clean up the nation’s waterways.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">
</span></div><div><span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">   David Zwick and his team had a long list of recommendations, including that individual citizens be given the right to sue industrial polluters, and that employees who inform on corporate polluters be rewarded by government and protected by law from reprisals by employers.  Water Wasteland also had a key high-profile supporter: William Ruckelshaus, then administrator of the new Environmental Protection Agency. “I agree with Ralph Nader,” he said at one point. “We are in danger of creating a water wasteland if we permit to happen in the future what has happened in the past.” Ruckelshaus promised “radical changes” in water-pollution law enforcement. </span></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">     In October 1972, a revised Clean Water Act passed in Congress with a bipartisan majority overriding a veto by President Nixon. The new law included a “citizen suit” provision allowing citizens to initiate legal action to enforce the law when the government failed to do so. That provision — an important new tool for environmental enforcement — was soon incorporated into other environmental laws.  It had been pushed by David Zwick, who also created a new organization — Clean Water Action — to implement the new law. Zwick’s co-author on Water Wasteland, Marcy Benstock, went on to her own activist glories, stopping the Westway highway project in New York City and heading up the Clean Air Campaign.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sowing The Wind</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">     Billed as the Nader report on “food safety and the chemical harvest,” Sowing the Wind was the name of the study that investigated the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).  It focused mostly on meat and poultry inspection, but also pesticide use and other agriculture-related topics. </span></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This Nader study team began their work in 1969 under the direction of Harrison Wellford, one of the original raiders and also the first executive director of Nader’s Center for Study of Responsive Law.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">     Sowing the Wind found that USDA was failing to protect Americans from bad meat and dangerous chemicals.  It charged that the 1967 Wholesale Meat Act – once thought to be a reform measure – had succumbed to business as usual within USDA. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The report found there was no regular monitoring for bacteriological contamination in federal meat inspections even though there were at least 30 diseases then believed to be transmitted through meat and poultry. USDA also continued to permit the use of herbicides such as 2,4,5-T, despite evidence indicating dangers to human and animal life. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Also reported in Sowing The Wind were lab and field data that raised concerns about possible birth-defects and cancers linked to the synthetic hormone DES, used to fatten cattle. USDA’s ties to big agribusiness in the meat, poultry, and pesticide industries were probed as well.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">    At the study’s release and Washington press conference in mid-July 1971, Ralph Nader charged USDA with “lawlessness,” that the meat and poultry laws were routinely violated, and that the Secretary of Agriculture, Clifford Hardin, “doesn’t know what’s going on in his department.”  Newspaper headlines across the country trumpeted the bad news. “Nader Task Force Accuses USDA of Allowing Bad Meat,” said one. Another charged: “Government Regulators Bowed To Agribusiness.” In any case, changes were soon on the way for USDA – at least for some of its responsibilities – as pesticide regulation would soon shift to the newly created U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).</span></div><div><span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">
</span></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">     <b>Meanwhile, the first round of “Nader Raider” reports – and the first four or five books to result from these studies – had sold in the neighborhood of 450,000 copies or more</b>. And there were many more reports and books to come. In fact, there were at least 17 raider reports published as books by 1972.  And the money from the sales of these and forthcoming books would be plowed back into Nader’s organizations. On the back covers of many of Grossman Publishers’ editions, for example, was the note:  “All royalties from the sale of this book will be given to the Center for Study of Responsive Law, the organization established by Ralph Nader to conduct research into abuses of the public interest by business and government.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">More Raider Reports</font></div><div><span style="white-space:pre"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></span></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">     By early November 1971, plans had been announced for a very ambitious “Nader Raiders” project: an investigation of the U.S. Congress —  its members, its committees, and its effectiveness.  In this vast undertaking, Nader would enlist the aid of some 1,000 researchers across the country. But as work on the Congress study began, other Raider reports kept coming (click on any book cover for Amazon page on that book).</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In November 1971, a study of the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation came out – Damning The West – which concluded the Bureau of Reclamation had “outlived its usefulness” and should halt its “senseless damming of the West.”  Later that month another Nader team, headed by James Phelan and Robert Pozen, both <b>Yale law school students, issued The Company State – a report on the giant chemical company, E.I. du Pont de Nemours Co., commonly known as DuPont. </b> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>That study charged that DuPont essentially ran the state of Delaware for its own narrow corporate interests over those of the general public.</b>  Jerry Cohen of the Washington Post called it  “a classic work on the impact of corporate power.”  Publishers Weekly said it was “well written, well organized,” and “bristling with data” — a study that  portrayed “dynastic family power in a velvet glove.”  Also in 1971 came The Water Lords, a Nader report by James M. Fallows and his team focusing largely on the environmental impacts of the pulp and paper industry in Savannah, Georgia.  And there were others in 1971, among them: Old Age: The Last Segregation, by Claire Townsend, on the indignities and frauds practiced by nursing homes; and, The Workers, by Kenneth Lasson, which profiled nine workers in an attempt to bring the circumstances of worker lives more clearly to the general public.  Among researchers on this project, for example, was Peter Lance, who spent one month each living with the families of a brick layer, a garbage collector and a policeman in Boston as part of the workers profiled in that study.  For many of the Nader studies, the initial raw reports, usually longer and more detailed, were first released to the press, followed by a final, more polished paperback book for the general public, which may account for some variation in publication dates.</font></div><div>
</div><div><span style="white-space:pre"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></span></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">     In September 1972, a Ralph Nader Study Group at the Center for Auto Safety released the book, Small – On Safety: The Designed-in Dangers of The Volkswagen, by Lowell Dodge. Previously in 1965, when Nader did his landmark book, Unsafe at Any Speed, which skewered the Corvair, he was criticized for not looking at the Volkswagen in the same way.  With Small–On Safety, he and the Center for Auto Safety did just that – and they found the VW bug and the microbus to have a range of problems.  Among some of the issues they documented from court records and files at the Center of Auto Safety were the Beetle’s erratic handling, its rollover potential, and its “up-in-flames” riskiness following an accident, this due to a poorly-designed fuel system and defective gas cap.  Volkswagen mounted a public relations campaign to deflect the book’s criticisms.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">     Another Nader report first released in 1972, was The Politics of Land, which investigated the land use game in California, highlighting in part, the role of developers and land speculators in the state.  This study was headed up by Robert Fellmeth, who had already worked on two other Nader reports.  A paperback version would be published a year later.  Also in 1972, came The Madness Establishment, a Nader Study Group report on the National Institute of Mental Health.  It was authored by Franklin D. Chu and Sharland Trotter and it found, among other things, that the Community Mental Health Centers Act had resulted in a mismanaged and ineffective bureaucracy.  The Madness Establishment was issued in book form by Grossman Publishers in 1974.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">     By September 1972 Nader had released his study of Congress as a Bantam paperback book titled, Who Runs Congress: The President, Big Business, or You?  Distilled from the work of hundreds of researchers and thousands of pages of material, a team of three Nader analysts –Mark J. Green,<b> James Fallows</b>, and David Zwick – wrote the final product.  At the book’s release, Nader charged that Congress was giving away its powers to committee chairmen, the executive bureaucracy, and special interests.  The book was well-received by critics and the American public, and Who Runs Congress? shot to No. 2 on the New York Times bestseller list in October 1972, and hit No. 1 for the month of November.  The book eventually went through four different editions and print runs of more than one million copies.  The book remains one of the best-selling volumes written on Congress.  When it first appeared, it was widely read by the incoming class of newly-elected Congressional legislators in 1974 following the Watergate crisis, including the 47 freshmen Democrats that year dubbed the “Watergate Babies.”  Who Runs Congress? also helped change the climate of public opinion toward Congress and Congress’ own perception of itself.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Other Studies</font></div><div><span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">     In the early 1970s, Nader teams also undertook studies of the financial system and corporate America.  In the summer of 1970, Nader formed a study group to examine one of the banking industry’s leading institutions, First National City Bank, later named Citibank, then headed by Walter Wriston.  In 1973, a 406-page Nader report titled Citibank was released, written by David Leinsdorf and Donald Etra.  The study, also released in book form by Grossman, explored Citibank’s secrecy and its conflicts-of-interest.  It also examined the bank’s concentration of power and charged, among other things, that Citibank cheated customers and underpaid employees.  Citibank fought back, issuing a point-by-point rebuttal with their own 97-page book in 1974, titled Citibank, Nader, and The Facts.  That reply volume included a forward by Walter Wriston in which Nader was accused of a “reckless misuse of facts.”  Still, the Nader book on Citibank was given high marks for its detailed analysis and was also one of the first assessments of how well a major bank was serving consumers and its community.  Inside Citibank, meanwhile, managers undertook a serious evaluation of the Nader criticisms.  Although Citibank did not lead to wholesale banking reforms, it did succeed in shaking up a secretive industry, alerting Congress and the public to the consumer stake in banking law and regulation.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">
</span></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[The Nader Study Group report on antitrust enforcement, “The Closed Enterprise System,” with Mark Green & others, 1972. Click for book.]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">    Another plank of Nader’s work and Raider report writing grew out of his Corporate Accountability Research Group, set up in 1971 to explore corporate power – from shareholders’ rights to corporate crime.  And one of Nader’s key lieutenants in this work was Mark Green, a Cornell graduate and Harvard law school student when he first came to work for Nader.  In 1972, with Green heading up the Nader Study Group on Regulation and Competition, The Monopoly Makers was released, also published in book form by Grossman. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Monopoly Makers examined the cartel behavior of numerous industries, their collusion with federal agencies meant to regulate them, and the costly consequences for the public.  Other volumes followed, including: The Closed Enterprise System, a report on antitrust enforcement by Green, Beverly C. Moore, Jr., and Bruce Wasserstein in 1972; Corporate Power in America in 1973, a collection of essays examining business abuses, edited by Nader and Green; and in 1976, Taming the Giant Corporation: How the Largest Corporations Control Our Lives, with coauthor Joel Seligman. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">There were also Nader documents and reports released on how to organize and build public interest organizations at the state and local level, such as Action for A Change: A Student’s Manual for Public Interest Organizing, by Ralph Nader and Don Ross.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Raider Legacy</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By 1972, there were 17 “Nader’s Raiders” reports published as books, with many more to come in subsequent years.]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">     The “Nader Raider” reports of the 1969-1973 era were only the first round of many more such reports to come.  In the ensuing decades, hundreds more such reports, papers, and books would be published, not only<b> by the Nader groups – i.e., Public Citizen, Congress Watch, Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs</b>), and others – but also from consumer and environmental organizations that emerged in the 1970s and beyond as the public interest movement flourished.  But the Raider style, in any case, was replicated and used as a model in spurring other investigative studies.  Nader didn’t invent the technique, of course, which dates to much earlier times and writers such as Ida Tarbell, Upton Sinclair, and others.  But Nader and his student teams did help revive it.</span>  </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The Raider reports and books became important works of investigative journalism at a time when the pre-Watergate press had become somewhat complacent.  The student reports were newsworthy, drew attention, and permeated popular culture, and as shown, some became bestsellers.</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">  By the early 1970s, the Nader reports had gained the respect of the mainstream media, and were also reviewed in scientific journals and law reviews.  They were taken seriously in public policy circles, their findings cited in Congressional debates, often spawning changes in legislative outcomes.</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>“The Powell Memo”</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>August 1971</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>     One measure of the effectiveness of Ralph Nader and his Raiders came in the summer of 1971.  A corporate lawyer named Lewis F. Powell, Jr., would write something of a famous memo in which Nader’s work was cited as harmful.</b>  Powell at the time was with a law firm in Richmond, Virgnia, and would also represent tobacco interests on occasion at the state legislature.  He was also a member of the boards of directors of 11 corporations, including tobacco giant Phillip Morris.  In August 1971, Powell wrote a long memo to his friend Eugene Sydnor, Jr., Director of the Education Committee for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.  The memo’s title was, “Attack on The American Free Enterprise System.”  It was dated August 23, 1971, two months prior to Powell’s nomination by President Richard Nixon to become a U.S. Supreme Court judge.  The “Powell Memo,” as it later came to be known, was confidential and not available to the public at the time it was written, and did not surface until after his confirmation to the Court.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">  <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">  At the outset of his memo Powell declared that “the American economic system is under broad attack,” and he proceeded to outline a series of steps that industry and their trade associations should take to counter the threat.  Powell listed Ralph Nader as among the key threats to the system, describing him as follows: “Perhaps the single most effective antagonist of American business is Ralph Nader, who — thanks largely to the media — has become a legend in his own time and an idol of millions of Americans.”</span></font></span></div><div><span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></span></div><div><span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> In describing Nader, Powell cited a May 1971 Fortune magazine profile that had cast Nader as a man out to get big business; a man whose passion “is aimed at smashing utterly the target of his hatred, which is corporate power.”  Fortune found it audacious that Nader was a man who thought “that a great many corporate executives belong in prison — for defrauding the consumer with shoddy merchandise, poisoning the food supply with chemical additives, and willfully manufacturing unsafe products that will maim or kill the buyer.” And Fortune added that <b>Nader wasn’t just referring to “fly-by-night hucksters,” but rather, “the top management of blue chip business.</b>”</font></span></div><div><span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">
</span></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">     Nader was not alone among those Powell singled out for special attention in the “assault on the enterprise system.”  But it was clear he did not hold in high regard the work that Nader and his associates had undertaken. So Powell set about, with his memo, to offer a detailed plan of public education, politics, and other activities to counter what he believed the activists were out to damage.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">     The Powell Memo would come to be regarded as something of a blueprint for business and allied organizations to do battle with the perceived politics of the left. It is credited with influencing a round of corporate activism and conservative think tank capacity-building that occurred in subsequent years designed to shift public attitudes, leading to the creation of organizations such as the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, the Cato Institute, Citizens for a Sound Economy, Accuracy in Academe, and other similar organizations.<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b> Since Powell’s memo, business and conservative organizations have in fact, “out-Nadered Nader,” copying many of his techniques, but building even more powerful legal, fundraising, political action, and research organizations to further their agendas.</b> And Powell himself, in his Supreme Court tenure and opinions, helped advance “corporate free speech” and corporate financial influence in elections, the latter of which many believe has put America on a perilous course.</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">2010: Joan Claybrook & Clarence Ditlow (Center for Auto Safety) on Capitol Hill.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">2010: Joan Claybrook & Clarence Ditlow (Center for Auto Safety) on Capitol Hill.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>James Fallows became a speechwriter for Jimmy Carter and a top journalist.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">James Fallows became a speechwriter for Jimmy Carter and a top journalist.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Joe Tom Easley, former Nader Raider. became a professor of law.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Joe Tom Easley, former Nader Raider. became a professor of law.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Robert Fellmeth, former Nader Raider, at the University of San Diego.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Robert Fellmeth, former Nader Raider, at the University of San Diego.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Harvey Rosenfeld, former Nader activist, founded Consumer Watchdog.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Harvey Rosenfeld, former Nader activist, founded Consumer Watchdog.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Andrew Egendorf, former Nader Raider, co-founded tech company, Symbolics.com.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Andrew Egendorf, former Nader Raider, co-founded tech company, Symbolics.com.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">     As for the Raiders, many of them moved on to government service; to careers in politics and journalism; or to heading up activist, environmental, or community organizations.  For example, by 1977, after the election of Jimmy Carter, a number of the Nader activists rose to positions within the Administration.  Joan Claybrook, who ran Nader’s Public Citizen, became head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.  James Fallows, now a nationally-known journalist, became head speechwriter for Carter.  And Harrison Wellford, after leaving Nader in 1973 and serving as chief of staff for Senator Phil Hart, became Carter’s associate director of the Office of Management and Budget.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">     But years later, after Nader’s Raiders had gone on to other work and into their own professions, several offered their recollections and perspective on those earlier years in Washington.  “We bought Ralph’s idea,” explained former Raider, Joe Tom Easley, describing the motivation behind the Raiders’ work during an interview for the documentary film, An Unreasonable Man.  Easley by then had taught at several law schools, including the University of Virginia, the University of Georgia, and American University. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“…We were going to make the country what it ought to be,” continued Easley, “– by working and pressing the system to work.  Ralph had decided to do about six or eight teams attacking different agencies… And the quality of the reports that came out was on the whole pretty high.  There was never one of the Nader reports of that summer or any summer since then that was exposed as a fraud.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>     Robert Fellmeth, one of the original Nader’s Raiders in 1968 who went on to become executive director of the Center for Public Interest Law at the University of San Diego and the Children’s Advocacy Institute</b>, observed of his earlier days as a Raider:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">…When you’re young, you don’t realize you’re doing something you have no business doing. How are you qualified?  There are professors who should be there who have studied the agency for 20 years. What are you doing?  It doesn’t even occur to you. And in fact, we did write a good critique [the FTC report] that stands the test of time. And the year after we wrote it, President Nixon asked the ABA [American Bar Association] to look at the agency. Sure enough, they came up with the same critique that we did, and it lead to some changes in the statute.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">     Fellmeth and other Raiders praise Nader for his vision and his “letting-us-run-with-it” style – with the Raiders doing the work and “Ralph orchestrating it from a distance,” as Fellmeth put it. “He was the kind of person who said, ‘You’re in charge of this. Here’s the mission. Do it.’ And then he’d review the final product and give you a sign off at the end.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">     Harvey Rosenfield, who worked as a Raider in the late 1970s and early 1980s with Congress Watch, and later headed up a consumer watchdog group in California, explained in a similar context:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“I think that the people [Nader] attracted came principally because they wanted the opportunity to work for justice in the country, and he created an environment where you could do that.  If you did it well, there was no limit to how much you could achieve.  He never stood in the way of anybody.  He never demanded the credit if somebody else was doing the work.  He was happy to have them get as much credit as they could from the public or the news media.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">     Andrew Egendorf, one of the original Raiders from 1968, went on to co-found a technology company named Symbolics.com.  He offered this view of Nader and business:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">…Everyone gives Nader, I think, an unfair reading.  Everyone says he’s anti-business, and he wants to tear down the capitalistic system.  He’s not like that at all.  His view was simply that the interest of the producers ought to be to support the interest of the consumers, because the whole system is based on consumption.  So why don’t we have a system that has constraints on it that require the producers interest to be aligned with the consumers interests?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The problem was that the producers were all monopolies or oligopolies, and the consumers were just all individuals with no clout at all.  All he wanted to do was level the playing field, give consumers the same kind of clout as an oligopoly.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">One Man’s Vision</font></div><div>
</div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What is interesting about the “Nader’s Raiders” activity that exploded in the late 1960s and early 1970s, is that it sprang, essentially, from one man’s vision and initiative – at least initially. <b>Here was a guy who had hitchhiked to Washington, D.C. in 1963 with little more than his law degree and a notion of trying to raise some public policy questions.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ten years later, there were at least a half dozen new Nader or Nader-related organizations at work with dozens of staff, publications pouring from each of them, and measurable public policy change on at least a dozen or more fronts. That, of course, was just the beginning, as there would be three more decades of  Nader-styled advocacy to follow.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Today, nearly fifty years later, the investigative spirit and techniques that Ralph Nader and his “Raider” teams brought into the public square are still at work in numerous organizations in Washington and elsewhere, with researchers and policy analysts digging into the public record, tracking government regulations, and watchdogging corporations.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">     See also at this website, “GM & Ralph Nader, 1965-1971.”  For other story choices on “Politics & Culture,” “Print & Publishing,” or “Environmental History,” please visit those respective pages, or go to the Home Page for additional choices.  Thanks for visiting — and if you like what you find here, please make a donation to help support the research, writing and continued publication of this website. Thank you. — Jack Doyle</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Date Posted: 31 March 2013</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Last Update: 2 April 2020</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Comments to: jdoyle@pophistorydig.com</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Article Citation:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Jack Doyle, “Nader’s Raiders, 1968-1974,”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">PopHistoryDig.com, March 31, 2013.</font></div><div>
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sources, Links & Additional Information</font></div></div>