🚀 go-pugleaf

             Copyright 1994 The Times Mirror Company   
                               Los Angeles Times

                    November 25, 1994, Friday, Home Edition

RALPH NADER

Life & Style; Part E; Page 1; Column 2; View Desk
2306 words

WHERE TO FROM HERE?;
RALPH NADER, KING OF THE ACTIVISTS, IS STILL GOING STRONG. SO 
WHAT DOES HE WANT
NOW? HE SAYS THE DEMOCRATIC AND REPUBLICAN PARTIES ARE 
FOSSILS, AND HE WANTS
CONSUMERS TO TAKE CONTROL OF THE POLITICAL AGENDA.

By CONNIE KOENENN, TIMES STAFF WRITER

WASHINGTON


   The November midterm elections might signify a major watershed to most
social
analysts, but not to Ralph Nader.

   "It's probably the most vapid issue list in years," he says of the national
campaigns. "It just shows you the voters are not organized to shape the
agenda."

   Partisan battles don't interest him since he considers both political
parties
to be fossils. "Just remember they have no membership, they have no grass-roots
-- it's all electronic combat -- raising money, writing checks and putting
these
absolutely ridiculous 30-second ads on TV." 

   In conversation, Nader, a towering 6 feet, 4 inches, is soft-spoken, but
he's
as intense as any politician.

   He arrives at a neighborhood bookstore/coffeehouse (a Nader hangout he dubs
"democracy center") for an interview loaded with supplemental reading -- a
Harvard Business Review essay on "Economics and the Oval Office," a flyer for
his "Civics for Democracy Textbook" and other Nader-issued materials, all
feeding into his overriding goal: to see consumers shaping the political
agenda.

   "Look at all we own as people, but don't control," he says. "We own the
public airways, we own $4 trillion of pension funds, trillions of dollars in
savings deposits and mutual insurance assets, all the public lands in America.

   "These are enormous wealth, but we don't grow up saying, 'Gee, we own this
together.' All we think about is owning a car, or a house."

   Sipping cranberry juice and eating an oatmeal cookie (he is a
semi-vegetarian), he discusses the gaps in the '94 campaign rhetoric.

   Not only had health care disappeared from the national agenda, he notes, the
candidates campaigning on the "crime issue" were talking about street crime,
ignoring the kind of corporate crime Nader wants to hear critiqued: "The
looting
of pension funds, the bank debacle, occupational hazards, consumer frauds --

these are all taboo campaign issues.

   "I think commercialism is more rampant today than any time in our history,"
he says. "It's attacking our other value systems -- our health and our safety."

   At 60, Ralph Nader, the founder of modern consumerism, remains a full-time
activist. Heading the Center for Study of Responsive Law, a few blocks up 16th
Street from the White House, he reads, speaks, writes and travels nonstop.

   "He's had an enormous influence historically," says Steve Brobeck, a
consumer
historian and director of the Consumer Federation of America. "He occupies a
special place, both as a symbol and, frankly, a celebrity. No one else in the
consumer movement would be thought of as a guest on 'Saturday Night Live,' but
he was."

   As the crusader who built his David-and-Goliath career taking on major
corporations -- automobiles, airlines, insurance -- Nader is accustomed to
being
simultaneously loved and maligned, and often accused of grandstanding.

   "He doesn't represent consumers -- he just represents consumers who want a
handout," charged insurance lawyer George Bernstein during a particularly
bitter
debate several years ago over insurance regulation.

   And Nader sometimes finds himself fighting lonely battles. He was the only
major witness last summer to oppose the nomination of Stephen G. Breyer to the
Supreme Court, saying Breyer's opinions showed a pro-business, anti-consumer
bent.

   *

   Nader attributes his passion for activism to his father, a Lebanese
immigrant
who ran a restaurant in Winstead, Conn., and imbued his son with the importance
of civic responsibility in a democracy.

   "What did you learn in school today?" his father would ask. "Did you learn
how to believe? Did you learn how to think?" Nader was reading the
Congressional
Record by 14, and his list of heroes ranges from Pericles to Thomas Jefferson
and such muckrakers as Upton Sinclair and journalist Ida Tarbell.

   He selects an anecdote from his youth. As a Princeton undergraduate, Nader
questioned the spraying of the pesticide DDT on campus. "The groundskeepers
would spray it on with huge hoses -- we'd even wipe it off our faces it was so
thick. The next morning there would be dead birds on the sidewalk."

   Nader made the connection, but when he approached the editors of the
Princeton newspaper with the story, he was brushed off.

   "They told me that we had brilliant biology professors and chemists at
Princeton and if there was a connection between DDT and the birds' deaths, they
would know about it.

   "That was one of the best lessons I had at Princeton."

   "You know what he's done for us? He has raised our expectations," says
Nader protege Harvey Rosenfield, head of California's Proposition 103


Enforcement Project. "People trust that man because they know he's not for
sale."

   Nader began to earn that reputation 30 years ago, when he was catapulted
into
the national spotlight as a young Harvard law graduate whose stinging book
"Unsafe at Any Speed" challenged the safety of the Chevrolet Corvair and
American cars in general.

   When General Motors unwisely hired a private detective to try to discredit
him, the ploy backfired. A Senate subcommittee looked into GM's snooping, and
the national publicity made Nader a media star.

   "It could have been scripted in Hollywood," says John Richard of Nader's
Center for Study of Responsive Law. "GM overreacted and got caught. Ralph got
all that exposure on the evening news and made the most of it. He was lucky in
many ways."

   *

   Nader's next moves laid the groundwork for the contemporary consumer
movement, Richard says.

   He attracted waves of young activists to Washington as "Nader's Raiders,"
investigating government foot-dragging (starting with the Federal Trade
Commission) and business fraud, and instigating reform in everything from water
pollution to nursing-home abuse.

   New laws were enacted -- the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act,
the Consumer Product Safety Act, the Freedom of Information Act and many more.

   Nader and his associates began forming advocacy groups (more than 50 at last
count) to oversee enforcement and lobby for more. "I like to think of myself as
a Johnny Appleseed, getting consumer groups started and letting them grow on
their own," Nader says.

   The Nader-led activity pumped life into a Washington vacuum, says Joan
Claybrook, president of Public Citizen, Nader's largest watchdog group, formed
in 1971.

   "There were no citizen groups in 1965 that lobbied, when he started
investigating the automobile industry," she says. "There were government
officials and industry representatives and Ralph."

   Nader's emphasis has gradually switched from exposes to long-range networks
of public interest research groups (PIRGs) and Citizen Utility Boards (CUBs),
which are statewide citizen action groups.

   Any conversation with Ralph Nader gravitates back to the theme of citizen
power. He whips out a little green CUB flyer that is mailed to all Illinois
utility customers. "In Illinois they helped pass a utility reform package and
saved ratepayers $3 billion," he says. "Every state needs something like this."

   Asked for his basic advice for today's consumer, he doesn't pause. "Read.
mes, November 25, 1994

   "We can show any family how to save a third of their food budget and improve
their nutrition," he says. "We can show them how to save hundreds of dollars on
their insurance bills."

   *

   As Nader's empire has blossomed into a sophisticated network of consumer
organizations, he has stuck to the no-frills lifestyle that earned him the
title
of "St. Ralph" in the 1970s.

   He rents a small apartment, owns no car (his frugality is legendary) and has
never married. "Not having a family was clearly a choice, a sacrifice," he once
told David Frost in a television interview. "If you want to deal with these
corporate abuses, you have to give up things."

   There is no Nader successor waiting in the wings. The field is too complex
today, Brobeck says, and furthermore, "Most people in the country wouldn't want
to lead their lives the way he does."

   "Ralph's work is what he is," Harvey Rosenfield says. "It's his joy, his
purpose in life."

   Rosenfield, a 1976 Nader's Raider, was sent to California to work on lower
utility rates and, in 1986, on Proposition 103, the initiative to roll back
insurance premiums. Nader stumped the state successfully for the initiative.

   Rosenfield recalls winding up an intensive 10-day campaign swing. "Ralph was
getting on the plane back to D.C. and he was still giving Proposition 103 cards
to the flight attendants and crew members.

   "You know how they say, 'He can drink anybody under the table?' Well, Ralph
could work anybody under the table."

   Nader, who has been labeled everything from prophetic to the "national nag"
over the years, acknowledges his passion for work, but he objects to
suggestions
that his life is monastic. Asked what he does for fun, he replies: "What I do
is
fun.

   "I do enjoy life," he says. "I just don't enjoy conspicuous consumption. I
like reading and conversing with friends. When I'm traveling, I like to visit
things. I like to see a meat-processing plant or a coal mine."

   *

   Having already tackled the most obvious consumer issues, Nader is taking
some
different paths in the '90s. He campaigned in two 1992 New England presidential
primaries, encouraging voters to write "None of the Above" on the ballot. Many
wrote his name instead, and "interestingly, they were divided between
Republicans and Democrats," he says.

   His motive was to generate public discussion of his "Concord Principles,"
which outline tools for his new democracy. "We had no television, it was just
300 or 400 people in auditorium after auditorium," he says. "They would stay
until 11 at night for big discussions. This business of the media pandering to
the lowest common sensibility of the audience is a self-fulfilling prophecy."

   In the unlikely company of such political conservatives as Patrick Buchanan,
Nader has vigorously opposed both the North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA) and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), maintaining they
will undercut environmental and minimum wage standards in the United States.

   He has been getting Congressional flak for his unexpected stance -- during
one heated debate, House Minority Leader Rep. Robert H. Michel (D-Ill.), called
Ross Perot, Buchanan and Nader the "Groucho, Chico and Harpo Marx" of the trade
issue.

   He was scolded even more publicly last summer in Newsweek magazine. Noting
that "many of Nader's crusades these days verge on the bizarre," the magazine's
Rich Thomas wondered aloud if Nader's views are losing their influence. But
Thomas concluded that, despite losing some battles, Nader remains a "powerful
player."

   NAFTA has already passed and GATT -- which faces a Senate vote in December
--
is expected to be approved, but Nader's opposition is unswerving.

   Asked to enumerate his most important accomplishments, Nader first offers a
checklist of what he calls "transient victories," items such as seat belts, air
bags, crash-worthy cars, better labeling on food, lower levels of lead in the
environment.

   And there have been the victories of what he calls "silent revolutions," in
America's smoking and eating habits that have occurred despite the pressures of
the marketplace. "The decline of tobacco and the improvement of nutrition are
the consumer movement, but people don't see it that way. They see the consumer
movement as the compulsory recall of cars."

   Looking ahead, he sees health care remaining on the agenda, along with "the
Big Brother aspects of a credit-card economy with all those electronic data
bases floating around," and making the new technology accessible to everyone.
(Although he's still writing on an Underwood typewriter, his office uses
Internet to mobilize campaigns around the world.)

   And he foresees the emergence of a third party. "Ross Perot broke the myth
of
the two-party system and proved that 19 million voters can wave bye-bye to
political parties."

   And, no, Nader wouldn't be a candidate. "I have a different role, on the
outside, to build a democratic infrastructure."
 
People Power

   For the last 30 years, Ralph Nader has planted the seeds of the contemporary
consumer movement by launching citizen action groups with various interests and
encouraging their development. Here is a partial list of the public-interest
organizations founded by Nader and his associates since 1969.
 
NADER GROUPS

   Center for Study of Responsive Law: Nader's headquarters for 20 years

   U.S. Public Interest Research Group: Est. 1988, umbrella for 26 state PIRGs

   Corporate Accountability Research Group: Est. 1970, now relatively inactive

   Essential Information: Est. 1980, monitors corporations outside the U.S.

   PIRGs: Most active in N.Y., N.J., Mass., Calif.

   Public Citizens: Est. 1971, advocacy group supported by 50,000 dues paying
members

   Health Research Group: Est. 1971, tracks health issues from pills to
pollution

   Critical Mass Energy Group: Est. 1974, opposes nuclear power

   Buyers Up: Est. 1983, group buying organization 12,000 members

   Congress Watch: Est. 1973, lobbying arm

   Litigation Group: Est. 1972, sues companies and government agencies
 
COLLEAGUE PUBLIC INTEREST GROUP*

   Aviation Consumer Action Project: Est. 1971, advocates safety, passengers
rights

   Center for Auto Safety: Est. 1970, promotes auto and highway safety

   Center for Science on the Public Interest: Est. 1971, concentrates on health
and nutrition

   Clean Water Action Project: Est. 1972, monitors EPA water pollution

   Disability Rights Center: est. 1976, supports legislation for the disabled

   National Insurance Consumer Organization: Est. 1980, insurance watchdog

   Pension Rights Center: Est. 1976, promotes pension reform

   Telecommunications Research and Action Center: Est. 1972, watches FCC

   * Some founded by Nader and spun off, others started by Naders Raiders

   Source: Fortune Magazine