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- Nader’s Life and Work
RALPH NADERGreat societies must have public policies that declare which rights, assets and conditions are never for sale. Such policies strengthen noncommercial values, which, nourished by public enlightenment and civic participation, can provide wondrous opportunities to improve our country. Guided by such values, we can better use our wealth and power to benefit all Americans. Applied beyond our borders, these values can help us astutely wage peace and address the extreme poverty, illiteracy, oppression, environmental perils, and infectious diseases that threaten to jeopardize directly our own national security as well as that of the rest of the world. —Ralph Nader, from the preface to Crashing the Party
Ralph Nader was born in 1934 to Rose and Nathra Nader, Lebanese immigrants who owned a restaurant in the small town of Winstead, Connecticut. Nathra, Ralph Nader recalls, would encourage patrons at his restaurant to participate in informal political debates. Nathra and Rose had strong opinions about democracy, and like most immigrants they experienced some dissonance upon coming into the country and witnessing both great acts of public good and objectionable acts of elitist exploitation. By age 14, Ralph Nader had closely read the classic journalistic muckrakers of his day as well as several years of the Congressional Record. At age 17, he entered Princeton University, where he would have the opportunity to test his father's enthusiasm for public protest. He attempted to get the administration to ban the spraying of DDT on campus trees, came to the defense of small business owners being abused by larger businesses, and, finding these endeavors unsuccessful, resigned himself to studying Chinese and preparing for law school. An excellent student, Nader entered Harvard Law School in 1955. He immediately developed an aversion to the corporate orientation of both the courses and the professors' ideologies. Nader wanted to study the legal issues involving food production and automobile safety. He had to do most of this on his own, as Harvard Law School didn't offer such courses and the professors were enthusiastically uninterested. He researched automobile safety anyway, and in 1959 published his first article, "The Safe Car You Can't Buy," in The Nation. At the time, there were nearly 50,000 automobile deaths every year in America, and more than twice that amount of permanent disabilities incurred in automobile accidents. Nader believed--and would continue to believe--that car companies simply didn't believe safety was worth the cost. By 1965, he had expanded the article into a devastating book, Unsafe At Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile. The book contained a theme that, in a larger sense, is almost uniquely attributable to Nader in American politics: corporations habitually blame consumers for defects in their products, just as all perpetrators tend to blame the victims, just as the rich blame the poor for being poor, and so on. The automobile industry spent millions in "public service" propaganda blaming "the nut behind the wheel" for auto fatalities. Nader, of course, took issue with the assumption, and justified his position with painstaking research and eloquent prose. The book launched the consumer rights movement, and General Motors' attempt to discredit Nader assured his fame, which he exploited in order to launch a career of public service and anti-corporate activism. Because of Unsafe at Any Speed, Congress enacted tougher automobile safety laws (eventually culminating, some decades later, in mandatory seat belts and air bags). While other activists dedicated themselves to ending the Vietnam War, Nader spent the rest of the 1960s expanding his project to include the creation of various task forces and groups of young advocates dedicated to consumer safety and rights. In 1969 he and his comrades formed the Center for Study of Responsive Law. Throughout the next thirty years, Nader's "Raiders," as they came to be called, fought for increased water quality, reforms in the Food and Drug Administration, and a plethora of other causes. Of course, most contemporary followers of politics identify Nader with his 1996 and 2000 Presidential runs on the Green Party ticket. Many hold him uniquely responsible for Democratic candidate Al Gore's loss to George W. Bush in 2000. By campaigning to the "left" of Gore politically, it is argued, Nader took voters away who would have voted for the centrist Democrat Gore, albeit reluctantly. Since the 2000 campaign, Nader has continued to organize grass roots activists against corporate power and irresponsibility. A statement Nader made in 1993 sums up his political perspective: What neither Clinton...nor most other Democratic Party proponents of change seem to realize is that significant, enduring change will require an institutionalized shift of power from corporations and government to ordinary Americans. While politicians have now made an art of populist symbolism, virtually none have a serious agenda to strengthen Americans in their key roles as voters, taxpayers, consumers, workers, and shareholders. (http://bostonreview.mit.edu/BR18.2/nader.html) Directory: uploads uploads -> 587 Return function, r i(X) r i(0) r i(1) r i(2) r i(3) 1 0 2 4 6 Thermal Station, I 2 0 1 5 6 3 0 3 5 6 10 uploads -> Department of science and humanities department of mathematics part-a questions and answers uploads -> The Case Against the nypd’s Quota-Driven ‘Broken Windows’ Policing What Is It? uploads -> For want of a nail uploads -> Ownership Models There are two different types of ownership models uploads -> Police Militarization uploads -> City of rising star regular meting thursday, july 14, 2016 uploads -> Township of winfield uploads -> Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act of 2014 uploads -> The Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program What We Want Now! Download 5.81 Mb. Share with your friends:
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