Ralph Nader

Ralph Nader (born February 27, 1934) is a United States consumer rights activist, and two-time U.S. presidential candidate of the Green Party. In both runs Winona LaDuke was his vice-presidential running mate.

Table of contents
1 Early career
2 Consumer advocacy
3 Presidential runs
4 External links

Early career

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

Consumer advocacy

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

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

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

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

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

Presidential runs

Nader ran for President on the Green Party ticket in the U.S. presidential election, 1996, qualifying for ballot status in relatively few states, and garnering less than 1% of the vote (he refused to raise or spend more than $5,000 on his campaign), but making major organizational gains for the party. He ran again in 2000, this time receiving almost 3% of the popular vote. (Many had hoped he would achieve the 5% necessary to qualify the Green Party for federal matching funds in the next election.)

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

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

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

Some voters had attempted to minimise this problem by engaging in Nader trading, in which Nader-inclined voters in swing states agreed to vote for Gore in exchange for Gore-inclined voters in safe Bush states to vote for Nader.

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

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

Nader announced on Dec. 24, 2003 that he will not run for president in 2004 on the Green Party ticket; however, he did not rule out running as an independent.

External links