Playboy Interview: Ralph Nader

When Playboy first interviewed Ralph Nader in October 1968, he was Public Enemy Number One--to the nation's carmakers. To Detroit's customers, however, he was a hero. As a result of his one-man crusade, the milestone Traffic Safety Act of 1966 called for mandatory seat belts in American cars. Since then, an estimated 200,000 lives have been saved on the nation's highways.

But Nader was only getting started. In the last line of his previous "Playboy Interview," he told us, "The struggle for consumer democracy is just beginning"--and it was. Within a year, more than 30,000 young people had applied to fill the 300 jobs on Nader's first task force, a citizen-action team of idealistic undergraduates and attorneys fresh from law school. Dubbed Nader's Raiders, the band of activists began making waves in Washington with a series of dramatic investigations into everything from food additives, dangerous drugs and environmental hazards to corporate greed and Congressional corruption.

In the quarter-century since then, the Raiders have been responsible for the. passage of at least 200 new laws, and Nader's core group has grown into a nationwide consumer movement of more than 50 civic-action organizations. Nader himself at 58, remains on the ramparts, his image intact as a real-life Frank Capra hero--a latter-day "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington"--with that aura of incorruptible idealism and selfless dedication. Despite the perennial assaults directed at him by his powerful opponents in government and business, he and his reputation have managed to survive a long and tumultuous career.

Although he has trumpeted the same message for almost three decades, Nader swung into the Nineties with a stepped-up plan of action. "The web of abuse has grown at an ever-accelerating rate," he warns, "along with the concentration of too much power in too few hands." So he has devised an ambitious program for reforming the system. He also made a move that, for many, was completely unexpected: After working outside the electoral system for his entire professional life, Nader decided to take his case directly to the people by placing his name on the ballot in the 1992 Presidential race. Nader scored 6311 write-in votes in the New Hampshire primary and bested Governor Robert Kerrey and Senator Tom Harkin in the Massachusetts primary.

To anyone who knows him, Nader's transformation from national gadfly to political hopeful was inevitable. Born in 1934 to Nathra and Ruth Nader, a hard-working Lebanese couple who immigrated to America and settled in Winsted, Connecticut, he grew up believing in the American dream of personal freedom and the responsibilities of citizenship. "When the Naders sat around the table," a family friend recalls, "it was like the Kennedys, except that the subject they discussed wasn't power, it was justice." At the age of 12, Ralph was a fan of the New York Yankees and he played basketball with neighborhood chum David Halberstam. Off court, his recreational tastes ran mostly to reading--"The Congressional Record" was a favorite--and he recalls "shaking with excitement" as he pored over the works of early muckrakers such as Upton Sinclair and Lincoln Steffens.

Nader entered Princeton in 1951, where he raised eyebrows by agitating for a ban on the spraying of DDT after seeing dead birds on the school's lawn. He also slaked his voracious intellectual appetite by adding Chinese, Russian, Spanish and Portuguese to the Arabic and English he spoke at home. Graduating Phi Beta Kappa, Nader went on to Harvard Law School but found it "a high-priced tool factory." As he later remarked, "If you worried about issues of right and wrong, you were considered soft intellectually."

It was while at Harvard that Nader began to mine an untapped vein of investigative research: the engineering of cars by the American auto industry. Detroit, he wrote in an article for The Nation, "is designing automobiles for style, cost, performance and calculated obsolescence, but not for safety"--despite the 1,500,000 auto-related injuries and 40,000 fatalities reported every year. The resulting article formed the basis for 1965's scathing best-seller, "Unsafe at Any Speed," which denounced the design defects of General Motors' Corvair as "one of the greatest acts of industrial irresponsibility in the present century."

Congress passed its historic auto-safety legislation the next year, and Nader was launched as a public figure. But after a golden age of consumerism in the Seventies--climaxed by the recruitment of dozens of reform-minded Nader protégés into the Carter Administration--the national mood changed overnight with the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan. For Nader, the Eighties were a decade "of moral narcosis, rampant greed and callousness--a decade in which the consumer movement struggled in vain to stem a rising tide of abuse, all under the banner of free-market deregulation and tax subsidies for the rich." The low point came in 1986, when Nader fell ill with Bell's palsy, an affliction that partially paralyzed one side of his face for several months. While he was recovering, he stopped work for several weeks to be with his ailing older brother, who was dying from cancer. When he returned to the fray, it was with a renewed determination to make his work meaningful.

But real progress remained elusive until, as he puts it, "all those checks that were kited by all those high rollers in the Eighties finally started bouncing in the Nineties," and the country plunged into hard times. Suddenly, in 1992, consumerism is in vogue again, and after a long eclipse--in Washington and in the press--Nader has undergone something of a personal resurrection. He's been there all along, of course, working as hard as ever, appearing in such varied forums as TV's "Inside Edition," the counterculture journal Mother Jones, even "Saturday Night Live"--and the public has begun listening to his warnings and admonitions once again.

To learn more about the ongoing crusade of the nation's leading citizen watchdog, Playboy called on Murray Fisher, who edited our first Nader interview 24 years ago. Fisher reports:

"When Nader and I met in a downtown Washington hotel, just a few blocks from the scene of the 1968 interview, he reminded me that, at the time, thousands of young protesters had been chanting and marching against the Vietnam war in the streets just below us. Two decades later, he said, they should be out there again--protesting even louder about what their government is doing to America.

"He hasn't changed a bit. Lean to the point of gauntness, Nader still favors the same shapeless, charcoal-gray Ivy League suits and black clodhopper shoes he's worn since he left a private law practice and migrated to Washington in 1964 as an unpaid advisor for Senator Abraham Ribicoff's subcommittee on executive reorganization.

"Intensely private, even secretive, Nader volunteers little or nothing about his personal life. Other sources, though, confirm all the stories about him. He doesn't own a car and hitches rides with friends, he lives in a modest boarding house that even his closest associates have never visited and he likes to save money by eating in coffee shops.

"Except for infrequent trips home to visit his parents, Nader still works literally every waking hour of his life. So it's not surprising that he has never been married, or that he has never been linked romantically with anyone. (It has been reported that in the Sixties, General Motors hired detectives to tail him in an unsuccessful effort to dig up dirt, and even sent women to accost him in an apparent seduction-blackmail scheme. GM has denied the latter allegation.) To the dismay of critics and journalists in search of clay feet, Nader is exactly what he seems to be: either an avenging angel or an utterly selfless idealist, depending on how one feels about what he stands for.

"Our sessions rang with the same reformist oratory that marked Playboy's first interview with him, but this time Nader has gone for the jugular. His ambition is still, as it always has been, 'nothing less than the qualitative reform of the industrial revolution.' But the economic and social decline of the past four years, he insists, is symptomatic of a fundamental rot that has elevated reform to a priority of the utmost urgency.

"By the time we met for our last session, Nader's theme had become a rallying call for a people's army of American citizens to rise up and join in a fight to save the republic--'while there's still time.' So we began our interview by discussing his political aspirations."

[Q] Playboy: Why did you decide to campaign for President?

[A] Nader: I wanted to enlarge the agenda of issues for the announced candidates. Jerry Brown talks about the corruption of a system that makes it virtually impossible for a candidate to get nominated without becoming indentured to special interests. But the rest of them--Paul Tsongas, Tom Harkin, Bob Kerrey, Bill Clinton and Pat Buchanan--make what I call end-point promises: "I promise to turn this economy around. I promise to improve the environment." But they don't say how they are going to overcome the organized lobbies and pressure groups that will block them if they try to do anything.

[A] So it doesn't really matter if the politicians who ask for your votes are well-intentioned or if they're charlatans. Either they're so dishonest that they think they can flimflam people or they really mean what they say. Either way, they can't deliver.

[A] Is it any surprise that we don't believe politicians when they look straight into the camera and tell us to trust them--that they'll clean up that mess in Washington and restore faith in government? Where have we heard all this before? If I could show you filmed highlights from the campaigns of every candidate who's run for President in the past twenty-five years, you'd laugh yourself silly because they make the same promises over and over again. And conditions keep getting worse.

[A] The public is left with the sense that they're just passive bystanders. They're sitting in their living rooms with the ads coming at them on TV, and they have no hard information on which to base a decision. They can't tell Tweedledum from Tweedledee.

[Q] Playboy: Where do you fit in?

[A] Nader: I'm none of the above. That's why I asked people to write in my name as a no-confidence vote against politics-as-usual. I'd like legislatures in every state to pass statutes that would allow a no-confidence vote. The front-runners would have to keep looking not only at one another but at an alternate candidate, "none of the above." If enough voters checked off that box, it would send a powerful message to both sides. If "none of the above" won, it would cancel the election, send the candidates packing and force new elections.

[Q] Playboy: So you're not really making a serious bid for nomination?

[A] Nader: It's a serious campaign, but not for the nomination. It's a campaign to involve citizens in the shaping of their government. Too many people have an attitude of cynicism and resignation about the political process. When you ask them what the difference is between ignorance and apathy, they roar back, "We don't know and we don't care." But power abhors a vacuum. If you don't get involved, the special interests will move in and run your life. The politicians would like nothing better than to have couch potatoes who get up only to vote for them on election day. But it's during the primary process, in the months before an election, that the tone and substance of the next four years will be determined.

[Q] Playboy: What kind of public response did you get on the campaign trail?

[A] Nader: In our first appearance, six hundred people jammed the room, and we continued to get turnouts of three hundred, four hundred, five hundred, in almost every community. In total numbers, we outdrew the Democrats and the lone Republican by almost five to one. People are hungry to find out how they can kick their dependence on the corporate and governmental power structures and begin shaping their own destiny.

[Q] Playboy: Did you give traditional stump speeches?

[A] Nader: They were not so much speeches as town meetings--nothing like we're used to seeing in an election year. When candidates go on the stump during state primaries, it's like the circus coming to town: Their advance people sweep in, then their advisors, press agents, banners, fliers, their staged events. They get their photo opportunities. They have teams of writers honing the five-minute speech into a series of sound bites suitable for the six o'clock news. Their handlers handpick the audiences and insulate the candidates from any unpleasant or searching questions. And the professional reporters wouldn't know how to ask a tough question unless their jobs were on the line--which they might be if they asked a tough question.

[A] But the people are fed up with that kind of politics. They want to ask the tough questions themselves and they want straight answers. So that's what I tried to give them.

[A] I told them, "I want you to think very carefully about who you decide to vote for this year. I want you to ask yourself if it's wise to trust any of the guys who are running with making the kinds of decisions the next President will have to make. Given the record of Congress and the White House over the past twelve years, there's no apparent reason for optimism. Would you have approved the decision to deregulate the S&Ls in 1982 and then unleash them to loot billions from their depositors? Would you continue to do business with a company that keeps stealing from you, like many companies that sell to the Pentagon? Would you work with a company that put hazardous contaminants in your food, water and air? Would you subsidize failing companies and then, if they started turning a profit, allow them to keep the subsidies? Would you do any of that?" "Hell, no!" they shouted. "Then you will have to start taking back the reins of government," I told them.

[A] I started talking at seven-forty and they asked the last question at eleven P.M. They were really into it. They wanted to sign up. But it's a long way from one evening's enthusiasm to a new kind of democracy. The write-in vote for me has been small because people know I'm not really a candidate. But the important thing for me wasn't getting them to vote for me, it was getting them to connect with one another.

[A] I kept telling the other candidates to do what I was trying to do--run with the people--so even if they're defeated, they'll leave behind something other than footprints in the sand. Even if they lose, they should leave a reinvigorated, much more visible pattern of citizen activity. Politics without citizen roots will turn against the people.

[Q] Playboy: Is that what's happened in this country?

[A] Nader: Definitely. We all feel an increasing loss of control over our own lives, over our government and our economic security. There's a deepening sense of desperation, an increasingly uneasy feeling that the people running things can't be trusted--that they don't know what they're doing, or worse, that they know exactly what they're doing but there's nothing we can do to stop them.

[A] If you don't feel there's anything you can do, you won't do anything, and they can keep doing things pretty much the way they like. That's what's been going on at an accelerating rate for the past twelve years or so. The level of accountability at the top in government and in large corporations has never been lower. The unaccountable bureaucracies that govern both are slowly converging.

[Q] Playboy: In what way?

[A] Nader: In every way--as a result of the symbiotic relationships among members of Congress, many state legislators and their campaign contributors in the business community. The members of Congress say to them, "We'll do what you want us to do, and in return you'll make sure we have a lifetime job in Congress." A few bright and honest members of Congress point out for us how corrupt the system is. But for most of the others, it's a way of life. All this is nothing new, of course. But in the past few years it's become more sophisticated, pervasive and outrageous--more surrounded with propaganda to camouflage it from public scrutiny.

[Q] Playboy: What kind of propaganda?

[A] Nader: The corporations have gotten smart. In the Sixties and early Seventies, when they started bribing and arm-twisting Washington in a tentative way, the consumer groups caught them red-handed and, in a few cases, put a stop to it. But since then, the corporations have dug in, using think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation to represent their interests. They've retained big public-relations firms like Hill and Knowlton to maximize their media impact and package themselves as patriots. And they've fostered an awesome proliferation of well-funded, well-connected lobbyists to work every corridor in the Capitol.

[A] There are more than fifteen thousand registered lobbyists in Washington--and at least as many more unregistered--working for clients that pay them as much as a million dollars a year to enlist support from Congress and the regulatory agencies.

[Q] Playboy: How do they get that support?

[A] Nader: They say things like, "We're losing the race with Japan. Don't you see how MITI, Japan's industry ministry, supports Japanese companies? You have to support us the same way or we'll have to close the factory and start laying off workers or move to foreign countries with cheaper labor and weaker laws--and that might jeopardize your reelection." There's almost an endless array of the-sky-is-falling threats, of bribes and temptations that they can use to advance their cause.

[A] The corporate influence is exerted not just through campaign contributions, but with free "fact-finding" junkets, free trips for the public servants and their families, big-time shmoozing and fraternization over fancy meals in expensive restaurants. Corporations hold forth the prospect of high-paying jobs for the public servants as consultants after they leave the government. They make sure that civil-court judges come from the business-lawyer ranks of corporate law firms. They push Congress and the Executive branch to appoint industry people as assistant secretary of this or deputy secretary of that. People from each side shuttle back and forth almost interchangeably. It's incestuous. And it goes on day after day and year after year. And the PACs are even worse.

[Q] Playboy: Explain political action committees.

[A] Nader: They're campaign contribution organizations formed for the sole purpose of paying members of Congress and government bureaucrats to promote and protect their interests at the expense of the public. The chicken-coop manufacturers, for example, formed a PAC about fourteen years ago. They wanted purchasers of chicken coops to qualify for an investment tax credit. That's all they wanted, so they put their money into the coffers of the House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee and, lo and behold, they got the investment tax credit as part of an amendment on another bill.

[Q] Playboy: Was this money given under the table?

[A] Nader: Not at all. It was perfectly legal. They simply wrote checks to each of the Congressmen and Senators on both committees.

[Q] Playboy: As campaign contributions?

[A] Nader: Yes. And because they're from a group, each PAC is allowed to give up to five thousand dollars--certainly a vast improvement on the paltry thousand-dollar limit on campaign contributions from individual citizens. There are more than four thousand PACs in Washington representing every conceivable special-interest group in American industry: doctors, car dealers, petroleum companies, textile manufacturers, you name it. They all want something, they pay millions to get it and they get their money's worth. It's nothing more, of course, than a legalized form of bribery, and it's turned Washington into a bustling bazaar of accounts receivable, with votes going to the highest bidder from the best politicians money can buy.

[Q] Playboy: Apart from investment tax credits for chicken coops, what kinds of special considerations do corporations receive in exchange for this largess?

[A] Nader: Government grants, contracts, exclusive licenses, nonenforcement of health and safety laws, quota and marketplace protections to insulate them from competition, government-paid research and development for new inventions--with the companies getting to keep the patents--and giveaways of taxpayer assets. Public lands go for five dollars an acre to mining companies that get to keep all the income from whatever gold or hard-rock mineral they dig out of the mines--mines on the American people's property. The list goes on and on. People complain about all the money that goes to public welfare programs, but corporate welfare costs probably three times more.

[Q] Playboy: You have written that these trends escalated tremendously under the Reagan Administration.

[A] Nader: What happened during the Reagan years was a fundamental transfer of wealth from the middle class to the wealthy and the corporate. This was accomplished in a variety of ways: by increasing government debt, by deregulating corporations and by passing tax reductions that favored the wealthy. When Reagan came in, he said he was going to balance the budget. He then ran up the biggest budget deficits in world history--including a huge expansion of the national debt from nine hundred fifty billion dollars to almost three trillion dollars. That took us, in eight years, from being the largest creditor nation to the largest debtor nation in the world--while our worker wages fell behind nine other countries.

[A] Reagan also ran on a law-and-order platform and then proceeded to take the federal cop off the business beat by deregulating corporate America. One of the many tragic consequences of that act was a tremendous stagnation in the development of more fuel-efficient motor vehicles and other sources of renewable energy, safer foods, safer drugs, safer working conditions, safer nursing-home conditions, safer highways, even safer children's toys.

[A] But even more costly was the fact that Reagan signed legislation that allowed the S&Ls to depart from their central purpose--which was to provide mortgage funds to encourage home ownership--and plunge into junk bonds and equity real estate. The result was the funding of extremely risky investments with billions of dollars in life savings from the banks' depositors--funds that proceeded to disappear into the pockets of bank officers, Wall Street executives and high-rolling speculators.

[Q] Playboy: Once it became clear what was going on, why didn't anybody try to stop it?

[A] Nader: It was a feeding frenzy and everybody was in on it. The accounting firms, appraisal firms and law firms all got a piece of the action precisely because everyone looked the other way. The attitude was, "Everybody's doing it, why shouldn't we?" And it was all done under the noses of the regulatory agencies that claimed not to have known what was going on. Well, it was as impossible to ignore as a solar eclipse. The agencies knew about the speculation, the self-dealing and the looting, but they did nothing about it because they were backed by a President who was owned and operated by the corporate interests of America.

[Q] Playboy: Some say the final cost of the S&L scandal will be approximately half a trillion dollars.

[A] Nader: It's probably going to climb even higher. They're talking about spreading it over the next thirty or forty years so that our grandchildren can pay it off. The accumulated interest by that time, including commercial bank bailouts, could run the tab to almost two and a half trillion dollars. That would work out to more than eight thousand dollars from every taxpayer in America. The bill is going to be paid, not by the perpetrators, but by their victims: the American people.

[Q] Playboy: You said that new tax laws were a factor in the transfer of wealth under President Reagan.

[A] Nader: Right. Hand in hand with his deregulation philosophy was his proposal for new corporate tax subsidies that he said would release billions for new investment, promote productivity and create jobs. But the money was used to fuel a merger-and-acquisition drive that further concentrated the corporate Goliaths, made them even less productive, drove them more deeply into debt, cost thousands of jobs and stripped many stockholders of much of their assets.

[A] General Electric earned more than six billion dollars in profits in 1981, 1982 and 1983. If it had been paying taxes at rates that applied before Reagan was elected, it would have owed about two and a half billion dollars more in taxes. But under the provisions of Reagan's 1981 tax law, millions of American workers each paid more taxes to Uncle Sam than GE did for those three years. In fact, GE actually received a two-hundred-and-eighty-three-million-dollar refund. They used that money not to build new plants and to hire new workers, but to buy RCA.

[A] Forty years ago, corporate taxes represented a fourth of federal revenue. Thanks to Ronald Reagan, they went down to between six and nine percent. Corporations began getting more subsidies from Washington than ever before, so they were sending proportionately fewer taxes to Washington and receiving much more in return. Consequently, the tax burden has come down increasingly on middle-class taxpayers. If you include Social Security taxes, which have escalated tremendously in the past ten years, people earning up to sixty thousand dollars a year are now paying far more in taxes than they were before Reagan was elected.

[Q] Playboy: All these disasters that you blame on Reagan occurred while there was a Democratic majority in Congress. Don't the Democrats share in the responsibility for what's happened in the past twelve years?

[A] Nader: Yes. They're feeding at the same election-money trough as the Republicans--maybe deeper. The majority of PAC money goes to the Democrats, since they are still the ones who control Congress. So there isn't any real opposition party anymore. In philosophy and in practice, the Republicans and Democrats are converging into a single party: the Power Party. I once said to my father when I was a boy, "Dad, we need a third political party." He said, "I'll settle for a second." He was before his time.

[A] There's a theory in Washington that the Democrats don't really want the White House--because then they'd be held responsible for the state of the country. This way, they get to keep all the goodies and they don't have to be held accountable. Why should they care? Republicans and Democrats alike are all going to be pension millionaires when they retire.

[Q] Playboy: Yet Congress keeps proposing new pay raises for itself.

[A] Nader: Right. It still dismays me when I hear a Senator say he can't live on ninety thousand dollars a year plus an array of fringe benefits that includes a princely pension, all-expenses-paid health insurance and medication, a three-thousand-dollar annual housing allowance, unlimited free long-distance calls from their homes, free transportation, cheap food, cheap haircuts. It would take me five minutes to recite all the other benefits. And yet they turn around and say that seven million working Americans should be able to make it on seventy-two hundred dollars a year, freezing the minimum wage at three dollars and thirty-five cents per hour from 1981 to 1989. The taxpayers are expected to send a quarter of their income to Washington and then sit still for the kind of huge increases that Congress votes for itself every year or so. Is it any wonder that the public has had it up to here with Washington? It's no secret that government by hypocrisy is not good for democracy.

[Q] Playboy: How do you feel about the dramatic contrast between the salaries paid to top corporate executives and the wages earned by their employees?

[A] Nader: It's a monument to arrogance and greed. In 1980, the income of the chairmen of the top Fortune 500 corporations averaged forty-five times higher than the wage earned by the lowest entry-level worker. While General Motors staggers under record losses--laying off thousands of workers and freezing wages for the rest--the chairman, Robert Stempel, is pulling down over two million a year in salary and extras. The chairman of Ford, Harold Poling, takes home a modest one million two hundred thousand dollars, presumably as an example to his employees.

[A] But the worst offender is [Chrysler's] Lee Iacocca. His personal income last year was more than the salaries of all the presidents of the ten major Japanese carmakers combined: four and a half million dollars, plus a lifetime expense account and a super pension. Hardly the kind of leadership to inspire confidence in buying American.

[Q] Playboy: Speaking of leadership, how would you grade George Bush's first term as President?

[A] Nader: I'd give him an F. All the trends that began under Reagan have accelerated under Bush: precipitous economic decline, staggering deficits, lopsided balance of trade, growing unemployment, declining quality of life, rising personal-income taxes, failing banks, reeling real estate, unaffordable medical costs, fourth-rate schools, rampant street crime, unchecked corporate crime, an ignorant energy policy and abuses of the public trust by a government increasingly unaccountable for its actions--except to big business. Even if Bush isn't responsible for creating all these problems, he's done nothing to solve them because he's been so busy playing leader of the Free World. Surely, among all the brilliance and idealism that America has to offer, there are people better qualified to run this country than Washington's current crop of politicians. But our electoral system seems to weed out the best people and leave us with the seedier ones.

[Q] Playboy: If you were President, what would you do to fix things?

[A] Nader: I would appoint a cabinet of intrepid activists to clean out every federal department, replacing the bureaucrats and corporate lapdogs with dedicated Americans. But we would only be the lead horses. The reins have to be held by the people.

[Q] Playboy: Do you have any specific projects in mind for this citizen crusade?

[A] Nader: Enough to keep us all busy for the rest of our lives. But before we can get anywhere with specific programs, we have to get enough people involved to make a real difference. And a highly effective way to mobilize is through television and radio.

[A] Let's begin by developing an audience television network, owned not by commercial interests but by the American people, with public-interest programing produced by a full-time staff for broadcast on both television and radio. It would be a nonprofit organization open for membership to viewers and listeners for, say, ten dollars in dues per year. Together with other contributions, that would be enough to finance equipment and personnel in small studios across the country. The programs would monitor the activities of our public and private institutions and offer information on matters of common need. For an hour a day, the public would find out what's really going on and learn what they can do about it.

[Q] Playboy: OK, so you're on the air. What's your program?

[A] Nader: Let's start with energy. We have to develop alternate energy sources. The cheapest, simplest, cleanest and most inexhaustible source is solar energy. Solar power would come close to providing a universal solution for many of our economic and environmental problems. It deals with urban pollution, acid rain and the greenhouse effect, as well as with inflation, balance of trade and geopolitical conflicts. Solar energy has been feasible for decades, of course. But we're not even close to developing a national program for converting to solar energy.

[Q] Playboy: Why not?

[A] Nader: Because Exxon doesn't own the sun. If the decision is left to the oil companies and the coal companies and the atomic-power companies, we won't have a solar-energy program until the world supply of fossil fuels is completely gone--if there's any environment left by then. So we'll have to do it ourselves. But we're not going to get very far in cleaning up the environment until we clean up politics. That means we have to begin intensifying public scrutiny of the cozy relationship between business and its pals in Washington. That means placing strict limits on campaign financing. It means pushing for legislation to outlaw gifts and junkets from fat-cat lobbyists and PACs. It means ending the sweetheart deals between industry and regulatory agencies. It means imposing term limitations to break the grip of entrenched Congressional dynasties. It means making lawmakers more accountable by enabling the electorate to cast a no-confidence vote between elections. And it means opening up the political process to foster the creation of new parties--making it easier for citizens to get on the ballot and bring their views to the public. The only way the Republicans and Democrats are going to shape up is if they're confronted with displacement. That's two programs--energy and politics. Want another?

[Q] Playboy: Sure.

[A] Nader: It's time to begin redistributing back to the middle class and the poor the wealth that was taken from them by the rich and the corporations during the Reagan years. The first way to do that is through tax reform. The special interests have to begin paying their share.

[A] The fairest solution would be to restore the progressive income tax on a more equitable basis, with those earning the highest incomes paying more than the rest of the taxpayers. But the simplest solution might be a single tax that almost everyone would pay at the same rate--ten or fifteen percent--with no loopholes for anyone, plus a higher flat tax for the top two percent of the wealthiest. Or we might abolish the income tax and replace it with a progressive sales tax that provides exemptions for the poor. The more you can afford to spend, the more tax you would have to pay. But whatever kind of tax system we adopt, it should be easy to understand and difficult to avoid. We don't want a reformed tax system to provide jobs for lawyers, bookkeepers and accountants.

[A] The second way to redistribute wealth is through pension funds. We have three trillion dollars in public and private pension funds that belong to the workers. But they don't have anything to say about how it's used. Billions of this money have been invested by a few banks and insurance companies--often against the interests of the workers--in speculative funny-money deals that don't create wealth or jobs. Forty percent of the shares listed on the New York Stock Exchange are owned by the pension funds. Isn't it time we used these funds on vitally needed community investment rather than on empire-building mergers and acquisitions?

[Q] Playboy: Not too many chief executives are going to welcome this kind of corporate philosophy.

[A] Nader: Then they'd better reach for their smelling salts, because I'd like to suggest an even more fundamental change to enhance our economic security: Let's break up the big corporations.

[A] Sears, Citicorp, General Motors, IBM--what do they all have in common? They were all number one--the biggest and the best capitalized. Under Reagan they got deregulation, tax breaks and, in some instances, import quotas. They even got concessions from their workers--all to underwrite empire-building. But despite everything, by the end of the decade, they were all sliding downhill or teetering on collapse.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Nader: When the bubble finally broke on all that euphoric expansionism, these top-heavy corporate bureaucracies were engulfed in a tidal wave of misspent money, and their rulers' uppermost priority had become the enrichment of their salaries, bonuses, stock options and pension packages. It's time for them and their companies to go. In fact, there are people at Harvard Business School who say that these corporate dinosaurs are already gone but they don't know it yet.

[A] Every time a major conglomerate has been broken up, things have gotten better. When Standard Oil was broken up in the early 1900s, the shareholders made out much better because they owned stock in four or five companies instead of one. When AT&T was broken up in the early Eighties and the baby Bells were established, people's holdings doubled in value in five years because they got shares in the baby Bells in addition to their share in the old AT&T.

[Q] Playboy: Would these huge corporations actually volunteer for breakup?

[A] Nader: Of course not. We have to give shareholders more rights to make the decisions. Most of the mergers and acquisitions that created these huge corporations never went to a free and informed shareholder vote. Of course, the idea of even initiating a shareholder suit is a wild ambition in most cases. The board of directors makes sure that shareholders can not get one another's names and addresses without costly litigation. But it's only by banding together and taking control that anything will get done.

[Q] Playboy: Critics of the health-care industry have accused it of behaving like a corporate monopoly in raising insurance rates, doctors' fees, hospital charges and prescription costs.

[A] Nader: There's a great deal of truth to that. We have almost forty million people, including millions of children, without any health insurance at all. Another thirty million have grossly inadequate health insurance. The rest of the country, except for the poor, are frightened that their rates will continue to go up, or that the coverage provided by their new employer will subject them to certain fine-print exclusions, such as preexisting medical conditions. Millions of people who have to get their own individual policies are paying more in health insurance premiums than they are for food. We spend thirteen percent of our gross national product on health care. That's the highest in the world, even higher than in Sweden, where everybody is covered from cradle to nursing home. This is appalling, acquisitive greed.

[Q] Playboy: Who's responsible?

[A] Nader: Insurance companies, doctors, hospitals and drug companies are responsible for a great deal of mismanagement, duplication and unnecessary surgeries. There are nearly a million unnecessary hysterectomies and Caesarian sections each year. And because there are so many operations being performed, so many drugs being administered, there are many more opportunities to make mistakes. Consequently, eighty thousand people a year are dying from medical malpractice. That's more than the number of people who die on the highways.

[A] Meanwhile, doctors' fees have never been higher. Many doctors are making four, five, six, seven hundred thousand dollars a year. Some also own the radiology centers that they send their patients to. It's just commercialism out of control.

[Q] Playboy: Why hasn't anyone stopped it?

[A] Nader: Who has power to stop it? The Health and Human Services Department should be riding herd on this sort of thing throughout the medical industry and relentlessly exposing it. But it isn't. Why isn't it telling us that it costs three times as much to have an appendectomy in one city as it does in another? Or that pharmaceutical companies sometimes get two or three times more in this country per pill than they do in Canada?

[Q] Playboy: Why aren't the regulatory agencies telling us?

[A] Nader: Deregulation philosophy. They don't believe in cracking down on business, and the medical industry is a business. And besides, it's other people's money. Much of their own medical coverage is paid for by the government, which we pay for, too, by the way.

[Q] Playboy: Insurance companies also justify raising their rates with the claim that unscrupulous doctors, lawyers and patients often concoct phony malpractice claims. Is that valid?

[A] Nader: There's some of that, but nine out of ten malpractice victims recover nothing. There are a lot of people who never know they've been victims of malpractice. There are people who don't want to sue their family doctor, and over half of those who do sue lose because the doctor can get ten colleagues to testify that he's the cat's meow.

[Q] Playboy: Are the insurance companies blameless in all of this?

[A] Nader: No, because they have a strategy that maximizes revenue. One reason that both medical and insurance costs keep going up is that the insurance companies are less interested in reducing claims than in endlessly raising the ceiling on premium increases. They would rather write you a thousand-dollar policy and pay you back five hundred dollars than write a five-hundred-dollar policy and pay you back two-fifty. They have more of your money left over for investment, which is their principal source of income.

[Q] Playboy: What would you do to lower costs and improve medical care?

[A] Nader: More than Bush's laughable plan. His tax incentives would have no measurable effect on improving care or reducing costs for most people. What we need is radical surgery, not Band-Aids. Health maintenance organizations are a step in the right direction, but it's time to embrace some sort of federally funded universal medical plan, financed through taxes, that would provide affordable comprehensive care for everyone without subjecting them to stagnant service. We're also going to have to impose vigilant regulatory control over the business practices of health care and enforce strict limits on insurance company rates, hospital costs, doctors' fees and drug company prices. But whatever system is adopted, it must pay top attention to primary health care and the prevention of injury and disease.

[Q] Playboy: Let's move to our educational system. How is that doing?

[A] Nader: It speaks volumes about our values and priorities as a society that America's schools have deteriorated from institutions of learning into adolescent day-care centers and breeding grounds for drugs and vandalism. Educators admit that the system is in trouble. They say we're not training kids for the high-tech careers of the future that will make America globally competitive. That may be true, but promoting occupational advancement at the expense of the humanities and social sciences simply encourages the corporations to complete the transformation of our high schools into trade schools, thwarting the development of critical minds.

[A] We're graduating teenagers who can hardly read, who can hardly write, who can hardly think, who don't know or care what's going on in the world. They know nothing of history. They equate success with celebrity and wealth. They equate satisfaction with gratification. That's not surprising, since they spend twenty-five or thirty hours a week--almost as long as they spend in school and far longer than they spend with their parents--being baby-sat by the television set, watching videos, listening to their Walkmans. They're recruited into the seventy-billion-dollar adolescent marketplace. At a very young age, they're eating junk food, playing with war toys, they're even fiddling with cosmetics. When they're asked who their hero figures are, it's the Ninja Turtles or Madonna.

[Q] Playboy: So where has this led us?

[A] Nader: We're seeing the takeover of the family by commercial and corporate values, not only in terms of assuming custody of our children, but in defining a valid parent as someone who goes to the office and gets a paycheck. If someone asks, "Where do you work?" you're supposed to say, "I work at Smith Kline or IBM." It's not OK to say, "I work at home as a parent," or "I work in the community as a citizen." That's not considered status.

[A] Schools don't teach citizen skills to our children. At most, they're taught job skills, memorization skills, test-taking skills. But you can't teach citizen skills just by teaching them the Bill of Rights. You have to give them facts and case studies and practical community programs to work on. They need an understanding of who has power, who doesn't, who needs it, who abuses it and what changes have to be made. Since schools are part of the community, they're not likely to focus uncomfortable attention on local institutions like banks, insurance companies or city hall. So whole generations of Americans go out of their schools without the most important skills they need: to know their rights and responsibilities, to know how to mobilize, how to build coalitions, how to dig out information, how to reach the press--how to build a democracy.

[Q] Playboy: Is citizen activism likely to become a required high school course in the near future?

[A] Nader: Not so long as all the forces we deal with in society--from school onward--militate against citizenship. We're taught to believe, not to think, to have faith in the system, not to question it. We're taught to be pragmatic, not idealistic. Even as children, we're programed by the media to become consumers, not producers. And when we finally get out of school and join the work force, we're taught how to make a buck, not how to make a difference.

[A] But even if we do want to make a difference, we have to think about the consequences, not the rewards. You don't see too many whistle-blowers getting invited to the White House. You see athletes, movie stars, foreign government rulers--many of them actually dictators. These are the people who get medals of freedom, not the unsung patriots who jeopardize their jobs, careers and family security to stop some company from endangering the public with unsafe products or defrauding them with unethical business practices. Someone who dares to challenge an abuse is more likely to be viewed as a troublemaker and risk being ostracized. So it's not surprising that most people say, "Hey, why should I be a hero? Why should I stick my neck out? I have a spouse and two kids." But that's exactly why they have to get involved, not only for themselves and their families, but for the health and welfare of the human family.

[Q] Playboy: Be specific. How can someone actually get involved in citizen work?

[A] Nader: You can call Public Citizen in Washington and they'll be glad to enlist you or give you a local referral. Better still, you can look up social-change organizations listed under Good Works or Consumer Protection Groups in the classified directory and start making calls. Start your own citizen-action group at work, or at school, or at the gym, or at your bowling league.

[A] Or you can do it at your college class reunion, like I helped to do three years ago. I was invited to speak to a small reunion of my graduating class at Princeton, the class of 1955. There were about seventy people in the room. I was the last to speak, and as I sat there listening to the others, I asked myself what I was going to say to these people. I don't like to specialize in nostalgia. I had only gone back to two or three reunions. I couldn't stand up and tell them about unsafe cars. So when my turn came, I went up to the podium and said, "You know, there's a great spirit in this class because we've known one another since we were seventeen or eighteen years old. We took classes and played sports together thirty-four years ago. So we can be completely candid with one another. You're all leading lawyers, leading doctors, leading professors, leading CEOs. The question is: What are you going to do with this talent? Go to another reunion and talk about the good old days? You're all in your fifties. Your children are grown, you have financial security. Now what? Are you going to coast into retirement, or are you going to try to fill your remaining active years with a revitalized sense of purpose and accomplishment? I'm sure we've all done what we can to make a difference, to leave things a little better than we found them. But are things really better? I don't think so and I don't think you do, either.

[A] "You're all part of the power structure. You get your calls returned. If we pooled our contacts--our assets, our accumulated experience, our collective knowledge--there would be no limit to what we could accomplish. So let's form our own civic group, an organization to mobilize the young students at Princeton and give them a horizon beyond going to work for a bank or an investment firm. Let's arrange internships and other kinds of job opportunities that will enable them to develop the civic skills they need to tackle the problems that can only be tackled by citizens because our public institutions have failed us."

[A] Well, the reaction was dramatic and astonishing. It was like a revival meeting. They started standing up. One doctor said, "I've been practicing for thirty years and I want to do something to improve our health-care system, but I can't do it from my clinic." Then a lawyer friend of mine got up and spoke for all of us, saying, "You know, when I got out of Princeton, America was number one--there was no number two--and all I thought about was advancing my career. Well, here I am now, fifty-five years old, and I look around and see the country falling apart. Well, we've got to do something about it."

[Q] Playboy: So what did you do about it?

[A] Nader: The Princeton class of 1955 organized the Center for Civic Leadership. With a full-time staff, we've raised three hundred thousand to four hundred thousand dollars to run it. This year alone we've placed sixty internships all over the country. Our goal is to provide ten percent of the graduating class at Princeton each year with full-time jobs in the civic-change arena.

[A] We also decided to do something about energy. There's a member of our class who's trying to get thirty chief executives--with no vested interest in the energy industry--to hammer out an energy-efficiency and renewability platform supported by the Princeton University Center of Energy and Environment. The platform will then be presented to Congress, the President and the rest of the country.

[A] Also, a law professor who's not a member of our group has developed a time-dollar program that's going to sweep the country: Neighborhood groups, like hospitals or community colleges, would open computer banks at which you can make deposits and withdrawals of civic time.

[Q] Playboy: Please explain that.

[A] Nader: Say you spend fifty hours tutoring a teenager. That's logged in as a service credit in your account at the computer bank. If you need someone to help you in other ways two years or ten years later, you can draw the fifty hours back. So it's a new form of currency for people who have more time than money. Since nobody receives any payment for services rendered, it's tax-exempt. An hour being an hour, it's inflation-proof and, because a lawyer's hour is worth the same as a teenager's hour, it's also egalitarian. But best of all, it binds the neighborhood together brilliantly, turning strangers into neighbors and neighbors into friends. The plan is already operating in ten parts of the country, and my Princeton group is adopting it in several other communities.

[Q] Playboy: Why not involve other college graduating classes in the same kind of work?

[A] Nader: That's what we're trying to do. We have already held two conferences, inviting classes from the Fifties from dozens of other universities. These alumni groups may be the most potentially powerful, dormant institutions in the country. Our class alone probably has personal and professional assets worth two and a half billion dollars.

[A] Imagine Harvard, Yale, Michigan, California, Stanford, Spelman, Oberlin, University of Miami organizing their own groups. Imagine alumni classes from med schools and law schools and business schools pooling their resources for reform, each in their own field. Imagine groups of retired people organizing to provide day care for latch-key kids, bequeathing to young people the manual and artistic skills, the priceless oral traditions they have to share. The key is to create associations that are remote from the pursuit of acquisitive self-interest--not just to engage in the kind of therapeutic do-goodism that makes you feel all warm and fuzzy without really accomplishing anything. The purpose is to crusade not for a five-cent gas tax, but for a transformation of energy into renewable resources; not just to feed the hungry--who'll be needing another meal in six hours--or to shelter the homeless--who'll be out on the street tomorrow--but to provide opportunities for education, employment and low-cost housing that will free these people from the cycle of poverty. The key is to go for systemic change.

[Q] Playboy: You've been at it for more than thirty years now, yet there hasn't been much to show for it in terms of systemic change. What keeps you from getting discouraged?

[A] Nader: The secret of sticking with it is to develop a love of struggle against injustice. People write me and say their lives have been saved by an air bag. There's a real pleasure that comes from getting General Motors and the other car companies to install safety devices in their cars. The death and injury toll on the highways has declined to probably half what it would have been without stringent motor-vehicle and traffic-safety laws passed in 1966 as a direct result of pressure from the consumer movement. Several hundred thousand lives have been saved, along with several hundred billion dollars in damages and lost wages. But even though we're getting better and more effective at what we do, we can't keep up with the proliferation of injustice.

[Q] Playboy: That sounds discouraging.

[A] Nader: Well, the alternative is surrender, and that's unacceptable. To go through life as a noncitizen would be to feel that there's nothing you can do, that nobody's listening, that you don't matter. But to be a citizen is to enjoy the deep satisfaction of seeing pain prevented, misery avoided and injustice decline. There are books on the joys of cooking, and the joys of sex and the joys of profit, but there ought to be one on the joys of civic action.

[Q] Playboy: What sort of future do you foresee if we don't start banding together as citizens to create the kinds of programs you're proposing?

[A] Nader: My father once told me that every society that's ever fallen was populated by people who said, "It can't happen here." Well, it's already happening here, and if we don't do something to stop it, what we're going to see is a more relentless decline in living standards. Citizens will be pushed harder against the wall by an increasingly arrogant, tightly dominating oligarchy. There will be inadequate health care, insurance and Social Security. There will be more workers thrown onto the heap of unemployment, more desperation as homeless people spill out into the streets. More people fighting over the same shrinking pie.

[A] There will be more impoverished children, more neglected children, more brutalized children--all as a consequence of the absence of a civic vision for the next generation. We'll become a supplicant society. The rich and the upper-middle class will still do pretty well, but the sense of social order, the sense of community, will break down even further. There will be a deepening sense of fear such as we haven't seen since the Depression. The principal public outcry will be to crack down on street criminals and build more prisons. And all of this will be given an aspirin called mass entertainment. So the future won't be 1984. It will be Brave New World, with soma to pacify the masses.

[Q] Playboy: Is it too late to avert all that?

[A] Nader: Not yet. We have, at most, a tenor fifteen-year window of opportunity to take control of the juggernaut before we're really into a cycle of calamities. So this is a watershed moment in history, not only for this country but for the world. The old ways aren't working anymore, and we're running out of time to begin making the kind of fundamental change that can renew civilization instead of ending it.

[A] It's not a coincidence that the Soviet Union and America's postwar dominance are coming to an end at the same time. With the red menace gone, we have to begin filling the vacuum created by these collapsing authoritarian regimes with a new spirit of genuine democracy--or new forms of authoritarianism will move in to replace them. With population pressures and environmental degradation reaching critical mass on a global scale, the message should be loud and clear: Hurry up and do something. This may well be our last chance.

"If I could show you filmed highlights of every candidate who's run for President in the past twenty-five years, you'd laugh yourself silly."

"People complain about all the money that goes to welfare programs, but corporate welfare costs probably three times more."

Congress' Ten Most Wanted

In this year's primaries, Americans have voiced their anger and frustration with leaders in Washington. For Ralph Nader, the citizen backlash couldn't have come at a better time. "This country has been strip-mined by a ruling elite of rich and powerful interests--predatory corporations and their lackeys in Congress," he says. "That's gone on long enough. If you don't like what they're doing, don't just sit there. Vote them out." Who does Nader consider to be Congress' primary offenders? "There could have been fifty names on the list," he says, "but these are certainly the worst of a bad lot."

1. Senator Orrin Hatch (R--Utah): The Senate's leading corporate cheerleader; opponent of antitrust laws; unabashed lobbyist for the pharmaceutical industry.

2. Representative Doug Barnard (D--Ga.): Raises reelection funds from financial industry; former banker on House Banking Committee who champions bailouts and blocks industry reforms.

3. Senator Dennis Deconcini (D--Ariz.): Member of S&L scandal's Keating Five; passionate advocate for weakening laws against corporate crime.

4. Representative Charles Stenholm (D--Tex.): Democrats' Trojan horse for the Republicans in Congress--e.g., undermined his own party by siding with Reagan as leader of Boll Weevils.

5. Representative Newt Gingrich (R--Ga.): Corporatist in conservative's clothing; helped engineer huge Congressional pay raise as Minority Whip after announcing he was against it.

6. Representative E. "Kika" De La Garza (D--Tex.): Sides with agribusiness against the rights of farm workers; spokesperson for the chemical industry as chairman of the House Ag Committee.

7. Senator Mitch McConnell (R--Ky.): A leading recipient of funds from special-interest groups; opponent of campaign finance reform; deplorable record on consumer and environmental safety.

8. Senator Wendell Ford (D--Ky.): Majority Whip consistently opposed to consumer issues and Congressional reform.

9. Senator Robert Kasten (R--Wis.): Vigorous opponent of a consumer's right to seek redress through the courts; nicknamed "Parts on Order" because he's "for sale" to corporate interests.

10. Representative Rick Boucher (D--Va.): Represents coal-mining interests unfavorable to workers in his district; legislative priority is to soften laws against white-collar crime.

"The only way the Republicans and Democrats are going to shape up is if they're confronted with displacement."

"There are books on the joys of cooking, the joys of sex and the joys of profit. There ought to be one on the joys of civic action."