Fighting the Corporate Goliath

Eight minutes before his flight leaves for Washington, Ralph Nader, consumer advocate, self-appointed David to America's corporate Goliath, steps through the automatic sliding doors at Logan Airport.

He has just finished telling a packed audience of Medical School faculty and students--some of the most prestigious doctors and doctors-to-be in the world--that their approach to medicine is all wrong, that they should be less arrogant and more responsive to the poor. He has told them that their prestige scale has prevented them from exploring some of the most important areas of medicine, and that their colleagues over at the Law School--from which he graduated in 1958--suffer from the same malady. They are, he has charged, "technically excellent" but socially "listless," unresponsive to the needs of the people. He has urged medical students to reject the status scale of the current faculty and to venture into low-prestige areas such as research of accident prevention. From the students he has received an ovation: from most of the faculty, polite applause.

As Nader enters the airport he begins to speak more quickly: he glances somewhat nervously from side to side. It seems clear that he does not enjoy public attention. Several passengers inside the terminal recognize his tall, gaunt figure immediately and whispers of "that's Ralph Nader over there!" are audible. "He looks younger in person than on television." one woman says. Nader doesn't look at them, but keeps walking straight ahead toward the gate. Two people holding pro-nukes posters are talking to passengers as they pass by. Nader tries to avoid them, but one of them recognizes him, leans toward him and says in an amplified voice ". . . and we're going to get Ralph Nader." Nader walks past them without saying anything and then mutters. "Those people are all over the place, in every single airport."

At the entrance to the gate, several more people recognize Nader and there are more whispers. Nader looks straight ahead and walks through the metal detector. It seems strange watching Ralph Nader walk through a metal detector, like seeing the Pope having his fingerprints taken. Ralph Nader hijack an airplane? The idea is hard to swallow.

By the time Nader reaches his gate, most of the other passengers have already boarded. No need to stand uncomfortably in a crows. He has his ticket checked, says goodbye, and quietly disappears down the boarding ramp.

But if in his private life Nader strives to keep a low profile and to stay out of sight, in his public capacity as a consumer activist, he must relish attention. Publicity is his only means of combatting corporate dollars and keeping his crusade afloat. When Ralph Nader the consumer advocate starts talking about his issues, he sheds the shyness that surrounds Ralph Nader the private person. He speaks with an energy and conviction which reveal his own enthusiasm and asks his listeners why they are not just as committed to consumer affairs as he is.

Nader rarely sticks to one topic when he speaks. His mind is a vast library of facts and dates, of reports, studies and legislative acts. Through the years he has compiled a list of cause and enemies which seems almost endless. And from this unwieldly mass of issues and debates come the material for his speeches. In his speech at the Beth Israel Hospital, for example. Nader used "the doctor's role in medicine" as an umbrella topic to take pot shots at the automotive industry, the highway industry, the drug companies, nuclear power and the makers of Wonder Bread. He sprays out facts and accusations like buckshot, aiming at everything and being reasonably sure he will hit something.

Because of this shotgun approach to issues and enemies. Nader has often been called irresponsible and an attention seeker. Ralph de Toledano, in his critical study of Nader. Hit & Run, says.

Nader is and was a revolutionist, but like too many of the current crop not quite certain what he wants to destroy and completely at a loss as to what he wants to build . . . Indefatigable in attack, he nevertheless flits from project to project, never completing any particular job and seldom going beyond the flash of publicity which keeps his name current on page one or the TV news.

But Nader's cause, by nature, is not one of narrow scope. His professed enemy is Corporate America. His activities, therefore, defy focus. He attacks auto companies, oil companies, and drug companies on the same premise, as though they constituted a single giant conglomerate whose single motivation was to screw Joe and Jane Consumer. Ever since the 1966 publication of Unsafe at Any Speed. Nader's virulent attack on the automotive industry in general and General Motors in particular, he has battled big business--all big business--with unparalleled energy.

One area in which he will need that energy in the future will be in counteracting the forces of the Reagan administration, which Nader says is the chief enemy to the consumer during the early '80s. The administration, he says, "is literally going to try to roll the clock back to the Eisenhower administration in the areas of product, auto and food and drug safety and anti-trust enforcement."

Nader says the only way to counter what he calls Reagan's "virtual war on consumers," is to form large-scale consumer co-ops across the country for service including food, health and automotive repair. He stresses the need for strong organization to make these co-ops effective.

"So many people who are concerned about social problems are taken up with the problem itself rather than stepping back, developing an instrument of action and then moving on with the organizational basis of the social problem. We've all done this--I did this in the auto area and with the utilities. Then a few years ago I realized that the real way to unlock this enormous concensus against certain patterns of injustice in this country that exist among the American people is to provide the instrument of organization in sector after sector." When this begins to happen. Nader says, "people begin to realize that they should control what they already own, like millions of dollars in pension funds, the public airways, the public lands and minerals and resources, timber--all of which are now owned by the American people and controlled by a handful of corporations."

Nader says monopolies and government service should be required to send out questionnaires asking consumers for advice on how to improve service. "I have tried to push the Post Office, for example, to agree to send a yearly questionnaire to each postal patron asking. 'Do you want to help improve postal service?' You've got a hundred million patrons. If you get half of one per cent, you've get 500,000 people. I mean you've got zero now: there's no group in America. The only person who would work full time on the postal service from the householder's view would be someone working directly for the householder."

Obviously. Nader says, he cannot effect this kind of mass mobilization on his own. He points to student groups as the major catalysts for consumers' rights programs in the '80s. Despite what has often been referred to as a growing conservatism on campuses around the country. Nader says student groups in the '80s will be more active, though not as large, as activist groups during the '60s.

He cites specifically a yet-to-be-formed group he calls the National Student Political Party for 1984, which will "deal with teenage and 20-year-old voters and be devoted exclusively to structure and access issues of citizen power."

"There is more activity by the small minority of students who are more committed than ever before." Nader adds. "There is actually more going on now than in the '60s, though it's not as demonstrative and graphic as the demonstrations and sit-ins of that era. Basically the next three to four years are going to be years of rising consciousness, rising resolves, and a very broad-based mobilization of citizen forces."

This statement, like many in Nader's long-time battle for consumer rights, has a distinct military flavor. The man whose Washington aides call themselves "Nader's Raiders" is a battle-searred veteran of countless corporate skirmishes. An old soldier, certainly, but, to the chagrin of corporate America, one not likely to fade away for a long time.