Good rundown on Ralphie
Taken together these actions by the Bush administration don't suggest a point-by-point attack on Nader - no one has proposed doing away with seat belts, air bags or fireproof pajamas, for example. Rather, they represent diametrically opposed philosophies about the nature of government regulation.
Ralph Nader: A traitor to himself?
The consumer activist and candidate stands accused of helping George W. Bush undermine Nader-forged consumer protections.
By BILL DURYEA, St. Petersburg Times. Staff Writer
Published March 21, 2004
At the heart of the many arguments now circulating about why Ralph Nader should abandon his candidacy for president is the accusation that he is a traitor, that by siphoning votes from Al Gore in 2000 he delivered the decisive electoral college advantage to George W. Bush. This was a betrayal, the argument runs, of liberals who had supported his innumerable causes lo these many decades.
This argument has been fine-tuned of late. The theme is still betrayal. Not of others, however, but of himself.
In the March 8 issue of the New Yorker, Hendrik Hertzberg laid the table for his condemnation of Nader's candidacy with a paean to his career of accomplishments: seat belts, air bags, fireproof children's pajamas, lead-aprons for X-ray patients, the Freedom of Information Act, the Environmental Protection Agency and on and on. It sounds a little like Marc Antony's double-edged praise of Brutus as an "honorable man" after Caesar's assassination.
Then Hertzberg serves a meal laced with arsenic.
"For the past three years, everything Nader accomplished during his period of unparalleled creativity, which lasted from around 1963 to around 1976, has been systematically undermined by the administration that he was instrumental in putting in power.
"Government efforts on behalf of clean air and water, fuel efficiency, workplace safety, consumer protection, and public health have been starved, stymied or sabotaged in tandem with the shift of resources from public purposes to high-end private consumption, the increasing identity of government and corporate interests, and the growth of a cult of secrecy and arrogance that began well before Sept. 11, 2001.
"Nader bears a very large share of responsibility for these spectacular traducements of his proclaimed values."
This may be the most forceful expression of this argument, but it is not the only one.
When Howard Dean abandoned his quest for the Democratic nomination he "urged his supporters not to be tempted by any independent or third-party candidate." When Nader announced his own run about a week later, Dean elaborated this way:
"Ralph Nader has made a great many contributions to America over 40 years. But if George W. Bush is re-elected, the health, safety, consumer, environmental and open government provisions Ralph Nader has fought for will be undermined. George Bush's right-wing appointees will still be serving as judges 50 years from now, and our Constitution will be shredded. It will be government by, of and for the corporations - exactly what Ralph Nader has struggled against."
We tried to get Nader to comment, but we weren't successful.
Leaving aside for the moment whether there is no real difference between Democrats and Republicans, as Nader often alleges, we wondered if it was really the case that the Bush administration had managed to dismantle in three years what Nader had established over three decades. Using Hertzberg and Dean's rubrics and Nader's own record to guide our search, we came up with this comparison.
Consumer protection
In 1965, Nader authored the book Unsafe at Any Speed, an expose of the flawed design of General Motors' Corvair, which, he said, had a tendency to fishtail and roll over because of its rear-mounted engine. General Motors executives paid a private investigator to dig up dirt on Nader, even going so far as to hire prostitutes to approach him in public. The ensuing publicity made Nader a hero and launched his career.
In 1971, Nader founded Public Citizen, a nonprofit group dedicated to "protecting Democracy and the health, safety and pocketbooks of consumers." This in turn led to the creation of the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
In December, PBS and U.S. News issued a joint report on how the Bush administration "has removed from the public domain millions of pages of information on health, safety and environmental matters, lowering a shroud of secrecy over many critical operations of the federal government," according to usnews.com.
The documents that the Bush administration have classified include auto and tire safety information that manufacturers are required to provide under a new "early warning system" created following the Ford-Firestone scandal several years ago.
The report went on to accuse the Consumer Product Safety Commission of "frequently withholding information that would allow the public to scrutinize its product safety findings and product recall actions."
Workplace safety
The same year he founded Public Citizen, Nader was instrumental in the creation of the Occupational Health and Safety Administration.
Thirty years later, the Bush administration repealed an OSHA ergonomics standard that was created to reduce injuries from repetitive motion and overexertion. Each year, 600,000 workers suffer serious workplace injuries, costing the country $45-billion to $54-billion annually, according to the AFL-CIO.
In 2002, the Bush administration proposed that industries come up with voluntary guidelines to replace the standard that had been abolished.
"Workers depending on voluntary guidelines developed by the big corporations for workplace safety protections is like depending on an Enron 401(k) plan for your retirement security," said Doug Dority, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers union.
In March 2002, the Bush administration proposed eliminating an $11.4-million program that provided workplace safety information to non-English speaking workers.
The Labor Department wanted to replace that program with one nearly a third cheaper that relied on nonprofits and faith-based groups to set up Internet sites. The previous program funneled money through the unions that provided the training onsite.
Fuel efficiency
Nader has long urged the auto industry to use existing technology to produce more fuel-efficient cars and trucks. But he hasn't made much progress no matter who was in the White House.
The Bush administration, which is top heavy with former oil and car industry executives, can claim with justification that it has done more than the Clinton White House to improve fuel efficiency.
President Clinton scarcely touched the so-called CAFE standard (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) during his eight years in office. It was 27.5 mpg for passenger cars when he arrived in 1992 and the same when he left. The light truck standard increased in 1996 by 0.1 mpg to 20.7. Bush, however, bumped up the standard 0.3 mpg for light-trucks beginning in 2005 (1.5 mpg by 2007).
Nader wasn't impressed.
He cites statistics from the Center for Auto Safety, which he helped found, which estimated that increasing CAFE standards for cars and light trucks by 60 percent (45 mpg for cars and 35 mpg for light trucks) by 2005 would result in a savings of 3-million barrels of oil each day, reduce hydrocarbon emissions by 500,000 tons, cut 140-million tons in greenhouse-gas emissions each year and, on average, save new car purchasers $3,000 in fuel costs over the life of the car.
Interestingly, Sen. John Kerry has been one of the leading proponents of much tougher fuel-efficiency standards. A bill he proposed with Sen. John McCain would have increased the CAFE standard to 37 mpg for cars by 2015.
Moreover, there is evidence the Bush administration has encouraged consumers to buy the least fuel-efficient SUVs by affording them tax breaks that were created to encourage farmers to buy new tractors.
Clean air and water
Nader helped establish the Clean Air Act. In 1980, Nader's Public Citizen group was instrumental in passage of the Superfund law.
Critics claim Bush has weakened the Clean Air Act's stringent guidelines for emissions of pollutants such as sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide. Under the "new source review" program older more polluting industrial plants were required to upgrade their pollution controls if they renovated or expanded. But this had the unintended consequence of discouraging older coal-burning plants from expanding for fear they would be forced to implement costly new controls.
In his 2003 state of the union speech, Bush proposed something called "Clear Skies," which he said would reduce pollutants 70 percent by 2015. Environmentalists say the proposal would substantially loosen standards that are on the books now but not enforced.
The Bush administration has proposed shifting the burden of paying for toxic waste cleanup from the polluters to the taxpayers, according to the League of Conservation Voters.
Bush has opened nearly 9-million acres of Alaskan wilderness to oil exploration and under his "Healthy Forests" program, he would open 20-million acres of national forests to logging, according to the League of Conservation Voters.
Public health
Nader's Public Citizen's Health Research Group has battled numerous public health risks, including Red Dye No. 2 and dietary supplements such as ephedra. He has also helped draft and pass many laws, including the Meat and Poultry Inspection Rules.
In January 2002, the Department of Agriculture decided to continue a pilot program for inspecting poultry that had been proven less effective in controlling salmonella and "visible fecal contamination," according to the Consumer Federation of America.
The Government Accounting Office studied the $5.7-million pilot program and found that it didn't "reduce disease-causing organisms" that are blamed for 76-million cases of food poisoning a year.
"The only reason for the administration to go forward after the GAO report is to give in to the poultry industry's pressure to run their lines faster," said Carol Tucker Foreman, head of food policy at the Consumer Federation of America. "Faster line speeds result in more fecal material on poultry. Consumers do not want poop on their poultry."
In its defense, the Department of Agriculture released figures in November 2003 indicating the rate of salmonella in raw meat and poultry dropped by 66 percent over the previous six years and 16 percent compared with 2002.
It should be noted that 2002 was a very bad year. About 27.4-million pounds of tainted poultry was recalled in one week, the largest in the nation's history. Twenty-three people died. Critics say the deaths were attributable to the administration's insistence on placing responsibility for food poisoning on the end user rather than the producer.
* * *
Taken together these actions by the Bush administration don't suggest a point-by-point attack on Nader - no one has proposed doing away with seat belts, air bags or fireproof pajamas, for example. Rather, they represent diametrically opposed philosophies about the nature of government regulation.
St. Petersburg Times. |
