Q&A with the Daily Bruin

Monday, August 19, 1996

Nader campaign stresses civic responsibilityBy Geoff Martin

Summer Bruin Senior Staff

Running on $5,000 of your own money and not accepting campaign
contributions may seem like political suicide, especially in a
national presidential election.

It is only when one begins to understand both this candidate’s
achievements and his hopes for a vital American democracy that such
tactics seem less gimmicky than logical. Such tactics hint at an
optimism which has borne him through many years of fighting to
protect citizens from what he sees as undue corporate influence
over this nation’s domestic and foreign policies.

Ralph Nader has long been known as a strong advocate of consumer
rights; it was his victory over the auto industry which catapulted
him into the public eye and made him not just a spokesman for
consumer rights, but the spokesman for consumer rights in many
people’s minds. His later activities have only strengthened this
image.

Since his 1965 victory, he has gone on to found numerous
nonprofit public-interest groups as well as design legislation and
programs designed to curb the influence of corporate power in both
electoral politics and in daily living.

The Freedom of Information Act, the Environmental Protection
Agency and the Safe Water Drinking Act are all attributable to
Nader.

His influence is ubiquitous, if not always evident, in such
day-to-day items as safety belts. In 1990, Time magazine named him
"one of the 100 most influential Americans of the 20th
century."

It was only recently, however, that he decided to become known
as a presidential candidate. Citing harmony between his beliefs and
the values of the Green Party, he allowed his name to be placed in
the Green Party primary on July 24. The Green Party is active
throughout the world and is based on its Ten Key Values: ecology,
social justice, grassroots democracy, non-violence, community-based
economics, respect for diversity, feminism, personal and global
responsibility, decentralization and sustainability/future
focus.

In a recent interview, Nader explained why he was running and
discussed what he hopes to achieve.

(A full transcript of the interview, in which Ralph Nader
discusses the condition of higher education in America, media
conglomerates, the California Civil Rights Initiative and United
States foreign policy can be found on the World Wide Web at
http://dailybruin.ucla.edu/db/view/view.html).

Given the dominance of the Democratic and Republican parties in
presidential elections, the recent House and Senate votes to raise
the minimum wage and your own admission that you can’t win, why are
you the best choice for president?

Because the best opportunity now for people who strategically
value how they’re going to use their vote is not to give their vote
to a party that is either Tweedledum or Tweedledee, and that’s what
the Republican and Democratic parties are.

You don’t give a wake-up call to a decaying political party
system by giving them one or the other of the political parties
your vote. The only way you can give them a wake-up call is to deny
them your vote and to vote for a new progressive political
initiative, like the Green Party …

So, the charge that your candidacy will only steal votes from
Clinton is irrelevant, given the two party duopoly?

If you’re trying to help build a new political force, you’re not
concerned about taking away votes from the corrupt political
parties you’re trying to replace. When the Republicans started
their parties in the 1850s, they weren’t worried about taking votes
away from the Whig Party.

The other point, of course, is that Clinton is too unprincipled
to ever lose to Dole, because he’ll always imitate Dole, and Dole
has complained about that.

How would you help college students as president?

First of all, you reinvigorate the student loan program. We are
one of the few countries in the Western world where students have
to pay so much for tuition, and what is going on in Washington
right now is shrinking the pool for student loans. That is a very
shortsighted and socially self-destructive policy.

Second, I would facilitate students’ ability to band together.
That they cannot have a check-off option on their tuition bill to
fund and organize student groups for on and off-campus purposes, so
long as they have an educational purpose, is outrageous.

Students are treated like second-class citizens when it comes to
university-trustee administration, and the university trustees
should want to develop their own civic communities in specific
areas, especially since the students are willing to spend their own
money to do so. But this kind of facility on the tuition bill is
repeatedly denied to them. Where it has been given to them, on 200
college campuses, the student public-interest research groups have
prospered and have effectively instituted change in the states
where they have operated, both in environmental and consumer
issues, as well as in working towards cleaner government. And, they
have also learned a lot of practical political science in learning
the skills of citizenship and in practicing democracy.

Third, there needs to be a broader public dialogue as to what
education should be all about. It should not be all about
propaganda. It should not be all about denying the curriculum the
opportunity to expand the civic knowledge and skills of students
and focusing the curriculum overwhelmingly in a vocational manner
that emphasizes trade school skills. The campus should offer both
civic skills and professional and occupational skills.

When you speak of professional and occupational skills, I assume
that you might be referring to an increasing trend towards
privatization in universities, especially in California.

Well, privatization … "Corporatization" is a better word for
it. That is when the corporations condition their contributions,
their grants and their alumni power on certain kinds of courses and
certain kinds of research being done, like genetic engineering or
computer programming. As a result, more and more students are
looking at colleges mostly as trade schools where they can get
certain skills in order to get better jobs.

There is nothing wrong with that ­ if it is done in the
broader context of learning civic skills, the humanities or the
social sciences, because even if you are well paid, society doesn’t
want people coming out of our schools who are cogs in global
corporate wheels where they have no rights and they only get paid
if they get along by going along. That concentrates power at the
tops of these companies and leads to a lot of bad mistakes and poor
judgments that harm a lot of innocent people.

The curriculum on campus and the research on college campuses
are very reflective of the economic powers, mostly corporate,
bearing down on the campuses. You see enormous research on
marketing, business administration, computer programming,
geological research and other areas that are useful to companies,
but you don’t see much research or student time being devoted to
the consumer side, the small taxpayer side or the citizen side of
our political economy …

You mentioned "civic skills" a couple of times, and in the past
you have called for a need to instill citizens with "citizen skills
and the desire to use them." What do you mean by "citizen" or
"civic skills?"

Well first of all, look at the roles that students will play in
their various roles in life ­ taxpayer, voter/citizen,
consumer, worker and investor. What are the citizen skills for
those roles?

In the voter area, you want your vote to count. If you have
money corrupting politics, money from special interests weakens
your vote. In the voting area, you need a binding "none of the
above" option on the ballot, so if "none of the above" gets more
votes than the other candidates it cancels the election, sends the
candidates packing, and orders elections in 30 days.

Taxpayer skills include the ability to get your money’s worth
from the government, being able to organize taxpayer groups, being
able to mobilize public opinion, learning to have access to the
mass media, and learning how to get reciprocity from cable TV
monopolies licenses by having citizen channels, labor channels and
student channels.

For investors, citizen skills refine the tools of shareholder
rights ­ they own the company, but they don’t control it. If
they own the company, they should control it.

Instead, management controls it with a puppet board of
directors, and it very often has a conflict of interest between
management’s own enrichment and the well-being of corporations.

More practically, some citizen tools are: "How do you get
information that is hard to get?" That is a skill. "How do you
learn how to use the Freedom of Information Act at a state and
federal level? That’s a skill. "How do you hold a press conference
and make sure it works? That’s a skill. "How do you learn how to
develop coalitions?" That’s a skill. How do you set up nonprofit
groups that are advocacy groups? How do you raise funds? Those are
skills. Those are the more mundane skills which lead to more
strategic and tactical ways to build democratic results.

How could these skills be taught in a college curriculum?

It is really quite easy … Every course can have a civic
dimension.

What you can do is inject a broader content into existing
courses. History courses are notoriously skewed with very little
attention paid to things apart from elections, wars and some of the
more pronounced technological advances like the railroads. There is
very little taught about civic history.

How did all the good things in this country happen? The civic
activity of the country is mentioned only in passing. A lot is said
about the industrial revolution, but not much is said about the
labor revolution. In law school they teach you state planning, but
for years they never taught environmental planning. Now they do,
because students have demanded a broader legal curriculum. They
taught corporate law, but they never taught consumer law. Now some
of the schools do. So, the content of these courses has to be
broadened, empirically, to better reflect the world out there.

JUNE SHIEH/Daily Bruin

Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader wants to mobilize
civic-minded citizens against what he sees as the increasing
"corporatization" of America.