"It's of the same order of the hula hoop -- a fad. Six months from now, we'll probably be on another kick."
-- W.R. Murphy, President of Campbell Soup Co. and member of the Business Council, 1966, dismissing Ralph Nader's campaign for auto safety.

In 1963, Ralph Nader, then an unknown twenty-nine-year old attorney, abandoned a conventional law practice in Hartford, Connecticut, and hitchhiked to Washington, D.C., to begin a long odyssey of professional citizenship. "I had one suitcase," he recalled. "I stayed in the YMCA. Walked across a little street and had a hot dog, my last." (A few years later he would expose the repulsive ingredients that go into hot dogs.) Taking a job as a consultant to the U.S. Department of Labor, working for Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Nader moonlighted as a freelance writer for The Nation and The Christian Science Monitor. He also acted as an unpaid adviser to a Senate subcommittee, chaired by Connecticut Senator Abraham Ribicoff, which was exploring what role the federal government might play in auto safety. Continue reading "Citizen Action and Other Big Ideas By David Bollier --- Chapter One The Beginnings"

"Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to, only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer..
-- Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776.

By the early 1970s, Nader's many task forces had exposed dozens of outrages committed by the "supply-side" of the American economy, from the noxious pollution spewed out by Maine's paper mills to the hazards of West Virginia coal mines, from price-fixing to fraudulent advertising to collusion between regulated industries and federal regulators. The varieties of injustice seemed endless. But what did it all add up to?


Continue reading "CHAPTER 2 Nurturing the "Consumer-Side" Economy"

"In a democracy, the highest office is the office of citizen."
-- Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter

Class Day, Harvard University, 1981. Ralph Nader stands hunched over the podium. A hushed assemblage of parents, students, professors and university administrators listen intently as one of Harvard's own returns to speak his mind to an institution so large and overconfident, he jokes, that "one can become engulfed by waves of ethnocentrism."

Continue reading "CHAPTER 3 The Office of Citizen"

"Sunshine is said to be the best of disinfectants."
-- Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis

It is no exaggeration to say that until enactment of the Freedom of Information Act in 1966, the American people did not truly know their own government. Secrecy, collusion among self-selected elites, and public relations hocus-pocus were common practices among the governing class. For all but a few enterprising reporters and well-connected lawyers, government decision-making was a mystery. Any citizen wanting to learn more about the conduct of government would be rebuffed with the standard line, "Who ya with?" It was a government of insiders.

Continue reading "CHAPTER 4 Let the Information Flow"

"Facts are subversive."
-- I.F. Stone

At the Senate hearings looking into General Motors' harassment of Nader, the future consumer crusader took an opportunity to reflect upon the nature of corporate power and consumer justice. "The requirement of a just social order," Nader told the Senators, "is that responsibility shall lie where the power of decision rests. But the law has never caught up with the development of the large corporate unit. Deliberate acts emanate from the sprawling and indeterminable shelter of the corporate organization. Too often responsibility for an act is not imputable to those whose decision enables it to be set in motion."
Continue reading "CHAPTER 5 Corporate Abuses, Consumer Power"

"All professions are conspiracies against the laity."
-- George Bernard Shaw

Alan B. Morrison digs out a tattered old scrap of paper from his wallet and reverentially unfolds it. Squinting at the faded ink, he reads off a laundry list of perhaps a dozen imaginary legal cases that, as a 33-year-old lawyer, he had dreamt of bringing: "Lawyers' minimum fee schedules....First Amendment advertising for lawyers....Executive impoundment of funds....Union democracy....Price-fixing by the auto industry 'Blue Book.'"

Continue reading "CHAPTER 6 The Art of Public Interest Litigation"

"Populus iamdudum defutatus est"
"The people have been getting screwed long enough."
-- Quotation on the door of the Public Citizen Health Research Group

It has been said that Sidney M. Wolfe, M.D., has a waiting room packed with 240 million patients. Although qualified to "lay on hands," he and other physicians on his staff have shunned a traditional fee-for-service practice for the greater challenges of public-interest medicine, a multi-disciplinary specialty that addresses the politics of health. In this brand of medicine, the diagnoses go beyond the standard evaluations of a person's health or sickness to look at the configurations of power in the medical care marketplace, which can have equal or greater influence on the well-being of many people. Does a food manufacturer use cancer-causing additives? Has a drug maker fudged the safety research data on its new drugs? Are an industry's workplace health and safety protections truly adequate? Are the Food and Drug Administration and Occupational Safety and Health Administration patrolling the marketplace and workplace with effective regulation and enforcement? These are the sorts of scientific, political and moral questions that are the backbone of public-interest medicine.

Continue reading "CHAPTER 7: The Politics of Health"

"The real measure of Ralph's success will be how many oak trees are planted." -- Claire Nader

It is a frequent complaint among Nader's critics that he is "spreading himself too thin" by founding so many advocacy groups and becoming involved in so many different issues. Yet that is precisely the measure by which Nader gauges his success: How many more people are becoming active citizens? How many new industries can be subjected to consumer-side pressure? How many government bodies can receive more probing public scrutiny? "I like to think of myself as a Johnny Appleseed, getting consumer groups started and letting them grow on their own," Nader has explained. One of the most important roles that Nader has fashioned for himself is as a catalyst, helping others to create their own citizen organizations. Funding and organizational structures have varied from one group to another, as might be expected, but they all share a commitment to citizen action in making government and business more accountable.


Continue reading "CHAPTER 8 The Citizen Movement Expands"