Q&A with Ralph Nader

The Spectator sat down for an exclusive interview with Green Party Presidential candidate Ralph Nader last Friday shortly after his Lerner Hall speech. Hear the insurgent candidate talk about politics, corporations, and his own college experience in his own words.

Spectator: Were you an activist when you were in college? What were some of the issues that mobilized your generation of college students?

Ralph Nader: Remember, it was the 1950s, where the main demonstration of student revolt on the Princeton University campus was to refuse to wear white buck shoes and khaki pants. There was very little going on. It was the Korean War time; the guys were afraid they were going to get drafted even before they graduated, and some were. So what we did was, we started being concerned about DDT spraying that we thought was a problem, some dead birds on the lawn, and there was no interest among the biology and chemistry professors in that. There was some support for University workers who weren't paid very much, but by and large there wasn't much going on at all. It was really a stultifying time to go to school.

Spectator: A big issue on campus this past week has been the conflict in the Middle East. How would you handle the conflict as President?

Nader: I'm often asked that: 'What would you have done at the end point in Kosovo, the end point at this hotspot, East Timor, etc …' The answer is that I wouldn't have let it go that far. The idea of using lethal force against people who are throwing rocks--youngsters--is abhorrent; I don't think anybody can justify that kind of bloodshed when one party has such huge military superiority over the other. Now, can we influence that? I think we could. We have very close relations with the state of Israel. To have 60 people die like that, some of them kids. In our country, when we have riots and people get shot, like at Kent State in the 60s, people say 'what's going on here? Lethal force, the overuse of force?' But the process is going in the right direction; the Israelis have recognized the right of return up to 100,000 refugees, which is a good start. Other countries in the world are getting together some sort of foreign aid package, and the question is, how much of the land in the West Bank and Gaza is going to be a Palestinian state, and are they going to be just autonomous, will they have an independent political system? The question is, 'will they have a democratic Palestinian state?' That's another problem. One small advance creates a problem. Anywhere around the world we are very reluctant to support the downtrodden. East Timor … Rwanda … we don't have the U.N. international peacekeeping force that we should have, clearly, so we don't have to go around the world being a policeman. Europe should have dealt with Yugoslavia and its neighbors; instead, Germany supported the Croatian breakup, that's what started it. So the situation everywhere is one where corporations are deeply involved. The Persian war was a battle over oil that could have been easily prevented, just the way it was prevented in 1961. You know how it happened in 1961? The dictator of Iraq starts the tanks rolling into Kuwait, saying Kuwait is Iraq, and the [Kuwaitis] call up London and [say], 'Send three little battalions of paratroopers' and they land, and the tanks go back to Baghdad. We had three weeks watching in 1990, why didn't we do it? It's very interesting. Our diplomats gave Saddam Hussein a go signal--we don't get involved in these internal disputes--and he took advantage of it. We could've easily sent a couple battalions and said, 'look, you're going to be faced with a resistance,' and he would've gone back to Baghdad. Why did it happen? Because we wanted control of the Middle East oil, and we got it.

Spectator: Suppose on November 7 the Green Party captures a large share of the vote and becomes a force in national politics. Where do you go from there?

Nader: Well, we just keep building. We've got more candidates coming in. We connect more with citizen groups. The Green Party in Connecticut, for example, turns itself into a citizen advocacy [group]. It deals with [the] Millstinone nuclear plant, it fights electricity deregulation, it led the way with me to defeat the Patriots boondoggle where the Republican Governor and Democratic Legislature two years ago got a half a billion dollars together and said, 'we'll build you a stadium, a practice field, we'll build your skyboxes.' And the Patriots were going to come to Hartford from Boston. And in the meantime, the Governor turns down $200 million in funds for repairing Hartford's public schools. So in four months the Green Party developed a whole coalition and the whole agreement fell apart and the Patriots went back to Boston to build a stadium with private funding. That's a very important theme, that a political party goes into the civic arena between elections to become just a money machine.

Spectator: Three blocks east from where we are at right now you reach the border of Harlem, and while it's gotten a lot better than it was, the dichotomy between here and there is still pretty stark. What would you do to improve the situation in areas such as Harlem?

Nader: It's like a ratchet; you can't just do one thing. You have to have affordable housing, community policing, or a police force that lives in the community that isn't going to use excessive force. It's a way to prevent police brutality and racial profiling. And then you have adequate community health care clinics, you put investment back in the poor areas by prohibiting bank and insurance redlining. Once the banks and insurance companies pull out of an area, it's doomed; it's on its way down. You improve the public transit so low-income people can get to their jobs around the city or in the suburbs. You develop community development credit unions as I mentioned. You facilitate trade union membership. It all comes together. But you can't just do one little thing, and you can't say, 'well, we're going to give a business on a corner here,' and then the place blows up with drive-by shootings. You've got to do it all as a coordinated effort.

Spectator: I know that you've had a pretty trenchant critique of academics being influenced by corporations, and I was wondering if in your own campaign you've been getting any support or advice from different academics. I know that [Columbia Professor] Manning Marable was speaking at a teach-in.

Nader: We have quite a few. Cornel West. We have lots of professors from the various disciplines who are supporting us. Not in any organized fashion. There may be law professors for the Nader-LaDuke ticket who are coming out within a week or so, but there's a lot of support on campus among faculty. We have the California Faculty Association, which is a group of teachers that's never endorsed anyone before, thinking of endorsing this ticket.

Spectator: What do you think the appeal is?

Nader: Well because no one is talking at the Presidential candidate level about corporatization and the use of the distance learning racket to really appropriate the work product of professors and then license it to private corporations … and the general commercialization of the curriculum. I mean, you know Bush and Gore are all 'computers' and 'technology,' what we call 'technotwit' attitudes. They don't ask 'what's it for?' [or] 'what're the uses?' It's just, 'get in there.' It's a very shallow view of things. You look at the ten values of the Green Party--nonviolence is one, social justice and all--well, you've got to flesh those all out in reality. I think this is an opportunity that doesn't come around very often, and if we can make the most of it--you asked about the impact after November--the Democrats will behave differently because they'll know they're going to lose millions of votes, and that'll be the margin of defeat with the Republicans. The idea of the Green Party, is not just to build the Green Party but to give progressive Democrats a place to go. When they have a place to go, they have more leverage over their party. When they don't have a place to go, they have no leverage. When the right wing of the Democratic Party can go Republican, they have a leverage over the party, like the Democratic Leadership Council. So it'll change the equation quite radically, and a lot of the groups on Capitol Hill will get more power as well, the citizens groups.