Death of the Liberal Class (31 page)
Read Death of the Liberal Class Online
Authors: Chris Hedges
Tags: #Political Culture, #Political Ideologies, #General, #Conservatism & Liberalism, #Political Science, #Liberalism
Rosenthal, who banned social critics such as Chomsky from being quoted in the paper, decreed that no story built around Nader’s research could be published unless there was a corporate response. Corporations, informed of Rosenthal’s dictate, refused to comment on Nader’s research. This effectively killed the stories. The
Times
set the agenda for national news coverage. Once Nader disappeared from the
Times
, other major papers and networks did not feel compelled to report on his investigations. He found it harder and harder to be heard.
Times
set the agenda for national news coverage. Once Nader disappeared from the
Times
, other major papers and networks did not feel compelled to report on his investigations. He found it harder and harder to be heard.
Much as Mr. Mister of
The Cradle Will Rock
hires a detective to spy on his enemies, General Motors hired detectives to dig up dirt on Nader’s personal life. They found none. The company had Nader followed in an attempt to blackmail him. They sent an attractive woman to his neighborhood Safeway in a failed bid to seduce him while he was shopping. GM’s campaign was exposed and led to a public apology by the company. Nader was awarded $425,000 in damages, which he used to fund citizen action groups.
The Cradle Will Rock
hires a detective to spy on his enemies, General Motors hired detectives to dig up dirt on Nader’s personal life. They found none. The company had Nader followed in an attempt to blackmail him. They sent an attractive woman to his neighborhood Safeway in a failed bid to seduce him while he was shopping. GM’s campaign was exposed and led to a public apology by the company. Nader was awarded $425,000 in damages, which he used to fund citizen action groups.
But far from ending the effort to destroy Nader, the defeat in court only spurred corporations to unleash a more sophisticated and well-funded attack. Lewis Powell, who was the general counsel to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and would later be appointed to the Supreme Court, wrote a memo in August 1971 that expressed corporate concern over Nader’s work: “Perhaps the single most effective antagonist of American business is Ralph Nader, who—thanks largely to the media—has become a legend in his own time and an idol of millions of Americans.” Powell goes on to recommend: “There should be no hesitation to attack the Naders, the Marcuses, and others who openly seek destruction of the system. There should not be the slightest hesitation to press vigorously in all political arenas for support of the enterprise system. Nor should there be reluctance to penalize politically those who oppose it.
“Moreover,” Powell went on:
much of the media—for varying motives and in varying degrees—either voluntarily accords unique publicity to these “attackers,” or at least allows them to exploit the media for their purposes. This is especially true of television, which now plays such a predominant role in shaping the thinking, attitudes and emotions of our people. One of the bewildering paradoxes of our time is the extent to which the enterprise system tolerates, if not participates in, its own destruction .
28
The eight-page memo, entitled “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” became the blueprint for corporate dominance. Powell’s memo led to the establishment of the Business Roundtable, which amassed enough money and power to direct government policy and mold public opinion. It inspired the activities of the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, the Cato Institute, Citizens for a Sound Economy, and Accuracy in Academe. The memo detailed ways corporations could shut out those who, in “the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals,” were hostile to corporate interests. Powell called for the establishment of lavishly funded think tanks and conservative institutes to churn out ideological tracts that attacked government regulation and environmental protection. His memo led to the successful effort to place corporate-friendly academics and economists in universities and on the airwaves, as well as drive out those in the public sphere who questioned the rise of unchecked corporate power and deregulation. It saw the establishment of monitoring organizations that pressured the media to report favorably on corporate interests. And it led to the building of legal organizations to promote corporate interests in the courts and press for the appointment of sympathetic judges to the bench.
Corporations poured hundreds of millions into the assault. They invented bogus disciplines, including cost-benefit and risk-management analysis, all geared to change the debate from health, labor, and safety issues to the rising cost of big government. They ran sophisticated ad campaigns to beguile voters. These corporations wrenched apart, through lavish campaign donations and intensive and shady lobbying, the ties between Nader’s public interest groups and his supporters in the Democratic Party. Washington, by the time they were done, was besieged with twenty-five thousand corporate lobbyists and nine thousand corporate action committees.
When Reagan, the corporate pitchman, swept into office, he set out to dismantle some thirty governmental regulations, most put into place by Nader and his allies. All of them curbed the activities of corporations. The Reagan White House gutted twenty years of Nader legislation. And Nader, once a fixture on Capitol Hill, was thrust into the wilderness.
Nader, however, did not give up. He turned to local community organizing, assisting grassroots campaigns around the country, such as the one to remove benzene, known to cause cancer, from paint in GM car plants. But by the time Bill Clinton and Al Gore took office, the corporate state was unassailable. Nader and his citizen committees were frozen out by Democrats as well as Republicans. Clinton and Gore never met with Nader while in office, despite Gore’s reputed concern for the environment.
“We tried every way to get the Democrats to pick up on issues that really commanded the felt concerns and daily life of millions of Americans,” Nader says in the documentary
An Unreasonable Man
, “but these were issues that corporations didn’t want attention paid to, and so when people say, “Why did you [run for president] in 2000, I say, ‘I’m a twenty-year veteran of pursuing the folly of the least worse between the two parties.’”
29
An Unreasonable Man
, “but these were issues that corporations didn’t want attention paid to, and so when people say, “Why did you [run for president] in 2000, I say, ‘I’m a twenty-year veteran of pursuing the folly of the least worse between the two parties.’”
29
Establishment liberals express a fascinating rage—and
rage
is the right word—against Nader in
An Unreasonable Man
. Todd Gitlin and Eric Alterman, along with a host of former Nader’s Raiders, attack Nader, a man they profess to have once admired. The most common charge is that Nader is an egomaniac. Their anger is the anger of the betrayed. But they were not betrayed by Nader. They betrayed themselves. They bought into the facile argument of “the least worse” and ignored the deeper, subterranean corporate assault on our democracy that Nader has always addressed. The anger they express is the anger of an exposed liberal class.
rage
is the right word—against Nader in
An Unreasonable Man
. Todd Gitlin and Eric Alterman, along with a host of former Nader’s Raiders, attack Nader, a man they profess to have once admired. The most common charge is that Nader is an egomaniac. Their anger is the anger of the betrayed. But they were not betrayed by Nader. They betrayed themselves. They bought into the facile argument of “the least worse” and ignored the deeper, subterranean corporate assault on our democracy that Nader has always addressed. The anger they express is the anger of an exposed liberal class.
It was an incompetent, corporatized Democratic Party, along with the orchestrated fraud by the Republican Party, which threw the 2000 election to Bush. It was not Nader’s fault. Nader received only 2.7 percent of the vote in 2000 and got less than one-half of one percent in 2004. All of the third-party candidates who ran in 2000 in Florida—there were about half a dozen—got more votes than the 537 that separated Bush and Gore. Why not go after the other third-party candidates? And what about the ten million Democrats across the country who voted in 2000 for Bush? What about Gore, whose campaign was so timid and empty—he
never
mentioned global warming—that he could not even carry his home state of Tennessee? And what about the 2004 Democratic presidential candidate, Senator John Kerry, who got up like a Boy Scout and told us he was reporting for duty and would bring us “victory” in Iraq?
never
mentioned global warming—that he could not even carry his home state of Tennessee? And what about the 2004 Democratic presidential candidate, Senator John Kerry, who got up like a Boy Scout and told us he was reporting for duty and would bring us “victory” in Iraq?
Nader argues that there are few—he never said
no
—differences between the Democrats and the Republicans. And during the Bush administration the Democrats proved him right. They authorized the war in Iraq. They stood by as Bush stacked the judiciary with “Christian” ideologues. They let Bush, in violation of the Constitution, pump hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars into faith-based organizations that discriminate based on religious creed and sexual orientation. They permitted American children to get fleeced by No Child Left Behind. They did not protest when federal agencies began to propagate “Christian” pseudoscience about creationism, reproductive rights, and homosexuality. And the Democrats let Bush further dismantle regulatory agencies, strip American citizens of constitutional rights under the Patriot Act and other draconian legislation, and thrust impoverished Americans aside through passage of a corporate-sponsored bankruptcy bill. And then the Democrats helped transfer hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to Wall Street. It is a stunning record. If the Democratic Party and the liberal class had challenged corporate welfare, corporate crime, the Wall Street bailouts, and issues such as labor law reform, if it stood up to these corporate behemoths on behalf of the working and middle classes, rather than mutter thought-terminating clichés about American greatness, they could rally a disgusted public behind them.
no
—differences between the Democrats and the Republicans. And during the Bush administration the Democrats proved him right. They authorized the war in Iraq. They stood by as Bush stacked the judiciary with “Christian” ideologues. They let Bush, in violation of the Constitution, pump hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars into faith-based organizations that discriminate based on religious creed and sexual orientation. They permitted American children to get fleeced by No Child Left Behind. They did not protest when federal agencies began to propagate “Christian” pseudoscience about creationism, reproductive rights, and homosexuality. And the Democrats let Bush further dismantle regulatory agencies, strip American citizens of constitutional rights under the Patriot Act and other draconian legislation, and thrust impoverished Americans aside through passage of a corporate-sponsored bankruptcy bill. And then the Democrats helped transfer hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to Wall Street. It is a stunning record. If the Democratic Party and the liberal class had challenged corporate welfare, corporate crime, the Wall Street bailouts, and issues such as labor law reform, if it stood up to these corporate behemoths on behalf of the working and middle classes, rather than mutter thought-terminating clichés about American greatness, they could rally a disgusted public behind them.
There are a few former associates who argue that Nader is tarnishing his legacy, and by extension their own. But Nader’s legacy is undiminished. He fights his wars against corporate greed with a remarkable consistency. He knows our democratic state is being hijacked by the same corporate interests that sold us unsafe automobiles and dangerous and shoddy products.
“I don’t care about my personal legacy,” Nader says in
An Unreasonable Man
. “I care about how much justice is advanced in America and in our world day after day. I’m willing to sacrifice whatever ‘reputation’ in the cause of that effort. What is my legacy? Are they going to turn around and rip seat belts out of cars, air bags out of cars?
An Unreasonable Man
. “I care about how much justice is advanced in America and in our world day after day. I’m willing to sacrifice whatever ‘reputation’ in the cause of that effort. What is my legacy? Are they going to turn around and rip seat belts out of cars, air bags out of cars?
“It was off to the races,” Nader said to me:
You could hardly keep count of the number of right-wing corporate-funded think tanks. These think tanks specialized, especially against the tort system. We struggled through the Nixon and early Ford years, when inflation was a big issue. Nixon did things that horrified conservatives. He signed into law the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, and air and water pollution acts because he was afraid of popular opinion, following the rumble that came out of the 1960s. He was the last Republican president to be afraid of liberals.
“There was, before we were silenced, a brief, golden age of journalism,” Nader lamented. “We worked with the press to expose corporate abuse on behalf of the public. We saved lives. This is what journalism should be about. It should be about making the world a better and safer place for our families and our children, but then it ended, and we were shut out.
“We were thrown on the defensive, and once we were on the defensive, it was difficult to recover,” Nader said:
The break came in 1979, when they deregulated natural gas. Our last national stand was for the Consumer Protection Agency. We put everything we had on that. We would pass it during the 1970s in the House on one year, then the Senate during the next session, then the House later on. It ping-ponged. Each time we would lose ground. We lost it because Carter, although he campaigned on it, did not lift a finger compared to what he did to deregulate natural gas. We lost it by twenty votes in the House, although we had a two-thirds majority in the Senate waiting for it. That was the real beginning of the decline. Then Reagan was elected. We tried to be the watchdog. We put out investigative reports. They would not be covered.
“The press in the 1980s would say, ‘Why should we cover you?’” Nader continued:
“Who is your base in Congress?” I used to be known as someone who could trigger a Congressional hearing pretty fast in the House and Senate. They started looking towards the neoliberals and neo-cons and the deregulation mania. We put out two reports on the benefits of regulation, and they, too, disappeared. They did not get covered at all. This was about the same time that Tony Coelho taught the Democrats, starting in 1979 when he was head of the House Campaign Finance Committee, to start raising big-time money from corporate interests. And they did. It had a magical influence. It is the best example I have of the impact of money. The more money they raised, the less interested they were in any of these popular issues. They made more money when they screwed up the tax system. There were a few little gains here and there. We got the Freedom of Information [Act] through in 1974. And even in the 1980s we would get some things done, [the General Services Administration] buying airbag-equipped cars, the drive for standardized air bags. We would defeat some things here and there, block a tax loophole and defeat a deregulatory move. We were successful in staunching some of the deregulatory efforts.
Nader, locked out of the legislative process, decided to send a message to the Democrats, who were now beholden to corporate donors. He went to New Hampshire and Massachusetts during the 1992 primaries and ran as “None of the above.” In 1996 he allowed the Green Party to put his name on the ballot before running hard in 2000 in an effort that spooked the Democratic Party. The Democrats, fearful of his grassroots campaign, blamed him for the election of George W. Bush, an attack that found fertile ground among those who had abandoned rational inquiry for the sound bites of television news.
Nader’s status as a pariah corresponded with an unchecked assault on the working class by corporations and their tacit allies in the liberal class. Long-term unemployment, millions of foreclosures, crippling personal debts and bankruptcies, the evaporation of savings and retirement accounts, and the crumbling of the country’s infrastructure are taking place as billions in taxpayer subsidies, obscene profits, bonuses, and compensation are doled out to corporate overlords. The drug and health-insurance companies, subsidized with billions in taxpayer funds, will soon legally force us to buy their defective products while remaining free to raise co-payments and premiums, especially if we get seriously ill. The oil, gas, coal, and nuclear power companies have made a mockery of Barack Obama’s promises to promote clean, renewable energy. We are rapidly becoming a third-world country, cannibalized by corporations, with two-thirds of the population facing severe financial difficulty and poverty.
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