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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://www.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.