10 Questions for Ralph Nader

By Ralph Nader; Matthew Cooper Wednesday, July 31, 2002
    • DARREN MCCOLLESTER/GETTY IMAGES

    For almost four decades, Ralph Nader has been the scold of corporate America. Now the man and the moment have merged as America recoils at CEOs' behaving badly. TIME's Matthew Cooper spoke to Nader about greed, corruption and why the presidential spoiler won't even think about playing golf.

    Did you think there was this much corporate corruption?
    No. And isn't it saying something that it exceeded my anticipation? It is impossible to exaggerate the supermarket of crime. It's greed on steroids.


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    Why didn't we know about it all sooner?
    What amazes me is that there are thousands of people who could have been whistle-blowers, from the boards of directors to corporate insiders to the accounting firms to the lawyers working for these firms to the credit-rating agencies. All these people! Would a despotic dictatorship have been more efficient in silencing them and producing the perverse incentives for them all to keep quiet? The system is so efficient that there's total silence. I mean, the Soviet Union had enough dissidents to fill Gulags.

    Congress passed a Corporate-Accountability Act last week. Was that enough?
    In this bill they ducked the stock-option expensing; they ducked the past disgorgement, where you have to pay it back and go to jail; and they ducked corporate governance in any fundamental way. The election of corporate board members is a Kremlin type of election. It's a self-perpetuating system, with the shareholders having no real power. That has not been touched. And basic problems of conflict of interest have not been dealt with. You have all the watchdogs in the private sector getting commissions from all the people they are supposed to be watching. The companies pay the auditors who are supposed to be auditing.

    Which party is more to blame for all this?
    It's equal-opportunity corruption. It's campaign cash. And what campaign cash produces is a convergence of culpability.

    What would help?
    You need to have a Federal Bureau of Audits to monitor the top 1,000 companies. For more ideas, check out citizenworks.org .

    You say that Progressives got to the polls in 2000, helping Democrats win Senate seats and making a Democratic Senate possible. Got any regrets, though, about throwing the presidency to Bush?
    No, because it could have been worse. You could have had a Republican Congress with Gore and Lieberman.

    O.K., what about 2004? You going to run?
    Too early to say. Let's wait until after the 2002 election.

    What about Bush? He's for corporate reforms that he once opposed. Do you have any hope that he can be Nixon-going-to-China on these issues?
    Bush came right out of this — the sweetheart loans, dumping the Harken stock before it tanked even though he was on the audit committee. Maybe he can stand up and say it takes one to know one, but he's not going to do that.

    Are you ever going to slow down? Somehow I don't picture you playing golf.
    I never envisioned the purpose of life as taking a piece of metal and pushing it toward a hole. People ought to be pushing children out of poverty.

    O.K., no retirement. Ever read a trashy novel or take a vacation?
    What do you think talking to reporters is?