it is the 50th anniversary of your book Unsafe at Any Speed, which prompted Congress to enact the most sweeping auto safety law in U.S. history, 50th anniversary of the signing of the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act and the Highway Safety Act. President Johnson signed the landmark legislation September 9, 1966, greatly reducing the annual number of traffic fatalities. It set mandatory federal safety standards for vehicles and drivers, established the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Our guest today, Ralph Nader, went on to win a major settlement against GM—that’s General Motors—for spying on him and trying to discredit him, and used the lawsuit’s proceeds to start the Center for the Study of Responsive Law.
Ralph Nader talking:
What’s happened is, whenever we’ve advanced anything, it’s been less than 1 percent of the people around the country, in various congressional districts, supported by public opinion, whether it’s food safety, cleaner air, cleaner water, improved information flows, Freedom of Information law. People have got to realize. That’s why I call Breaking Through Power: It’s Easier Than We Think, and full of examples of where a few people started the ball rolling. Lois Gibbs, starting this group out of Love Canal, all over the country, against toxic contamination of people’s homes and neighborhoods, she had—she had no power at all, but she built power.
Take a study by Johns Hopkins University Medical School last March and break it down. And in the period when these bombs are being discovered in trash cans in New York, 25 people have died in the New York area from mishaps in hospitals—hospital-induced infections, hospital malpractice, bad prescription of drugs. Totally, it’s 700 a day. This is a silent violence from corporate negligence, that includes air pollution, includes a lot of other hazards from negligent or criminal corporations. But silent violence doesn’t get on TV. It’s overt violence that gets on TV, which is more like street crime or violent attacks. So, but by far, the greatest number of Americans who are dying from preventable causes are from corporate misbehavior, whether it’s air pollution, water pollution, contaminated water, hospital hazards, you name it. And it’s all documented by groups like Harvard Medical School, Harvard School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins. But very little, if anything, is done about it, because it emanates from profit-making corporations that put money into political campaigns. But that doesn’t stop people from organizing in each congressional district. You can transform this country with Congress watchdog groups in each congressional district, representing majority opinions, a lot of left-right support for change in this country.
Libertarian Party against health and safety regulation. They’re against Medicare, full Medicare for all. That’s their very serious weak point. And they can’t back it up with many facts, unfortunately. But as you say, they’re against empire. They’re for civil liberties and, therefore, civil rights. But very incomplete party.
they would actually get rid of the federal regulatory agencies. They want to get rid, some of them, of the IRS. I don’t know how they’re going to collect taxes. But they’re really estranged from reality in that way. But you take them for what they are. They are good on civil liberties, and they are good against empire. And they don’t like the bloated military budget. But they’re very incomplete. They haven’t figured out: How do you build all these public works, that they use every day, all these public services?
This is the 50th anniversary of Unsafe at Any Speed. the air, water is cleaner. That’s one. Much safer in cars, where it’s one-fifth the risk of getting killed in a car by a given 100 million vehicle miles. We have the best Freedom of Information Act in the world, and we’ve got to use it more. We have civil rights laws that we don’t use enough of. We have the law of wrongful injury, that’s very underutilized. Most of the people who are wrongfully injured are not finding their way to a lawyer, against the perpetrator of their harm, so they can get compensated and deter other unsafe characteristics. So, there has been. But in the foreign and military area, it’s been very, very regressive.
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Ralph Nader
longtime consumer advocate, corporate critic and former presidential candidate. His new book is titled Breaking Through Power: It’s Easier Than We Think.
— source democracynow.org