Reply #27: Really? Democrats care deeply about NBA officiating? [View All]

[NNadir]

I've been a democrat all my adult life, well over thirty years, and I don't need a mindless cretin like Nader to tell me what a democrat is.

Nader has been for one thing and one thing only: Nader.

In the last two elections, Nader has run the Repuke line almost exclusively. It consists of three words: "The Democrats Suck! The Democrats Suck! The Democrats Suck!"

Nader by the way, has behaved personally more like a Repuke than anyone imagines. He fired the entire staff of the Multinational Monitor when they threatened to strike over illegal working conditions (80 hrs work for 40 hours pay.)

Now, Nader talks like a big friend of labor, but his history is a bit more complicated. In the early 1970s, his Raiders' work on transportation regulation treated unionized airline and trucking workers as among the beneficiaries of government-sanctioned monopolies; that work contributed importantly to the movement for deregulation of these industries, with disastrous effects on workers, later in the decade.

Closer to home, Nader was the prime mover in a very ugly tale about a publication he founded, Multinational Monitor. In 1984, he fired then-editor Tim Shorrock (an occasional contributor to LBO), allegedly for running a story on Bechtel's alleged bribery of South Korean officials to get construction contracts without getting Nader's approval. (So much for editorial independence.) But the sacking came after a long history of fights between Nader and Shorrock over near-sweatshop working conditions as well as editorial policy, with Nader, among other things, objecting to Shorrock's attempts to link CIA behavior to the interests of multinationals.

Shorrock was given three months to leave. In response, he and two colleagues organized a campaign to get reinstated, and, as Shorrock told LBO, they

enlisted the support of a number of writers, union activists and subscribers. Nader refused to meet with the group or even acknowledge its existence. Finally, our staff decided to ask for union recognition, and filed papers with Nader and the National Labor Relations Board. Within 24 hours, the locks on our offices had been changed and I was fired - by Nader's closest aides, who had been conveniently "given" the magazine as a free gift by Nader. In the next two weeks, the rest of the staff was laid off (and never rehired). From that point on, the Monitor became a scab publication.

But we kept up the fight, filed unfair labor practice charges with the NLRB and kept pestering Nader and his surrogates with protest letters and petitions. Then Nader retaliated: first, his aides tried to get the Washington, D.C., police to arrest me for stealing files. The case was thrown out of court. So we went public, and took our story to the Washington Post. Shortly thereafter, Nader's aides filed a $1.2 million civil suit against myself, the ex-staffers of the Monitor and one of our supporters from the Institute for Policy Studies, on the charge that we had tried to "destroy their business."

Eventually, a settlement was reached: we dropped the NLRB case, they dropped the suit. But the damage was done. Like the corporations he abhors, Nader won his fight through heavy-handed tactics and intimidation. No union was ever formed at the Monitor, and business went on. "I don't think there is a role for unions in small non-profit 'cause' organizations any more than...within a monastery or within a union," Nader told the Washington Post on June 28, 1984.

The Monitor story is not unique: around the same time, a much bigger union drive was squelched at Public Citizen, the largest of the Nader organizations....

A couple things I would add. First, Nader's campaign against me was incredibly vicious. His top aides spread all kinds of rumors about me in Washington and managed to get me pretty well blacklisted from the public interest crowd (which actually was a good thing). They even tried to convince people I was a communist (!!!) out to subvert Nader's organizations.

Ralph Nader may look like a democrat, smell like a populist, and sound like a socialist - but deep down he's a frightened, petit bourgeois moralizer without a political compass, more concerned with his image than the movement he claims to lead: in short, an opportunist, a liberal hack. And a scab.

http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Nader.html



I cannot imagine how anyone with a sense of decency idolizes this man. Nader his a fraud, and his supporters are notable only for being credulous.