He too has his achille's heel and is not as pure as the rhetoric would have one believe.
“f LaDuke is looking for Occidental stockholders to criticize, she might want to look a little closer to home. In the financial disclosure form Nader filed on June 14, the Green Party presidential candidate revealed that he owns between $100,000 and $250,000 worth of shares in the Fidelity Magellan Fund. The fund controls 4,321,400 shares of Occidental Petroleum stock.
The Rainforest Action Network -- whose members no doubt include myriad Nader Raiders -- has slammed Fidelity for "investing in genocide," and called for the fund to divest its Occidental holdings.
"The Occidental projects are so beyond the pale about what's reasonable and moral in this modern era," says Patrick Reinsborough, grass-roots coordinator for the Rainforest Action Network. Reinsborough says that his group has been primarily targeting Gore and Fidelity Investments in general, Fidelity Magellan being part of the Fidelity Investments mutual funds network, as well as the one with the largest quantity of Occidental stock. "We have called upon Ralph Nader -- as we would call upon any citizen -- to either divest from Fidelity or to participate in shareholder activism," Reinsborough says. "Gore has much more long-standing links to Occidental Petroleum."
But even if Fidelity were to divest its holdings in Occidental, it holds shares in so many companies Nader has crusaded against, it's hard to escape the conclusion that Nader's participation in the fund is supremely hypocritical. The fund, for example, owns stock in the Halliburton Company, where George W. Bush's running mate, Dick Cheney, recently worked as president and COO. The fund has investments in supremely un-p.c. clothiers the Gap and the Limited, both of which have been the target of rocks by World Trade Organization protesters, as well as Wal-Mart, the slayer of mom-and-pop stores from coast to coast.”
http://archive.salon.com/politics/feature/2000/10/28/stocks/index.html“Ralph Nader believes an independent candidacy should “generate more understandings and support for major new directions for our country.” His website says these new directions include “repeal of laws that obstruct trade union organization by millions of workers mired in poverty by wages that cannot meet their minimum family livelihoods.” The site prescribes “a living wage for tens of millions of workers making under $10 an hour.” But the perennial leftist candidate, whose name will appear on the presidential ballot for the third consecutive time this November, has not played by the same rules he strives to make binding for corporations and private businesses. In fact, when the minimum wage rose, he once cut back on the hours his technical staff would work. Despite the millions of dollars he commands, he historically paid his professional staff less than minimum wage. Nader, who told Business Week during the last campaign that he offers staff “unlimited sick leave,” ordered staffer George Riley to take a two-week leave of absence to work on a political campaign, refusing him to pay for the time. When I worked for Ralph Nader in 1980-81, he paid us $8,000 a year, hardly enough to get by on even then. We could scarcely afford the time to spend money, though, because Nader expected staff to work around the clock.
Before I got the job, I went through interviews with eight people on six occasions over a period of nearly two months. Before each interview, Naderites told me they’d decide my fate in a few days. But after each interview, they informed me I’d have to go through another. I barely subsisted during that time, hundreds of miles from my home with no means of support. I later discovered this was standard procedure – they’d tell people they need them in a hurry, then keep them in limbo for months.
Though Nader claims he wants to fight discrimination, he and his staff asked me my age, religion, sleeping habits, family tree, medical history and a lot of other highly personal questions in violation of District of Columbia’s employment law. In a Washington Post commentary, Sidney Wolfe, long time director of Nader’s Health Research Group complained that the government was forcing him to collect medical details on his employees that he did not want to know. This is strange, because he asked me all sorts of medical questions he had no legal right to ask about during our interview.
When I asked the personnel director about the personal tone of the interviewing, she acknowledged that her questions were “unethical” and said the working conditions are “illegal,” people are “treated unfairly” and they want to make sure those hired can take it.:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=1CDB5CAE-1860-4EC8-9E56-D5E4CBBCA7A8
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