speaker
Ralph Nader

taken from http://www.crashingtheparty.org/bio.html

Geboren: 1934 als Sohn libanesischer Immigranten.

1951 Jurastudium in Princeton
1955 Harvard Law School
1959 April: article published in The Nation, "The Safe Car You Can't Buy," in which he declared, "It is clear Detroit today is designing automobiles for style, cost, performance and calculated obsolescence, but not -- despite the 5,000,000 reported accidents, nearly 40,000 fatalities, 110,000 permanent disabilities and 1,500,000 injuries yearly -- for safety."
1996 und 2000 Präsidentschaftskandidat der US Grünen

BIOGRAPHY / LEBENSLAUF (pdf, rtf)

en detail:

In 1963, Ralph Nader, then an unknown twenty-nine-year old attorney, abandoned a conventional law practice in Hartford, Connecticut, and hitchhiked to Washington, D.C., to begin a long odyssey of professional citizenship. "I had one suitcase," he recalled. "I stayed in the YMCA. Walked across a little street and had a hot dog, my last." (A few years later he would expose the repulsive ingredients that go into hot dogs.) Taking a job as a consultant to the U.S. Department of Labor, working for Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Nader moonlighted as a freelance writer for The Nation and The Christian Science Monitor. He also acted as an unpaid adviser to a Senate subcommittee, chaired by Connecticut Senator Abraham Ribicoff, which was exploring what role the federal government might play in auto safety.

If such circumstances seemed an unlikely springboard for launching one of the great citizen movements of the late 20th century, one must look more closely at the man himself, his values, his upbringing, his intellect -- all of which find some personal imprint in the many citizen organizations he has founded.

Born in 1934 to Lebanese immigrants Rose and Nathra Nader, Ralph always took the rights and responsibilities of American citizenship to heart. "When I sailed past the Statue of Liberty," his father once said, "I took it seriously." Civic duty had a special meaning in Winsted, the small town in northwestern Connecticut where Nathra ran the Highland Arms Restaurant and engaged his customers in spirited debate about public affairs. Studious, bright and intense, Ralph followed the Yankees, played with David Halberstam, the future journalist, and read back issues of the Congressional Record with equal enthusiasm. By age 14 he had read the early muckrakers -- Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, Upton Sinclair and George Seldes -- who were to inspire his thinking about the distribution of power in American society and the possibilities of citizenship.

Entering Princeton in 1951 as Dwight Eisenhower presided over the conformist "silent generation," Nader was never one for fitting in. "At Princeton the chief act of rebellion was to refuse to wear white buck shoes," he once recalled. After finding dead birds on the campus lawns, he tried to ban the spraying of DDT on the trees; the editors of the Daily Princetonian scoffed, claiming that the university's chemistry and biology professors would surely have objected if DDT posed any danger. When local restaurants challenged the license of a popular hot dog vendor, Nader tried to rally fellow students to protest and was appalled at the lukewarm response. Apart from such breaches of Princeton's civic torpor, Nader used most of his time there indulging his voracious and eclectic mind, spending hours in the library and learning Chinese and other languages.

After graduating from Princeton in 1955, Nader went on to Harvard Law School where he developed an intense distaste for its narrow intellectualism and moral complacency. "It was a high-priced tool factory, only instead of tools and dies, they were producing hired advocates for corporate law firms and corporations," Nader later complained. "If you were worried about issues of right and wrong and justice and injustice, you were considered soft intellectually." Nader once asked a law professor why, given the abundance of courses and seminars in the catalog, there was no course on "food and the law." As he tells the story,

The professor, nonplussed for an instant, blurted, 'Food?' Recovering his composure, he allowed that the reason was simply that the subject had not developed to a suitable intensity to qualify as an adequate intellectual challenge at the School. Searching for a frame of reference, I asked him what course would so qualify. He looked up at the sky and then a definite glow crossed his face as he responded: 'Tax.'

It was at Harvard where Nader first explored another unorthodox legal topic: the engineering design of automobiles. His research resulted in an April 1959 article published in The Nation, "The Safe Car You Can't Buy," in which he declared, "It is clear Detroit today is designing automobiles for style, cost, performance and calculated obsolescence, but not -- despite the 5,000,000 reported accidents, nearly 40,000 fatalities, 110,000 permanent disabilities and 1,500,000 injuries yearly -- for safety."

After several years of lawyering in Hartford and footloose world travelling as a freelance writer, Nader arrived in Washington and began work on a book elaborating on the themes of his Nation article. His rendezvous with history was nearly derailed when he left part of his completed manuscript in a New York City taxicab. With customary determination, however, he rewrote the book in breakneck speed and published Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-in Dangers of the American Automobile (Grossman) in November 1965.

The chief target of the book was General Motors' "sporty" Corvair, whose faulty rear suspension system, Nader argued, made it possible to skid violently and roll over. More generally, Nader's book documented how Detroit habitually subordinated safety to style and marketing concerns. The main immediate cause of car injuries, Nader demonstrated, was not the "nut behind the wheel" so often blamed by the auto industry, but the inherent engineering and design deficiencies of the motor vehicle that was woefully uncrashworthy. Solutions must focus, accordingly, on the vehicle itself.

This pioneering insight, that the safety remedy often lies not with individual consumers but unresponsive oligopolistic manufacturers, would become a recurring theme in Nader's many investigations. As he wrote in Unsafe:

A great problem of contemporary life is how to control the power of economic interests which ignore the harmful effects of their applied science and technology. The automobile tragedy is one of the most serious of these man-made assaults on the human body....Our society's obligation to protect the 'body rights' of its citizens with vigorous resolve and ample resources requires the precise, authoritative articulation and front-rank support which is being devoted to civil rights.

Despite reviews in national publications, initial sales of the book were modest. If the public did not immediately appreciate the import of Nader's book, its chief target, General Motors, did. Worried about litigation challenging the Corvair's safety, GM hired private detectives to tail Nader in an attempt to dig up information that might discredit him. Instead, journalist James Ridgeway broke the story about GM's snooping and dirty tricks in The New Republic, prompting Senator Ribicoff's subcommittee to summon James Roche, president of General Motors, to explain his company's harassment -- and apologize.

The remarkable incident catapulted auto safety into the public spotlight and helped send Unsafe at Any Speed to the top of the bestseller lists. More importantly, as one Nader biographer, Charles McCarry, wrote, "It certified [Nader's] virtue, gave birth to him as a public figure, and equipped him with an image that has remained a combination of the best qualities of Lincoln of Illinois and David of 1 Samuel 17." The incident also served as a proof of a core Nader conviction: that one person, acting with intelligence and persistence, can make a difference -- even if the target is the largest corporation in the world.

The 32-year-old Nader -- acclaimed as a David slaying a Goliath, an underdog hero in the age of impersonal, unaccountable bureaucracies -- did not see his newfound celebrity status as a ticket to riches, political gain or respectability in the Establishment. He saw it instead as a tool for advancing an expansive new form of citizenship in shaping the economy and civic life. For Nader, there was no virtue in being a passive member of the "Silent Majority" that Richard Nixon would later celebrate. Real patriotism, Nader asserted, is caring enough about your country to roll up your sleeves and do something to make it more humane, moral and caring. Forget the idea of being an inconsequential private citizen, Nader counseled; one should be an engaged, questioning "public citizen."