Word: nader
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...bring issues out in the open where they cannot be ignored," says Nader, chopping his hands, as he often does when he speaks. "There is a revolt against the aristocratic uses of technology and a demand for democratic uses. We have got to know what we are doing to ourselves. Life can be ?and is being?eroded." To prevent that erosion, he unmercifully nags consumer-minded U.S. Senators, pushing them to pass new bills. When their committees stall, he phones them by day, by night, and often on Sundays. "This is Ralph," he announces, and nobody...
...Nader today is widening his sights. A lawyer by training, he is investigating the affairs of Covington & Burling, the Washington law firm headed by former Secretary of State Dean Acheson. At one time or another, Covington & Burling has numbered among its clients 200 of the nation's 500 biggest corporations, and Nader wants to determine just how much influence the firm has inside the Government. Most of all, he is probing into the affairs of ossified federal bureaucracies. "We hear a lot about law and order on the streets," he says, with a mischievous twinkle in his eyes. "I thought...
...Chamber of Commerce deplored "the tardiness of business in responding constructively" to consumers' criticism. The committee called on sellers to "expand information regarding safety, performance and durability of products." Nader insists that he is not "antibusiness" but simply "pro-people." He often jokes that he is as much a foe of the funeral industry as Jessica Mitford but that while she only wrote a book, "I'm trying to reduce the number of their customers...
Occasionally the people whom Nader is trying to help seem more resentful of his efforts than do his corporate targets. On his taxi rides through Washington, cabbies regularly berate him because they must now pay for seat belts and 28 other pieces of mandatory safety equipment. Nader sympathizes with them but argues that the automakers could reduce prices by at least $700 per car if they would do away with costly annual style changes. Even Lyndon Johnson, who signed the 1966 auto-safety bill into law, has found some Nader innovations irritating. On a drive across his Texas ranch, L.B.J...
...movement that Nader fostered goes by the awkward name of "consumerism." It belongs to an age of discontent that has roiled campuses and ghettos, subjected old certitudes to new doubts and stimulated individual assertiveness. Economist Walter Heller says: "People are much more questioning of authority, including the authority of the marketplace...