> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
> [mailto:owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com]On Behalf Of Doug Henwood
>
> Nader & lots of other left populists like to talk about corporate
> crime, but have little to say about the normal exploitative
> operations of capitalism; they like to talk about monopoly, without
> having much to say about the destructiveness of competition.
>
> Doug
Actually, that's too kind Doug.
Nader's rhetoric historically was very pro-competition, supporting most forms of deregulation in the 1970s in the name of consumers. Nader's rhetoric has become more generally anti-corporate in recent years, but he generally had a liberal "externalities" view on the economy- promote maximum competition while passing regulation only to force companies to internalize the costs of their operations.
Nader and his technology guy Jamie Love have promoted competition almost excluviely as the solution to the Microsoft problem. (I did the same thing with my work at NetAction, but I was a hired gun and spent a lot of time writing about a variety of non-competition regulatory solutions to the problem as well.)
And in the fight over access to so-called "broadband" high-speed access to the Internet, they are almost monomaniaclly supporting the competition as the approach, despite strong evidence that competition encourages focus on high-profit customers while making it nearly impossible to find investors in the capital investment needed to wire up poor neighborhoods. This is currently framed as a fight between AOL and AT&T, but links to the general problem of telecom deregulation which has pulverized commitments to universal service.
I am not even sure it makes sense to place Nader in the populist tradition. He fits much more clearly in the early century Progressive tradition of Teddie Roosevelt and the muckrakers, who bemoaned monopoly while promoting consumer protection and environmental policy. While not hostile to labor, that tradition almost always chooses consumers over labor rights in a pince.
--Nathan Newman