How Ralph Nader launched a movement in Vermont

Ralph Nader is America’s most famous consumer rights advocate. He is a relentless critic of corporate corruption and a former presidential candidate.Nader, now 88, achieved early fame in 1965 with the publication of Unsafe at Any Speed, his exposé of auto safety problems with Americans cars. He went on to become a key leader in the anti-nuclear power movement. He has run for president several times, most famously in 2000, when critics accuse him of drawing votes from Vice President Al Gore resulting in the election of George W. Bush.Nader’s influence on Vermont can be found in the Vermont Public Interest Research Group, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this month. VPIRG was born out of a meeting at the University of Vermont in October 1971 with student activists. Don Ross, Nader’s top lieutenant, urged the students to form a campus chapter of the national citizen action movement that Nader was spearheading. Ross promised that the new group “could investigate and bring pressure in such areas as the environment, automobile laws, equal employment opportunities for minorities – any area you’re concerned about.” VPIRG was launched the following year. There are now PIRGs in over 25 states.We spend the hour talking with Ralph Nader about the citizen action movement that he inspired and about his thoughts on politics today. We also speak with Paul Burns, who has been executive director of VPIRG for 22 years.Nader says that his legacy will be measured by “how many oak trees are planted. Meaning oak trees in the forest of democracy. We can't have enough of them. They're far too few, given the corporate supremacist and the corporate control as never before in our country's history. So we can look back with pleasure as to what has been achieved. But we've got to look forward and be very displeased about how much more there has to occur to subordinate corporate power to citizen power, constitutionally, statutorily, and in the minds of the people everywhere.”The preamble to the Constitution, Nader says, did “not [say] We the corporations. It was not We the Congress. It was We the people.”