“It’s the work of a creative thinker who offers the way out of the mess, inspiring all of us to dare to do something brave.” Jim Hightower columnist and activist, in preface to Ralph Nader book

In an age of celebrity worship, the word “I” isn’t in Ralph Nader’s vocabulary.

His new book, he points out, is called Told You So, minus the personal pronoun.

Subtitled The Big Book of Weekly Columns, it tells you everything you need to know — or are likely to know — about the veteran campaigner Mother Jones called “the most private man ever to run for public office.”

“Fact is, I was right,” he says, chuckling.

At 79 — tall, rangy and kinetic — he has earned the right to be right.

READ A NADER Q&A BELOW

The eight-year collection of columns is emblematic of an American original whose life has been lived from the outside in, hedgehog-style, with emotions discreetly tucked away and political opinions bristling in plain sight.

And there are an exhaustive number of opinions, backed by research and fuelled by litres of midnight oil. From corporate crime to obesity to health care to media decline to tax refunds to free trade to the decline of democracy. And much, much more.

They’re the latest outpouring from a five-decade career that began in the 1960s when young firebrand Nader burst on the scene as a white knight of consumer rights, shaming the authorities into a slew of new auto safety laws.

He went on to crusade for sweeping anti-pollution laws, founded at least half a dozen public interest research groups, activated the much-feared Nader’s Raiders and produced more than 20 books.

But the rubber met a rocky road when he ran for president four times, most contentiously in 2000, when his 3 million votes were blamed for throwing the victory to George W. Bush. Some of his former supporters campaigned against him as a divisive figure, and have not forgiven him. They saw his subsequent runs as a reckless failure of judgment. The lustre was scraped off the name that long meant “evildoers beware.”

But Nader is impervious to the slings and arrows. The revolving door of popularity doesn’t interest him. A hard-charging, 24/7 man who once told a colleague he made a choice between work and marriage, he has fled from the kind of personal close-ups that crackle across the Twittersphere.

Described as shy, austere and even grim, the public avenger (whose name famously rhymes with Darth Vader) showed no sign of the above as he warmed to his favourite subjects on a recent book tour in Toronto.

His collection of columns, he insisted, should not be read as a rant. They’re not meant for hand-wringing, but repairing the damage he sees all around him.

“It’s the work of a creative thinker who offers the way out of the mess, inspiring all of us to dare to do something brave, but essential if we are to be a truly free, self-governing people,” enthuses a preface by columnist and activist Jim Hightower.

Shot to fame

Nader’s maverick spirit was honed early, at his Lebanese-American parents’ dinner table in the picture-perfect mill town of Winsted, near Hartford, Conn.

His father ran a local restaurant. For Nathra Nader, his wife Rose and their four children, political debate was daily fare, in both Arabic and English. In high school and university — Princeton then Harvard Law School — Ralph Nader never outgrew the conviction that the highest duty was the public good.

Leaving a small-town law practice, he went to Washington in search of bigger game. In 1964 he was hired as a Department of Labor consultant, after writing a muckraking article accusing the auto industry of passing over car safety for sales and profits. His passion for auto safety reform reportedly began when he saw a catastrophic accident in which a child was decapitated in a low-speed crash because of a faulty glove compartment door.

Nader’s landmark book, Unsafe at any Speed, launched his first campaign, and made him a public enemy of the auto industry. But it was another kind of scandal that morphed him into a household name: General Motors authorized a detective agency to spy and pry into his private and political life — even hiring a prostitute to waylay him, unsuccessfully, at a supermarket food counter.

The sleaze attack not only vindicated Nader, but shot him to fame, the covers of Time and Newsweek, the talk-show circuit, and more legislative bull’s eyes than most members of Congress can claim in a lifetime. He used the $425,000 won from a lawsuit against GM to help fund his advocacy groups.

Modern-day Stoic

But the snooping also revealed a man who lacked the predictable vices of wine, women (or men) and drugs, not to mention corruption. He was even a vegetarian. And, alarmingly, he had likely never told a lie in his life: a modern-day Stoic, as different from the denizens of D.C. as the Roman philosopher Seneca from a 21st-century U.S. senator.

“They have put you through the mill, and they haven’t found a thing wrong,” Sen. Abraham Ribicoff declared to Nader when the spy story surfaced in the national news.

And Nader quickly entered urban legend as Mr. Clean.

More legend than reality, wrote the Washington Post’s Marc Fisher: “A lot of what you thought about Ralph Nader is wrong . . . He follows the NBA. He is not humourless, far from it. He does have a driver’s licence and even occasionally gets behind the wheel. He does not live in an $80-a-month room near downtown. He is not nearly as interested in car safety as he is in the total restructuring of the American economy and society.”

Half-a-century after his career began, not much has changed, bar a few more lines and a tad less hair. A bout of Bell’s palsy (a form of facial paralysis) has given him a deceptively unfocused look. Otherwise, the unsparing work schedule, vast output of books and articles, political activism and tireless determination to change things for the better — even as the political scene gets worse — has seemingly stopped the Nader clock.

“Am I a Pollyanna?” he asks, with a smile.

“No. When you look at the great social innovations, they never had a lot of people behind them, but they represented public sentiment. The real problem is the mass feeling of powerlessness. Once you feel powerless you’re apathetic by definition. As long as the people who are leading are backed by public sentiment, have a grip on the facts and are persistent, they can win. It’s easier than you think.”

RALPH NADER’S Q&A WITH THE STAR’S OLIVIA WARD:

Q: What made you call your book Told You So, a title many people would run from?

A: The response is “what hubris.” But it wasn’t just “I” told you so. I’ve been not saying it, though provoked, for 40 years. I’ve said it on auto safety, and I was right. I was right on Iraq, on (the World Trade Organization) and NAFTA. I was right on Wall Street. So it isn’t just a throwaway line. There’s testimony, books, statements behind it.

If you have no axe to grind, you have a grip on reality and aren’t indentured to the prevailing propaganda — and you have a sense of urgency about justice and the common good and are willing to put the time in — you’re going to be more right than the Boltons, Rumsfelds and Cheneys.

Q: You’ve been called the last American radical. Are you comfortable with that?

A: There are a lot of good people struggling for justice but they’re not known. If people worthy of trust don’t get on the mass media, it’s a formula for social decay. The wrongdoers of the corporate world, the militarists and commercialists are at centre stage.

Those whose names are known are almost all over 65. That’s because the 1960s produced civic celebrities. It’s not that younger people who are working for civic rights, women’s rights, consumer rights don’t exist, they just aren’t in the media. There are plenty of people building local economies with local self-reliance to reduce dependence on absentee giant corporations. It just isn’t glamorous stuff.

Q: You won some huge victories when you campaigned decades ago. Could you do it again today?

A: Not likely. Couldn’t get committee hearings in Congress. Couldn’t get the press. It needs daily coverage. The White House isn’t as receptive as LBJ (Lyndon Johnson) or even (Richard) Nixon.

Nixon feared the rumble from the people so he signed OSHA (the Occupational Safety and Health Act), EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), product safety (legislation). He proposed a minimum incomes plan. He had a health insurance plan better than Obama’s, but it didn’t get through. He proposed drug rehabilitation rather than incarceration — all because he feared the rumble. If there’s no rumble there’s no action.

Q: The Occupy movement did create a rumble, but it’s all but disappeared. Why is that?

A: They had a brilliant slogan, brilliant encampment concept, but they aborted themselves because they didn’t want leaders. If you don’t want leaders you have no leadership.

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They had no agenda but inequality. And they contemptuously avoided the political system, without which many of their desires, like reducing inequality, had no chance. Most of what they wanted had to go through Congress or state legislatures. I tried to interest them in the minimum wage — 30 million workers in the U.S. make less than 40 years ago, inflation adjusted. They said “it’s a great idea but we have no organization.”

Q: Are you disillusioned with President Barack Obama, or did you have any illusions to start with?

A: I never had illusions. I knew him when he was in Illinois. He was very good rhetorically, but conflict-averse when it came to challenging power.

Obama turned his back on his own people, brown and black. He took up (Bill) Clinton’s focus on the middle class, but never talked about the poor until recently. He never raised the minimum wage, though he promised to push for it. He said it would be $9.50 by 2011. Then he comes back this year with $9 by 2015.

This is the first president who decides on drone strikes — on “killer Tuesdays.” Under international law it’s a crime to kill civilians when you go after a suspect. He’s a constitutional law lecturer who’s having trouble obeying the constitution or federal statutes: there’s incarceration without charges and torture going on at Guantanamo. Surveillance is greater than under (George W.) Bush. Now all of America is under surveillance.

Q: You’ve called the U.S. an “advanced Third World country.” Why?

A: It’s advanced in its science, technology and military armaments. But look at the plight of the people. I hate to depress you with the facts, but half the country is poor. The U.S. Department of Labor says if you make over $24,000 as a family of four before payroll deductions you’re not poor. Absurd!

The proper — modest — criterion is $40,000. Half the families in the country are under that. We are way down on the average wage. We have the highest child poverty rate in the (developed) world. The highest level of consumer debt and foreclosure. According to a Harvard Medical School study, 800 Americans die every week — that’s 45,000 a year — because they don’t have health insurance.

Also, we don’t have an electoral process that permits a multi-party system. We have an absurd electoral college process so that you can come in second in a presidential vote and win over somebody who won the popular vote, like Bush and (Al) Gore. That’s happened four or five times in our country. Electorally, America is a money-driven two-party tyranny. And we’re lecturing other countries on democracy.

Q: You’ve said a lot of disparaging things about the plutocrats. But you wrote a book called Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! that urges revolution from the top?

A: I tried to show in detail what 17 well-connected multi-billionaires who were willing to spend money could do in one year: reform is likely to happen fast when it’s long overdue. For instance, Warren Buffett has the wherewithal to completely revamp the tax system if he puts $1 billion into it. It’s 2 per cent of his net worth. I could show him how to do it.

I’m seeing if I can get a bunch of billionaires to run in 2016 as independents. That would be a three- or four-way race.

Q: And the grassroots?

A: I’ve often said that 1,000 organized people in each congressional district could turn the whole country around with a long-overdue agenda supported by the American people.

Q: For example?

A: Much stronger law enforcement against corporate crime and abuse. Full medicare for all, a living wage, different policies for children, not getting into foreign quagmires.

I left my website in 2008 still open, showing how many policies had majority support but were still off the table. When you have major issues supported by a majority of Americans not being discussed by candidates, or even raised in debates, then you have a strictly controlled oligarchy and plutocracy. That has to stop.

Q: Under the current bitterly divided system do you see any hope for change?

A: Page 1 of the papers reported on an unlikely alliance (in Congress) that nearly got prohibition of universal surveillance. You’ll see it almost every week: a libertarian-conservative-progressive-liberal alliance. Not the corporate or the military right wing.

If you can get them together it would be a decisive tipping point. They agree on revising the Patriot Act and civil liberties. They’re against a military empire and sovereignty-shredding, job-shredding (trade) agreements. They don’t like Wall Street and agree on Main Street. They don’t like the huge waste of the military budget or corporate welfare. They agree on third party rights.

True, they disagree on regulation and social issues. But let’s start with those five major areas and work from there. I’m writing a new book about the coming power of left-right coalitions.

Q: So why have politicians been unable to focus on issues of the public good?

A: The Republicans are far more frightened of the Republican right than they are (willing to work) to make their leaders better. The Democrats judge themselves by how bad the Republicans are. It’s disastrous.

When I asked John Larson (former chair of the House Democratic Caucus) why they don’t make minimum wage an election issue when it’s good for politics and the economy, he said they think they’ll raise less money from the Walmarts, the fast food industry, etc.

Q: Do you have any regrets about what you’ve done, or left undone?

A: Lots. That’s why you keep innovating. I should have started a major effort to develop civic skills and experience (for schoolchildren). To unlearn the lies they’ve been told and give them community-based knowledge and connections with adults who can show them how a city runs. That was my biggest mistake.

Q: You’ve written a book about Canada, and you compare us favourably to the U.S. Ever think of emigrating?

A: Canada is a “pull-up” country for us, even though its social safety net is fraying. People in Canada look just like us, so it’s an important comparison. The U.S. is a pull-down on Canada, and your prime minister is exactly right for that.

Everyone who doesn’t have health insurance thinks of emigrating. I’m lucky — I have it.