Public Citizen Copyright © 2016 by Public Citizen Foundation All rights reserved. Public Citizen Foundation 1600 20th St. NW Washington, D.C. 20009 www.citizen.org ISBN: 978-1-58231-099-2 Doyle Printing, 2016 Printed in the United States of America PUBLIC CITIZEN THE SENTINEL OF DEMOCRACY CONTENTS Preface: The Biggest Get ...................................................................7 Introduction ....................................................................................11 1 Nader’s Raiders for the Lost Democracy....................................... 15 2 Tools for Attack on All Fronts.......................................................29 3 Creating a Healthy Democracy .....................................................43 4 Seeking Justice, Setting Precedents ..............................................61 5 The Race for Auto Safety ..............................................................89 6 Money and Politics: Making Government Accountable ..............113 7 Citizen Safeguards Under Siege: Regulatory Backlash ................155 8 The Phony “Lawsuit Crisis” .........................................................173 9 Saving Your Energy .................................................................... 197 10 Going Global ...............................................................................231 11 The Fifth Branch of Government................................................ 261 Appendix ......................................................................................271 Acknowledgments ........................................................................289 THE BIGGEST GET INETEEN SIXTYEIGHT WAS the rst full year of my television talk show, a visually Ndull hour-long interview program featuring a guest who had something import- ant to say and was willing to confront the often-surprising questions from faceless telephone callers and the uncensored commentary of a studio audience. We were competing with game shows. Our local TV experiment in Dayton, Ohio, featured the not very animated video of two talking heads, while on the other channel, “Let’s Make A Deal” was giving away $5,000 to a very animated woman dressed like a chicken salad sandwich. What chance, in the late sixties, did this ho-hum TV show have? The “Phil Donahue Show” featured no band, no announcer who laughed at all my jokes, no famous movie stars; this was Dayton after all. All WLWD (our station) had to o¬er was a young team of ambitious producers lled with the passion of rev- olutionaries and too inexperienced to understand the size of the challenge. With an absence of fear owing to our youth, we charged forward with the only thing we had: issues. This was 1967; the women’s movement was brewing. The nation, already reeling from the killing of the president, was about to witness the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy. In August 1968, the whole world was watching as the cops beat up kids outside the Democratic Party convention in Chicago. Guests I coveted were not breathless to ®y to Dayton to appear on a local talk show. One of my earliest longed-for guests was a young lawyer from Washington, D.C., who had swept onto America’s front pages less like a storm than a tsunami. His well-researched, detailed book condemning General Motor’s Corvair as “Unsafe At Any Speed” had so angered the largest manufacturing company in the world that the wounded corporation committed its lawyers and a bottomless public relations budget to the task of destroying the young crusader whose book was destroying sales of their beloved rear-engine car. By 1968, Ralph Nader was appearing on coast-to-coast TV, but not the “Phil Donahue Show.” I can still hear the phone voice of Ralph’s secretary, “Phil who?” 8 PUBLIC CITIZEN: THE SENTINEL OF DEMOCRACY I was totally awed by Ralph’s no-notes grasp of detail and no-pause answers to every question that came his way from cynical reporters. He knew the math of the Corvair’s high center of gravity and the car’s di¬erential, the physics of the rear-en- gine placement as well as the thermal dynamics of the car’s gas tank. This was the guest I wanted to have. Then I learned that Ralph was appearing in Cincinnati. I drove the 60 miles to the city’s airport, located across the Ohio River in northern Kentucky. This being prehistoric times, I left my car unattended at the curb (no Transportation Security Administration) and walked directly to the arrival gate and through the exit door out onto the tarmac as the aircraft came to a stop near the rollaway stairs. I positioned myself at the bottom step, clinging to my no-proof faith that he would say, “You came all the way from Dayton to meet me? How can I say no?” The plane’s passenger door opened and down the stairs came my gangly hero, schlepping a bulging briefcase and adorned in an ill-tting dark blue suit, a skinny tie and shoes he’d been wearing since his junior year in high school. With my hand extended, I said, “Hi Ralph, I’m Phil Donahue.” He looked sur- prised. “You came all the way from Dayton to meet me? How can I say no?” I drove to the Dayton Inn Hotel with my prized passenger in the right-front seat of my 1959 Chevy. When I nally got to sleep that night over my excitement, I dreamed I had killed Ralph Nader. I had an accident and my car had no seat belts. The next day, March 27, 1968, Ralph Nader made his rst appearance on my television show. He spoke of the danger of the second collision. The collision of unbuckled bodies rattling around the inside of the car like eggs in a crate bouncing o¬ a steering column that did not collapse, protruding knobs on an unpadded dash- board and doors that ®y open, ejecting passengers to almost certain death. A small audience of housewives never took their eyes o¬ the young lawyer. A friendship was born between the local Dayton TV host and the single most important consumer advocate in the history of consumption. Throughout the 29-year history of my program, we produced almost 5,000 shows. Public Citizen became a major resource for the young show producers outside my o¯ce door. Public Citizen experts are the GET people. A GET is the sought-after guest that all the shows wanted. Ralph was my best GET, followed by more great GETS from the busy organizations founded by Ralph. Dr. Sidney Wolfe, who headed Public Citizen’s Health Research Group, came to our program and cautioned women against allowing their ob-gyn to pat them on the head, patronize them and thrust an illegible prescription in their hand. “You have a right to know the side e¬ects of drugs, the ingredients and how they work.” It wasn’t long before women all over America were asking their doctors questions and demanding information. Dr. Wolfe’s health group published a book titled Worst Pill, Best Pills, a detailed alphabetized reference of hundreds of pharmaceutical products that help, hurt or do nothing at all. I held the book up and displayed the address at which viewers could order this valuable assembly of important information for $10. The resulting orders PREFACE 9 turned Public Citizen and the o¯ce of the “Donahue” show upside down. About half a million dollars ®ooded in for the next several weeks and from subsequent programs. The money enabled Public Citizen to buy a building near Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C., which has served as its headquarters for 22 years. Joan Claybrook served Public Citizen as the most tenacious nonprot CEO I have ever known. She is as fearless as Ralph and has sti¬-armed her share of white-col- lar grandees from the government, the insurance industry, Wall Street, the law and many One Percenters. Joan has also been a valuable resource in helping our show producers get the GETS that kept us on the air for so many years. Open this fabulous book to any page and you will nd a “Donahue” show. And now Robert Weissman, the new president of Public Citizen, is at the helm of this singular organization. Long before the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Citizens United, Public Citizen was the modern-day version of the little Dutch boy who saved Holland with his nger in the dyke. It remains to be seen how much help Naderites get as they struggle to hold the constitutional dam against the rising tide of money surging toward Congress. Robert is leading the charge on this and many other important ghts. It has been 47 years since I stood in an unguarded area of the Cincinnati airport greeting Ralph Nader. For me, that moment began a lifelong tutorial on justice, power, democracy and the never-ending need for vigilant oversight of all three. I read this book and learned all over again why oversight can come only from a pop- ulace informed by a free press beholden to no corporate interests and aided by the Freedom of Information Act. For me, this book is another reminder of how the handshake I made with Ralph in 1968 in a no-trespassing zone of the Cincinnati airport led to countless “Donahue” programs that made our Constitution come alive for millions of Americans. A handshake that led to the biggest GET of my life — and the biggest GET for the American public. —Phil Donahue INTRODUCTION LANCING AT HIS WATCH, the young attorney strode through Washington, D.C.’s GNational Airport, a man in a hurry. He had 10 minutes to spare before ®ying to Hartford, Connecticut, where more than a thousand people were waiting in the square to hear him speak at a noon civic rally. Standing in line at the Allegheny Airlines desk, he recognized the person in front of him as a senior aide to a U.S. senator. He overheard the aide being told the ®ight was full, that no more passengers could board, that the only way to make it to Hartford that day was to take another ®ight via Philadelphia. The aide, John Koskinen (later President Barack Obama’s head of the Internal Revenue Service) shrugged and accepted the alternative arrangement.