PR.com (Allison Kugel): You’ve just announced your candidacy for the 2008 Presidential election. Coming from a legal background and then consumer activism, what prompts you to want to enter the political arena, especially since you seem to have so much disdain for it?

Ralph Nader: Because the corporate government has shut the doors down on us in Washington. We can’t get congressional hearings on our subjects that we used to. We can’t get the regulatory agencies to respond to our petitions, like [The] Food and Drug Administration and OSHA (Occupational Safety & Health Administration) and Auto Safety. So, we either close down and go to Monterey and watch the whales, or we go into the electoral arena.

PR.com: What do these agencies respond to, if they’re not responding to you?

Ralph Nader: The doors are open for corporations: thirty-five thousand daily lobbyists, ten thousand political action committees (PACs) and slush funds and their own executives in high agency government positions; like The Defense Treasury and the FDA. So, the corporations are now our government. It’s not that they just have influence. They are our government.

PR.com: Yet in your activism and lobbying to congress you were able to accomplish so much. I don’t know if a lot of people know that your lobbying in Washington led to Congress passing everything from National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act to The Freedom of Information Act to The Clean Air Act.

Ralph Nader: You can’t do it anymore. It was all done in the sixties and seventies, and a little bit in the eighties. The nineties, under [Bill] Clinton, almost impossible. Under [George W.] Bush, almost impossible.

PR.com: What was the process back then that allowed you to do that?

Ralph Nader: We’d go to Chairs of committees in the Senate and the House. We’d persuade them on the merits to hold investigative hearings and propose legislation, and they would pass them. Lyndon Johnson, and even Nixon and Carter, would sign them and then the agencies would be created or strengthened, like The Auto Safety Agency and Product Safety Commissions. And they were supposed to implement it. But it’s all closed down now. Most of these groups don’t want to admit it, because they want to make it appear that they’re able to do something, but they know that they can’t do much at all. It’s because the two parties are dialing for the same dollars. They socialize with the same lobbyists. There was an article recently in Politico which says that the lobbyists who gave to Republicans are now moving over to give to Democrats.

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