Skip to main contentThe back flap of the dust jacket on Ralph Nader’s latest book points out that Time and Life magazines named him “one of the hundred most influential Americans of the twentieth century.” Never mind that Life halted weekly publication in 1972, Time is among what the kids now call legacy media, and the 20th century has been over for a quarter century or so.
The grainy author photo, too, has a nostalgic feel: Nader as the man in the gray flannel suit, a bit rumpled perhaps, without the crisp fedora or the chiseled good looks of a Gregory Peck. And like the Peck character in the 1956 film The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Nader the iconic consumer advocate has turned in the December of his maverick career to doing PR for corporate bigwigs, albeit well-behaved ones.
The Rebellious CEO: 12 Leaders Who Did It Right (Melville House, 352 pages, $32.50) profiles a dozen corporate executives whom Nader purports to admire, men who have used their wealth and influence not solely for their personal enrichment, but to promote economic and social justice and save the planet.
And they are almost all men.
Of the 12 rebellious CEOs Nader profiles, only one is a woman, Anita Roddick of The Body Shop, and one a person of color, Iraqi American restaurateur Andy Shallal. The other 10 are gray-haired white men, all but two of whom are now deceased, and all but two of those have been dead for at least 10 years.
So this is not especially a book about best business practices on the cutting edge of a greener, more equitable new world; it’s more of a memoir, a book of history.
Even Nader’s social etiquette is a bit mid-20th century. Roddick, for instance, is always “Anita,” referred to by her Christian name as if she and Ralph were close friends (and perhaps they were; Roddick died in 2007). The 11 men in the book are often referred to by their first names, especially if they were good enough pals of Nader’s to return his calls, but mostly they are given the dignity of address by their last names.
On top of that, Nader’s book is badly written and indifferently edited, with some infelicity of prose or other cropping up every few pages, posing a conundrum that will send readers flipping back to figure out, “Wait a minute, what does he mean by that?”
One such bewildering passage pops up early in the chapter on John C. “Jack” Bogle, founder of The Vanguard Group, midway through a paragraph on the evils of stock speculation: “For example, stocks and bonds are once removed from the real economy, options and puts, further removed as the bets they are, and even further removed are exchanges of complex derivatives. The latter, based on algorithms, are bets on bets on bets on bets and so on. Rank speculation.”
“Puts”? Is that a noun or a verb? And we get it, there’s betting. But to those of us who don’t subscribe to The Wall Street Journal, please pass the Advil.
No doubt the reader is wondering, if this is a memoir, does the presidential election of 2000 come up at all? Didn’t Nader, as the Green Party nominee, play perhaps a greater role than any other single person in stealing enough votes from Democrat Al Gore to put Republican George W. Bush in the White House?
One might think Nader would, nearly a quarter century on, have the sense—some might say the decency—to let this sleeping dog lie, particularly before a nerve-wracking election year when history could so catastrophically repeat itself in the three-way Armageddon between Vice President Kamala Harris, former President Trump, and scion of the Kennedy dynasty RFK Jr.
But, of course, he doesn’t and he can’t.
At least two of the executives Nader profiles, it turns out, vehemently opposed his 2000 bid—and not because they were Republicans. One was Sol Price, a liberal Democrat and founder of FedMart, Price Club and PriceSmart (i.e., the guy who basically invented Costco and Walmart). Price took out a prescient quarter-page ad in the Los Angeles Times at the time, decrying Nader’s candidacy and warning of the irreparable harm it might do.
Having brought up the subject himself, Nader feels compelled to respond. He rationalizes his ill-starred run by comparing it to the presidential campaigns of Socialist Party perennial Norman Thomas in the 1930s and ‘40s that Nader argues pushed FDR to the left to adopt such longtime Socialist agenda items as Social Security, unemployment compensation, and greater regulation of banks. He goes on:
“The problem with this Democratic Party, I observed, is that instead of being nudged by the Green Party [to adopt such policies as universal health care and a higher minimum wage], it started to seriously harass their candidates off the ballot in state after state and violate their civil rights.…In that 2000 election, when Albert Gore won the national popular vote, the result was decided by the antidemocratic Electoral College, and the multiple GOP shenanigans in Florida. This process was topped off by the GOP justices on the US Supreme Court.”
So Nader doomed the United States to four years, some might argue eight, under the worst Republican administration in its history, except for the last one, because he wanted to “nudge” the Democratic Party—a nudge that became a shove. Progressives could take a lesson from this ill-advised move before using their votes in 2024 to “make a point” about the war in Gaza or the safety and effectiveness of vaccines.
Another enlightened CEO in Nader’s book who was less than enamored with the author’s political ambitions was Bernard “B” Rapoport, founder of the American Income Life Insurance Company of Waco, Texas. Credit the author for having a sense of humor self-deprecating enough to quote B directly (the brackets are Nader’s):
“I feel about Ronnie Dugger [the incorruptible, hardline progressive editor of the Texas Observer] the way I feel about consumer advocate Ralph Nader. God help the world if we don’t have them, but God help the world if they are ever in a position of power.”
Despite his book’s many flaws, the larger point Nader makes is a powerful one: Americans are the greatest owners of wealth on earth—and not the 1% who own such a disproportionate share of private wealth. Nader speaks of the public wealth: “the public lands—which together with adjacent offshore seabed territory constitute one third of the United States—the public airwaves, trillions of dollars in pension and mutual funds, and, least recognized, trillions of dollars in government research & development given away to build the major industries of our economy.”
The leaders with the greatest power to preserve and do the most good with the nation’s wealth, Nader argues, are not our elected ones, from the president on down to the local school board; they are the nation’s business leaders, the CEOs of its major corporations. The problem, as one mega-billionaire confessed to Nader, “We know how to make a lot of money, but we don’t have a clue about what to do with it, including me, Ralph.”