The Cavalier Daily interviewed Ralph Nader this past October. We asked Mr. Nader ten questions which had been submitted by college newspaper editors from across the country on the issues they thought were the most relevant to this election.
You can listen to an audio recording of the interview by clicking on this link. Alternatively, you can read the transcript of the interview, found below.
CD: Ok, I guess we can get started. Basically I've got ten questions that were submitted by college newspaper editors across the country. The first one comes from the Daily Campus at the University of Connecticut. It's about financial aid. How will you provide financial aid for middle class americans who struggle to afford the cost of college tuition?
RN: Public universities should be tuition-free, as they have been for decades in Western Europe, including some countries like Finland. If we can do it - If they can do it, we can do it. It should be like high school. If you want to go to Harvard or Brown, you pay whatever – although they're going toward tuition-free because of their endowment interests, you know, they're moving in that direction, but it should be that way. It takes about 55 billion dollars a year, and we spend 80 billion in up-front and back-up costs keeping soldiers in Western Europe and East Asia, 60 years after World War II – doing what? Who are they defending? Japan? South Korea, Germany, England, France – against who? Inner Mongolia? Moldova? So if you bring them back, and then a lot of the soldiers can get an education, too.
So that's it. Now, absent that, you've got to expand your student loans. They should be completely done by the Department of Education. There should be no Sallie Mae, no commercial student loan companies that gouge you, rip you off, and do it, you know, do it after you've signed on. I mean, most students don't care much about the fine print of the student loans, and then when they graduate and they start having to pay and they see a fifteen-hundred dollar penalty, or this-and-that, it's bad. And as you know, Sallie Mae and others have gotten a steal until recently because of reform in Congress. Where if they make money off you, they keep it, but if they lose, Uncle Sam makes up the difference. Why do we even have private corporations engaging in student loans. Why is the tax payer subsidizing these boondoggles and these high interest rates and these defaults by students? It should all be done by the Department of Education. Adequate, public, accountable.
And by the way, you know, these student loans companies wine and dine your, a lot of your loan officials – student loan officials, like Duke and Columbia. They had to resign. They take them to junkets, wine and dine, so that they can get an exclusive. Actually put their people on campus.
CD: Alright. Our next question is about funding for higher education. It comes from The Rebel Yell, at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Will funding for research universities be hindered or diminished in any way due to the current economic crisis?
RN: Oh, it'll be hindered. But right now the corporations are funding a lot of partnerships between universities and themselves, and that's basically corporatizing research. And a lot of it is publicly funded, so they get proprietary information in these contracts between the biotech industry, say, and the biology department professors, and they sign these contracts and they basically require the professors and the graduate students not to speak about what they've researched, and there's a gag rule, because it's considered proprietary information by Monsanto, for example – the Iowa State deal between Monsanto – and it's improper. So the first consideration is that universities should not be corporatized, should be not engaging in commercial missions – requiring graduate students through peer pressure and faculty pressure to engage in that kind of research.
Second is that the government's research should be more thoroughly aired. You know, here's the way it operates: the NIH gives money to universities to research new cancer drugs – anti-cancer drugs. So they come up with something, and the NIH pays them, under contract, and then they proceed to test them clinically, like TAXAL, which is an anti-cancer drug, and 31 million dollars of National Cancer Institute money, discovered, developed and clinically tested this very important anti-cancer drug. And then under federal policy, they gave it under a monopoly marketing agreement to Bristol-Myers Squibb, who turned around and charged women with ovarian cancer $14,000 for six treatments, each – you know, each woman. Six treatments - $14,000. Now where's the taxpayer here? There's no reasonable price provision to explain what Bristol-Myers charges. They didn't research it, they didn't discover it, they got it essentially free. And there's no royalties back to the NIH based on when Bristol-Myers makes a ton of money on it. That's very important, you know, to draw the line between non-profit, tax-funded academic institutions and profit-seeking corporate institutions who appropriate the assets – faculty, grad students – for their proprietary control and for their profit. So when the government does research, it should keep its research, and if anybody wants it, they should pay a royalty for it, you know, when they support research at universities.
CD: Ok, our next question is from our own paper, The Cavalier Daily at the University of Virginia. It has to do with the economy. The U.S. is almost 10 trillion dollars in debt, and counting. How are you going to make sure our generation isn't picking up the tab for your generation's excesses?
RN: Well, first of all, you have a balanced budget, except for extraordinary circumstances. You don't deficit finance the Iraq War. Presidents usually raise taxes to fund wars. This reduced taxes on the wealthy, and put the burden on your shoulders to pay, see? The first step is you cut the military budget, which is very bloated, wasteful, redundant – all kinds of weapons systems costing zillions that were designed for the Soviet Union era of hostility, but they're still in the pipeline because Lockheed-Martin and Grumman and General Dynamics want more sales. So you cut that, you cut the corporate subsidies – hundreds of billions of dollars - you've seen what's on the way with the bailout on Wall Street. And that will help produce a balanced budget. Another way to do it is to tax the corporations at the rate they were taxed in the prosperous 1960s, which they are not now. They're taxed far less. But, I'll tell you, any time that you have deficit spending you've got to make sure it's for a strict public purpose, like, let's say you're in a depression and you want to create jobs, so the government goes into deficit spending to rebuild the public works – the schools, bridges highways, public transit – that's a legitimate use, because that's a real investment. You're gonna get a return on that investment. But - wars, subsidies to corrupt, mismanaged corporations, that's not appropriate use of tax money anyway, much less deferring the burden on to the next generation. And I call Bush the biggest baby-taxer in American history, because when he does deficit spending, he's taxing the kids.
CD: The next question's from The Daily Bruin at the University of California, Los Angeles. It's about student loans. The economic crisis has forced many banks and lenders to close their doors to students seeking loans, forcing some students to take on part-time and sometimes even second jobs. What are your plans to help regulate and to maintain a steady level of lenders available to students so that their focus can be primarily on their studies and not on the costs of college?
RN: I want to eliminate the commercial lenders. They've disgraced themselves, they've enriched themselves. You can see what the head of Sallie Mae paid himself over the years. He set up his own golf course. So no, this is a public function and it should be done with public funds until the day when we have no tuition at public universities. Again, the distinction between Harvard, Yale, and you know, the University of California. When I made this point about two weeks ago at a university, a person stood up in the question period and said, “You know, I've just finished my graduate degree from a university in Finland, and I just like to tell everybody here that what it cost me in my senior year was 56 euros, which is about 83 dollars.” If Finland can do it, why can't we do it? So you'll notice the premise there is not that it could be tuition-free. It should be tuition-free. It's like high school. It should be like high school.
CD: Well, the next question ought to be right up your alley. It's about tuition costs and it's also from The Daily Bruin. Many universities are raising tuition fees for students because of a decrease in state funding. As president, how will you combat this obstacle to higher education, and what can be done at the national level to ease the financial burden on students?
RN: Well, you see it's good it's U. Cal-Berkeley, because there's a retired physics professor, I think it's Charlie Schulz, who has his own Web site, who has been monitoring the budget. Most people don't even understand university budgets, because their not micro enough, they're not detailed enough. Like you have a departmental budget, but what, you know, detail? And he's the only one I know in the United States that takes it apart, year after year. And he makes these presentations, and they just completely ignore him. And his point is that students are cross-subsidizing corporate research. You know, when they come into these agreements – you know, I think Novartis is on campus there, and BP is about to be on campus – that, when they say, well, we're going to put billions of dollars in the next ten years, these corporations, but there's a cross-subsidy. So there is an argument that the more commercial research is conducted on campus in these partnerships, they have to have elaborate laboratories, elaborate this, because they compete against one other – Stanford, Harvard, Berkeley – that they're shifting significant costs on the student, in terms of tuition increases. So I would suggest that the students there look at Charlie Schulz's Web site and they can see that the tuition at Berkeley should not be as high as it is, if it wasn't for this kind of commercial research.
The other thing is the students have no input. They and their parents are paying the bill, but there's a lot of secret items in these university budgets. And they're non-profit, they're publicly funded. They shouldn't have secret items. They say, “Well, we have to compete with our other universities.” That's corporate talk. That's not non-profit, tax-funded talk.
The other point is that the price of textbooks is huge, and that's a racket, too, and years ago, the Justice Department anti-trust division went after the publishers for anti-trust, collusion. But when you have a textbook that's printed in the hundreds of thousands or millions, and they charge you 80 bucks, a hundred bucks? What do they charge you? A hundred and twenty bucks? Right? Ok, now you go into a book store, and you pick up a book that's 600 pages, the size of your textbook. It's got a 50 thousand print run, and it's thirty bucks. Something's wrong here. And then they change you, you know, from year to year, so you have to keep buying it, so you can't recycle it through a student co-op, used book marts. And in some community colleges, people have told me the price of the book exceeds the price of the tuition for the course. So I would encourage college newspapers to devote less space to sports and entertainment and gossip, and more to investigating their own university. And not just economically – in terms of what their priorities are, moonlighting, with – like, the professors should tell all their students who they're moonlighting with. I mean, you know, by day you're taught by a professor – anti-trust, let's say – and he's moonlighting with some corporations, advising them on mergers. You've got a right to know that.
Another thing, all contracts that the university has above, say, $50,000 should be online. They don't want to do that. It should be online. The more scrutiny students have with the budget, the less spiraling will be tuition. And then students can get course credit. You know, they do a seminar paper in economics, they study the budget. They do a thesis, they do the budget. So there's a lot going on in universities that the college papers don't have a clue. I keep telling students, you know, whenever are you going to have your own radio station, your own T.V. station, your own newspaper, your own gathering halls, your own laboratories – physics, chemistry – when in the rest of your life are you going to have that? And what do you do with the newspaper? You mimic some of the tabloids. That's a whole story by itself.
Go ahead.
CD: Sure. We're going to switch gears a bit, and talk about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This question's from the Arkansas Traveler at the University of Arkansas. What programs do you support to aid young veterans returning to college from Iraq and Afghanistan?
RN: Well, they should have the equivalent - well, you know Senator Webb's got a bill through to provide them with education. So there is, like, a G.I. Bill of Rights, you know, that was after World War II. So that's – I'm not certain how much it takes care of, but it's pretty generous. He got it through a guilt-ridden Congress. But we don't want veterans to come back. We don't want veterans to go there in the first place. We want to get out of there.
CD: We'll switch gears a little bit again. This is about environmental sustainability. It's from The Daily Targum at Rutgers University. If elected, how high a priority will you make sustainable energy research? Are you willing to increase funding and resources to make that a reality?
RN: We need to deadline targets. You know, that how much of our energy will come from – if energy efficiency, advance, and renewables: geothermal, wind power, all kinds of solar. That's what we did to go to the moon. You know, Kennedy said we're going to go to the moon, the deadline focuses the country, it focuses the budgetary priorities, it focuses the regulatory – technology forcing regulation on the motor vehicle industry and the lighting, heating, air-conditioning industry, and appliance manufacturers. So that's the way to do it, and we should do it fast, because it's more productive and it's more efficient. I mean, the way they say “Oh, it's gonna cost the auto industry billions.” Well, they've been on notice for 35 years, to begin with. But the point is that what is inefficient in terms of energy consumption for the consumer is desired by the vendor, right? You know what I'm saying? In other words, if you have a more fuel-efficient motor vehicle that you're driving – say, 60 miles per gallon – Exxon sells you less gasoline. If you have more efficient usage of all kinds of industry, it reduces the sales of the coal, oil, gas and uranium, in the nuclear industry. That's why they don't like it. That's why they don't like solar energy, because it's a displacing energy. Unless they buy up the solar company, it's gonna displace them. So their lobbies in Washington tilt the playing field for years. They get – the fossils and nuclear get the tax credits, they get the depreciation accelerations, they get the free government research and development. They get all of these corporate welfare props. And until recently, solar energy got nothing. Energy efficiency technology manufacturers got nothing. We have to reverse that completely. And the goal has got to be to phase out completely fossil fuels and uranium, as completely as possible. Just the way the horse and buggy industry was phased out by motor vehicles. I mean, that wasn't done by government, either, but there's too much at stake – there's climate change at stake, there's geopolitical wars at stake, there's pollution at the ground at stake, there's devastation of land - you know, the strip-mined lands, for example - there's occupational disease at stake. And the kind of power that fewer and fewer Exxon-Mobil types have over the country, and over the consumer and the environment. Whereas these other forms of energy are not only sustainable, but they're decentralized. You know, communities, solar installation, repair, et cetera. And so they create more local jobs, and more community self-sufficiency. The great thing about sustainability is self-sufficiency. The corporations have vectored us toward global – corporate globalization, interdependence - NAFTA, WTO, all that. And that is the antithesis of community self-sufficiency. I mean, there are communities all over the country that could be self-sufficient in energy, for example. And water resources. And food, more food grown, you know, in a decentralized way instead of the agri-business – centralized, corporate farms, and such.
CD: Ok, the next question's about diversity in higher education. It's also from The Rebel Yell at UNLV. With whites no longer projected to be the majority in the next generation, how long do you feel that affirmative actions laws will be necessary?
RN: Well, that's a factual question. And it'll differ university to university. Some universities may be pretty bad, some universities maybe not. It's hard to put a deadline on it. You can gauge it by – as the question implies – how many minority students are in there. That's one way, and then the other question is, to what extent do the economics of the university tuition, basically, have a discriminatory effect on lower-income, minority students? So you know, if you level the playing field in terms of the cost of access and you have higher and higher percentages of minorities, it's really not needed. But that is a factual question.
CD: The next question comes from The Red and Black, at the University of Georgia. It's about healthcare. What in your policies for healthcare will take college students and recent graduates from universities into account?
RN: Because I want a universal healthcare where you're covered the day you're born, long before you matriculate. Every other Western country does that. In our country, we have a pay-or-die system, where the health insurance companies, that don't deliver any healthcare, have extraordinary power, and can, you know, disallow claims and require deductions and exclusions, and disallow pre-existing conditions and drive people into fits of anxiety where they've got to go to their psychiatrist to get counseling. What most college students don't know, because their expectation levels are so low, compared to Western Europe and Canada, is that 18 to 22 thousand people in this country die every year because they can't afford health insurance, according to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Science, and the higher figure was the Urban Institute. Now when you've got that kind of mortality figure, the morbidity figures of people who get sick, stay sick and that are injured and don't get treatment because they can't afford health insurance – hundreds and hundreds of thousands. So, I say to that question: Raise your expectation levels. We're entitled to have the same universal, full Medicare for all, free choice of doctor and hospital, private delivery of healthcare according to cost and quality standards. We're entitled to have it like their counterparts in the universities in Paris, Berlin and London. And that's what they should go for. Now there are 93 members of the House of Representatives who have signed on to what's called single-payer, full Medicare, in the House of Representatives. It's HR676. That's what students should be supporting, you know, all over the country.
Now, if we don't get it, what's going to happen? Well, you don't have health insurance when you graduate because you're not under your parents' umbrella, let's say. So you're on your own. So lots of people in their 20s don't have any health insurance, they go bare. And I just had one of our volunteers in New York, a young man, he was on his bike, trying to be sustainable, and a limousine hit him. And he didn't feel much, he was throw off, and then a day later, he was in excruciating pain in his hand. And he didn't have any insurance. And so, here we go again. He goes to a doctor, and they want 250 bucks just to look at it, and “You better go for surgery.” And he goes to another doctor, he says “No, no, it isn't surgery.” One doctor says, “You better hurry, because, even though it costs you thousands of dollars, because your wrist might have to be amputated.” What is this? Nobody dies in Belgium or Germany or Italy or the U.K. or Canada because they can't afford health insurance. So the students have gotta become more militant, more knowledgeable about what other countries who are far less rich than we are – Taiwan, for example, who gives everybody health insurance – and they've gotta begin demanding it. And I tell you, if there's a burst of organized energy coming off campus, it will really galvanize what is going on in Congress. Because, see, look, the unions, they want full health insurance, but they already got it for their workers, so they're not really tough on this — they'll just put out the right statements. The elderly, they've got Medicare – although they're getting shafted now because of Medicare Advantage. But at least they have Medicare. So they're not a lobby, you see. So where's it gonna come from? From the generation that has most at stake: the people going into their twenties.
CD: Our final question is also from The Cavalier Daily. It's about immigration policy. What kind of access to higher education should illegal immigrants and their children enjoy?
RN: Well, first we gotta back up. We should stop, as a government, supporting dictators and oligarchs south of the border, who so exploit their people, and with known jobs, that they go north to feed their families. Who wouldn't do that? Second, if they're employed and their taxes are being withheld, they've gotta be given the same rights as other American workers, because otherwise they will be used to drive down wages and standards, largely in jobs held by minorities in this country, who are American citizens. Third, get a minimum wage of at least ten bucks, which is what it would be if it was adjusted for inflation from 1968. Can you imagine, $6.55? It's going backwards into the future. It was just raised to $6.55 in July. That Americans will take some of these jobs, to begin with. So I'm just giving you a broader framework of what's at stake here.
Ok, so now you have children who are going to a public university and they're illegal. Or – they may have been born in this country, so they are American citizens, but the basic problem is, that's trying to tackle a problem at the end point. I want to tackle it at the base point. But you get people who've been here. They're here unlawfully. They're obviously - been here a long time if they've got children in college, right? So there's an equitable doctrine that says: yes, they crossed the border and it was a violation of law. It was not a felony. It's not a felony to cross the border illegally. If you do it for criminal intent it would be. And they were accepted by the economy. And the law enforcement was not applied to Tyson's Foods or other large employers that love to be able to have unlawful workers because they can push them around, pay them less, and they're afraid to complain, to report illegalities – occupational hazards and so forth, and injuries. So there's an equitable doctrine basically that says that an economy that accepts people for that long, withdraws - withholds taxes, has nullified the illegality of the entry. So, it's an equitable doctrine in law. So that's the answer. And that has been nullified by our accepting the hard work of their parents – work that a lot of us don't want to do, they clean up after us, they harvest our foods, they are our nannies, they clean the hotels and the restaurants and wash the dishes. That, in effect, is an equitable doctrine that nullifies the illegality. And if that does, then, they're in university and they're treated like anyone else.
CD: Ok. Well, I want to thank you for sitting down with me today.
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