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Oregon daily
emerald
Tuesday, October 16, 1984
Eugene, Oregon
Volume 86, Number 33
Nader criticizes ‘corporate America’
By Julie Shippen
Of the Kmerald
More than 800 people watched Mon
day night as an unusually animated
Ralph Nader mixed comedy with
social criticism in his attacks on
everything from the Reagan ad
ministration and corporate power to a
lack of leadership on America's col
lege campuses.
Nader capped off the first day of
Politics ’84, a four-day, ASUO
sponsored political symposium, with a
keynote address entitled "En
vironmental Effects of Corporate
America” given in the EMU Ballroom.
Nader prefaced his speech with an
overview of Ballot Measure 3, a
Citizen's Utility Board (CUB) proposal
that he has supported for more than 10
years around the country, he said at a
press conference held earlier Monday.
He cited the measure, as well as
Ballot Measure 9 (concerning the
disposal of radioactive waste, in
Oregon), as being "a silicon chip for
the consumer movement,” and urged
the mostly-student crowd to vote in
favor of the measures next month.
Addressing the many areas of con
flict between environmental and cor
porate interests, Nader blamed the
"mercantile mind” for confusion
created by viewing investments nor
mally considered productive, such as
cancer-prevention studies, with those
that are not.
“An investment to prevent cancer is
not necessarily productive,.. .but in
vestment to produce death-dealing
weapons on a mass scale, that’s pro
ductive,” Nader said with obvious
sarcasm.
“Yet every year, the mercantile
mind spreads like some sort of ex
traterrestrial oozing further and further
over other value systems in our socie
ty,” he added.
Education is one area affected in re
cent years by this type of thinking,
Nader said. He claimed that degrees in
accounting or computer science, for
example, are now thought of with
more prestige than degrees in
literature or history.
“The mercantile value has so nar
rowed your horizons as students that
you look at your University as a high
status vocational school,” he said.
"There seems to be a greater desire
among students to be well-paid cogs in
the corporate wheel than to become
educated graduates trying to decide
what direction to push that wheel.”
The “illegitimate violence” of
pollution did not go untouched by
Nader’s deck of witticisms as well. The
consumer advocate turned this time to
the automobile industry, which was
the target of his book 1965 book “Un
safe at Any Speed.”
“Here is an industry that has stead
fastly refused to toilet-train itself for 75
years,” Nader said. “Its anal exuda
tions are lethal. For years it was
against the law for an individual to
relieve oneself in the Detroit River, but
it wasn’t at all illegal for corporations
to relieve themselves in the Detroit
River.”
Pres. Ronald Reagan’s administra
tion, particularly Reagan himself,
received the uncensored reproaches of
Nader, who called the president ‘‘the
mannequin in the Whitehouse” and
the ‘‘king of style” and pointed to
Reagan as the cause of current and
future deficits.
Nader said that if Reagan is re
elected, the national deficit could tri
ple from $930 billion when he took of
fice in 1980 to $3.1 trillion by the end
of his secod term. He also said
Reagan’s deficit is equal to the coun
try’s total deficit from George
Washington to Jimmy Carter.
Nader urged the current generation
of students to take action in consumer
and government issues, suggesting
they begin by joining or organizing
groups like OSP1RG, as well as setting
up initiatives like CUB.
“You’re being shaped now for your
future careers — don’t waste the
time.” he said. “Your’s may be the last
generation in history that could have
achieved so much by giving up so lit
tle. The sacrifices in the future are go
ing to be bigger.”
Photo by Michael Clapp
Consumer advocate Ralph Nader speaks to
local media representatives before attacking
Pres. Ronald Reagan and corporate power on
campus Monday.
Measure 9 debate heated
By Paul Ertelt
(If the Emerald
The Ballot Measure 9 controversy heated
up Monday as a representative of Teledyne
Wah Chang and a self-proclaimed anti-nuclear
activist accused each other of lying at>out the
hazards of nuclear waste at Teledyne’s Albany
plant.
About 30 people attended the ASUO
sponsored debate in the EMU Forum Room.
)ames Denham, spokesperson for Teledyne,
and Lloyd Marbet, a sponsor of the measure,
clashed while discussing the effects of the
measure on Oregon's economy and on the
health of Oregon citizens.
The measure, which will appear on the
Nov. 6 ballot, prohibits disposal of naturally
occurring radioactive wastes on sites subject to
water erosion, earthquakes, volcanoes or
landslides.
The measure also stipulates that possibly
safer sites must be considered before sites are
approved and that no radioactive release from
the waste will be allowed.
Controversy surrounds the Teledyne
plant, which produces zirconium, a corrosion
resistant metal used in the nuclear power in
dustry. Waste from the process is stored in
sludge ponds near the Willamette River, and
this creates a potential health hazard to those
who get their drinking water from the river,
Marbet said.
Denham cited a study by the Oregon State
Health Division’s radiation section to support
his claim that the site poses no appreciable
health hazard.
“If you were to build a house on top of the
sludge ponds and lived on it for one year, it
would be equivalent to smoking one pack of
cigarettes a year,” Denham said.
But Marbet countered him, saying that
there are no safe levels of radioactive material,
despite government-established “safe” levels.
The federal government’s constant lowering of
Photo by Bill Harpole
fames Denham, at podium, and Lloyd
Marbet trade accusations at a debate Mon
day in the Forum Room.
safe levels of exposure is evidence of this, he
said.
The radium level of Teledyne’s sludge is
lower than many common materials, in
cluding synthetic rock-wool insulation and
mantles for Coleman lanterns, Denham said.
But Marbet said the form of the radioactive
material is a more important health considera
tion than the radium level.
If the Teledyne waste were to get into the
water supply, the radioactive material would
be readily absorbed by the body, Marbet said.
Even low levels of radiation can cause genetic
Continued on Page 9
Speaker visits class
by conference phone
By Julie Freeman
Of the Emerald
Though guest speakers are
common in classrooms, a
University journalism class
recently learned that speakers
don’t always have to be present
to give lectures or accept ques
tions from the audience.
In fact, Joe Williamson,
managing editor of Sunset
magazine, proved that
sometimes a guest speaker is
only a phone call away.
Williamson spoke with and
fielded questons from jour
nalism students in one of Prof.
Ken Metzler’s magazine classes
last week.
“I thought it went very well,”
Metzler says of his recent ex
periment. Although this is the
first time Metzler has used a
conference phone in a large
class, the idea is not as new as it
may seem.
Metzler used the method,
which has been available
through the EMU since 1971, to
call and talk to reporters and
sources in the small reporting
classes he once taught.
He first got the idea of using
telephone lecturers in larger
classes when the journalism
school became accredited in the
magazine field several years
ago, he says. The University has
emphasized magazine jour
nalism for many years but has
had a definite handicap in at
tracting speakers because of its
distance from major centers of
the magazine industry.
The telephone is an ideal way
of bringing speakers to the
classroom if they are unable to
visit in person, Metzler says..
Because of the apparent suc
cess of the telephone lecture,
Metzler plans to have former
students and well-known pro
fessionals in the industry speak
to his classes using this method.
Phone lectures are not
restricted to the journalism
school, however. The EMU
pays all rental costs of the
telephone unit needed for the
lectures and checks it out free of
cost to any department in
terested in using it. The only ex
pense to the user is the normal
cost of the telephone call.
The unit works like a regular
telephone amplifier. Two
remote microphones enable the
audience to talk to the lecturer,
while the moderator, who con
trols the unit, has a separate
microphone. A phone jack is
the only necessary classroom
equipment.
While the advantages of this
method seem clear, there is vir
tually no demand for the
machine, says Virginia Ander
son, University scheduling
officer.
“I think the main problem is
that most people don’t know we
have it (the telephone unit)
available,” she says.
“I thought it was just as
valuable as having the person
actually there,” says Nancy
Nielson, a senior in Metzler’s
magazine class.