Fighting the System: Kevin Rollins Interviews Jim Turner

Kevin Rollins: To start off, you were a Raider Nader(sic) Are you still a Raider Naider?

Jim Turner: Nader's Raider.

Nader's Raider.

I say I was the first Nader's Rader, Ralph says I was one of the first. My argument is that I came in March and the others that year came in June. And I was also a Nader's Raider for Gore. I helped organize Nader's Raiders for Gore.

I've heard about that.

Because it did not seem to me that in the philosophical and activist base that Nader was articulating, that running for president fit. I mean its kind of an odd argument to say, "whoever becomes president is going to be screwed by the system, the system's going to screw you out of shape and make all bad things happen, therefore, elect me." I mean, that doesn't track. The analysis is, that there's something wrong with the job. There's something wrong with the position. And the problem we're dealing with in the larger social context is how to make the position function more effectively. That's what I read the Nader analysis to be. But the idea that you could jump into that position even as Ralph Nader and do anything that would be that much different from anybody else didn't wash with me and I didn't see that.

So you're significantly Pro-Gore? Did you think that Gore was the best choice?

Not significantly, I thought Gore was a better choice all the way around. But that's within that very narrow confines of what the options are.

You wouldn't say Gore is utopia?

Not at all. I've had my own battles with Gore, not exactly battles, but I was on the wrong side with Gore on a number of things all along. He and Nader share one very interesting characteristic and that is that they believe that for every problem, there's a technological fix. I just don't think that works. I think technology comes as a mixture of problems and solutions. So every time you get a solution from technology, you get a new problem. You just can't fix things with technology. And Gore really believes that you can.

But you thought he was better than Bush?

Better than Bush.

What was wrong with Bush? As if I don't know...

Let me start from a different angle. What I think is going on in the country is that there is and there has been for a long time perhaps all of American History a strong effort to empower individuals. The idea is that individuals running at the fullest capacities will generate the things that make life worthwhile, valuable, solve problems, create a better world, all of that kind of stuff. Most of the institutions that we've generated tend to want to mediate the individual tendencies to be idiosyncratic and creative and dynamic and all of that. I believe that the institutions perform a very valuable function in keeping people away from the truly bad things. But more than that I don't think they can do.

Institutions can't move people toward the truly good things. People will move themselves towards the truly good things. Whatever they are, is going to be a big surprise

The argument is shades of gray?

From a regulatory point of view, from an organizational point of view we tend to divide everything into "yes" and "no" in our culture, with big lines. The FDA believes there are two kinds of things in the world: those that are good for everyone, and safe for everyone, and all those things which are bad for everyone, and unsafe for everyone. And those are the only two kinds of things that exist. And that's just not the way the world is.

That's our whole culture -- either this is it, or this is it. There's an old joke in grade school, do you walk to school or carry your lunch?

They're not mutually exclusive?

No not at all. Most things aren't mutually exclusive.

You end up with, in the case of the FDA, you've got all this stuff that is gray, as you were saying, which is neither bad for everybody, nor good for everybody. And they say that they have to treat it all as if its bad for everybody. That's what they do.

The question I was going to ask you... I used to take Seldane for my allergies, but they banned it because certain people had heart complications with the heart medicine and it was killing them. It didn't kill me, I wasn't taking heart medication, but they banned it throughout the market. And so I'm deprived of it...

800,000 people took it. 25 people, maybe, died because of it.

Right.

My idea is information. Consumers are what drive this society. Consumers are, in my view, to economics what voters are to politics and when they vote with their dollars everyday, they shape the society. And when Adam Smith wrote about the free-market, he said "consumption is the sole purpose of all production."

So you put your different choices out there and people bought as consumers, and that's what the driving force was. In fact, consumer behavior defines this society more than any other collective behavior.

So, in 1970, here comes the birth control pill and we're battling to get what we called the "patient packet insert" included on pharmaceutical products. And the first one that was ever done was the birth control pill. We had petitioned the FDA and we had 950-word patient package insert that we wanted to put in. Their position was, and the pharmaceutical industry's position was [that] all this information was too scary and it will get people upset and they won't use it, because they will read it and they'll think it will harm them, when really it isn't.

The consumer is stupid...

Yeah, the consumer is stupid. That's the basic argument. So, we fought and fought and fought, and ultimately, they ended up with a 104-word patient package insert. That was the beginning of the patient package insert world. And one of the things it said was two women out of a hundred who take the birth control pill will suffer blood-clotting damage requiring hospitalization.

So, my thought was, if you could refine that, I'll bet you, you could find which 25 of that one hundred had a 99 percent chance of including the two. So therefore you could divide the information... on the basis of family history, on physical checkups, their own health history. On the basis of that you can say, these 25 out of a hundred are the ones 99 percent likely to include the two that are going to end up with blood-clotting damage. And the other 75 percent, have virtually no likelihood of being damaged. And therefore you would get two really good policy results. One is, all these people can use it safely, and all these people over here could stay away from it.

That would be people choosing, they would make their choices on the basis of information. Now the way they choose is on risk-adverse or risk-taking. People who are willing to take a risk, will take the risk, and people who are risk adverse, won't. But you have no idea whether the risk takers are in the group that isn't taking a risk in fact, even though they're willing to. [Or] Whether the people are risk adverse, actually don't have any risk. So you screw up the use of birth control pills -- you screw up the people who are going to be harmed, you screw up the people who could take it and have no problem. And the whole result is because there's not enough information out there.

So why didn't I like George Bush? Because George Bush is a guy who believes that "if I like it, I have the right to put full power of the government behind it and force people to do it." Whatever it is that I like. And that's the way he sees the world. And he's got good guys and bad guys. If you're a bad guy, he has the right to throw everything he has in the government against you and if you're a good guy he has the right to throw everything in the government for you.

How would you categorize your political beliefs?

Correct!

Would you say you're a libertarian, an authoritarian, a liberal or a conservative?

Actually, I'm a Democrat. I was born a Democrat. I didn't see any reason to change. Now I keep telling the Democrats why they don't get the right ideas.

I"m not partial to isms or arians, or whatever they are. Its interesting because when I look at the ideas that I think make sense, I find people all over the political spectrum that hold them. I happen to be very, very pro-Keynes. And pro-Hayek. And I don't quite understand why everyone is arguing about these two guys because, if you took Hayek with his ideas and put him into the offices that Keynes held when he made up his ideas, I don't think he'd have come out much differently. My argument being that Keynes, the Keynes ideas, which everyone abhors in one sense now, were born out of necessity of actually running government programs. That's where it came from. He wasn't sitting in some academic tower, ruminating on what to do. He said, "shit, the country's going down the tubes, the government has a role to play, what role can it play, ah, if it does this, this, and this, the government will help the economy. He doesn't think this is a good thing, or a right thing, or the correct thing, or the ideal thing, or any. He just said, "Look, I'm in this job, the government can help make things better, here's how it can do it. This is what we do."

He was in the job when he made this stuff up. Hayek was thinking abstractly in a university. I love his stuff. I don't know how anybody believes he's a conservative. But they do.

I was at the NTU convention last week and John Fund made an excellent comment that too often people pay attention to personalities and not to ideas. We get into a conflict between Hayek and Keynes and we forget about what it is they are actually talking about and we just see them as adversaries. You're either aligned with one or the other.

Yeah, and I think that just doesn't make sense. Hayek attacked concentrated power. He attacked it in government, he attacked it in labor and he attacked it in corporations. Where's the current conservative movement attacking corporations?

Let's just take an exampleThe right to life community. They don't like abortions. But there are a humongous number of spontaneous terminations of pregnancies due to industrial chemicals in the air, the water and the food. I mean, way more than there are conscious abortions by individual women. Why isn't the right-to-life community out there attacking that as well.
All I'm saying is there are subtle ideas about the individual and individual rights. And the way we've analysed it is that what you have is, rather than a left-right spectrum, you have a matrix. Left-Right-Order-Free and what you end up with is, the order-right and the order-left get together and figure out how to limit the individual. The order-left wants to limit their economic independence and the order-right wants to limit their personal lives. And they get together and say how much can we agree that we are going to limit each of those. The Free Left and the Free Right are sitting around not terribly interested in government because they're running around doing other stuff. If they could start thinking through and creating policies, we might have a little more of a political debate in this country.

Do you feel that we're better off with the FDA? or not? Would we be better off with none at all?

The regulatory model... its a tricky problem. The FDA as an institution... at best is a 19th century institution, or 18th century institution in terms of its thought. And it is a yes-no, command and control type institution. I think we are better off to have the FDA. But, just like I think its better that we have a switch in the kitchen that turns the light on and off. But, it would also be very good if they recognized that's what they're doing. They're regulating 35% of the economy right now. And they have a very small budget and very unclear guidelines for what they're doing, so they're constantly giving you yes-no's on all kinds of stuff that doesn't require yes-no. That's a mistake.



On the other hand, having them there to make sure, that all the bad things that are bad for everybody are gone and that all the good things that are good for everybody are OK, that's a good thing. What we should do, though, is give them a much stronger informational role to play. Much more information in the gray areas, where they can say on your allergy medicine, "This thing has posed serious problems to people, the best information we have is that these are the people whom it poses serious problems." I don't know where I would draw the line. It seems to me that 25 alleged deaths against 800,000 users is pretty small. And one of the things the FDA does is it constantly skews all of its analysis toward what would be the dangers that are directly attributed to something without laying out the dangers that happen by not having the thing available. So we have 25 deaths... we don't know how many of those 800,000 died from the other drug you're going to have to take now because you didn't take that one. We don't know how many people in this instance, of the 800,000 are going to have some kind of a problem as a direct result of not having access to that drug.

Right now, we have 100,000 deaths in hospitals a year by people using drugs approved by the FDA, in the manner the FDA says they should be used. 100,000 deaths from that. How many of those 800,000 people are dying in ways that are not attributable to the drug, but are attributed to something that would not be there if the drug was there. I don't know if there were any, but we don't know that, because FDA hasn't looked at that... and they never do, they never look at that.

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We have massive amounts of our social structure under the control of multi-national corporations. In my view, multi-national corporations operate in the society almost identically to the way governments operate. They are creatures of government in the sense that they have to be chartered by government or they wouldn't be there. They collect and accumulate and dispense resources, just the way government does. The piece that they charge for their activities, that's over the top of straight costs of production, the piece that's over the top which is basically the retained earnings, that's basically a tax. For all intensive purposes, the way things happen now, about 15 percent of the money a corporation takes in after taxes that goes to stockholders, the rest is retained earnings by management that they use for their own activities. Those for all intensive purposes are a tax. They should be treated as a tax, they should be looked at like a tax.

I'm not saying get rid of the 15 percent that's profit. That doesn't bother me nearly as much as this 65% of the corporate dollar that flows into retained earnings to be used to shape the culture that we live in. That is functional tax money. That's where we should be looking. If you want to keep fighting government taxes that's fine. I think you could get rid of all government taxes and still have a huge drain on society because of what corporations are doing and the way they manage the excess money that's outside of what they need for their purposes.

That's an argument I have with my libertarian friends, that corporations are often as inefficient, bureaucratic, and authoritarian as the government?

I believe they are. I would even go a tiny step further that they are in fact governments. They are operating just as if they were governments. In Britain there are more people who are retained as security for corporations, than there are in all the police forces there are in Britain. I think its getting close to that here in the US. I mean a security function is carried out by these guys, the reason they have the security function is because they're like governments. I mean, their leaders can be kidnapped or assassinated, why because they're operating like governments. They have huge, huge areas of responsibility they're carrying out.

How do we get away from that? Is there a better option

Understand, that most economic activity in this country, 60 percent of it, is small business which is not these things I'm talking about. I think that [multi-national corporations] are a drain on society, very much the way the government is a drain on society, in the function of being a drain. There are things that both do, that are very valuable and we need to preserve. But, they're bloated way beyond what they should be.

And what's happened, another reason I wasn't for Bush, what's happened is, that the idea of cutting government has been... has bypassed the military. And the result is, essentially, that one of the two largest sources of money going from the public into the coffers of the government is untouched, the other one is the entitlements, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. One of the things that happens, you just go watch, You take a bunch of domestic money, and cut it, and you raise the military money, you will find, not necessarily program for program, but for idea for idea, you'll find that the stuff you cut out over here, ends up over here. So you have all kinds of things going through the military, that were things that used to go through the domestic budget.

And they're over here in the military. The universities just line up like crazy, they go up to the office of naval research and get grants to do all kinds of weird stuff.

And the other place that's getting lots of money now is NIH. Chiffon margerine, invented by the NIH. Gatorade, invented by the NIH, there are hundreds of products invented by the NIH. Just given to the corporations. Just given away. Billions of dollars have been made off of money the government has put into things people have taken and used and never reimbursed the government for in any way, shape or form. Its just crazy.

How do we get out of that situation?

My point is to redefine the whole debate and understand that small businesses, consumers, stockholders, and labor are all on one side and on the other side are these large concentrated institutions, which include government, major corporations, military, international organizations. You recognize that this group is made up of individuals, the group of consumers and stockholders, these are individuals that need to be enfranchised and what we need to do is to create, in relation to major corporations, the very same kinds of protections on the individual that exist against government. In other words, we have to take in principle, conceptually, take our entire bill of rights and have it apply to corporate behaviors. So that, the first amendment applies. So if you're a whistleblower, you have a right, and you get up and say this corporations screwing everybody, whatever, "they're putting sand in the brakes," or whatever they're doing. You have a right to do that. You can't be fired if you did that.

The other thing I would do is to enfranchise and protect the constituents of those institutions. And another thing is to create an independent judiciary inside those corporations. You take the ombudsman movement that's developing, you reinforce it and you create an independent judiciary internally, so that there's a General Motors court. And what you do if you're Ralph Nader, instead of giving it to the press, you file a petition at the General Motors court and say, "These guys are making cars that are killing people." Or whatever your charge is and the court says yes or no. Then the decision of that court is appealable into the court system if it doesn't decide in a way that makes sense. And then the courts look over and say, "well, that's reasonable, it could have gone either way and they went for General Motors." And they went for General Motors 99 out of 100 times...

Its sort-of institutionalized arbitration...

Its taking, like in many industries now, they're taking arbitration or mediation programs. All of those are this impulse to get this independent decision-making framework that will review what they're doing so that somebody can say, "really you've gotta hold yourself accountable."

Incidentally, I think this is all natural law I think that when the founders of the United States came up with the idea of a government that had three equal branches, an administartive, a judicial and a legislative, they are talking about functions that exist in a situation that have to be dealt with . Anything that's going to work has to have those functions. Actually, in a way its the body, mind, spirt presentation only on a social basis. Its saying look we've got to do some thinking, we're motivating ourselves around, and we have to have some sort of ethical principles, values.


We're not necessarily bringing in government, we're bringing in concepts we have from government...

That preceded government. That we have organized the government to reflect.

The natural divisions. Its a very ecological...

Holistic, ecological. I argue that the American Revolution was truly a revolution. It was a 180 degree shift. Before the American revolution everybody thought power came from God, through the king and flowed downward. After the American revolution, we demonstrated that power starts with the individual and flows upward. Nobody, not the king, not the dictator, not Hitler, not anyone is able to function at the top of this pyramid without the bottom supporting it. And if it doesn't, they fall apart. The corporations are the same way. And corporations there's no oversight of any kind. There's no internal oversight. They're just running around... if they hit these numbers, man, they're great.

And they have the power so that government doesn't necessarily stop them.

I think they have more power than government. Certainly collectively they do.

What are the major boundaries to health choice.

The major barriers are the sense that people are stupid. And then the next major barrier is the notion the system is so expensive. Well, one of the reasons it is expensive, is because they treat everybody like they're stupid. If they treated people like they're smart and they actually gave them the opportunity to match their resources to their desires and their needs, they would be a lot better off. The other side of that coin is that there's a lot of very good solid specialized medicine that exists that people really need to know how to access and be a part of. But you can't have it be a situation where that's all there is. There's got to be access to all kinds of things which are less expensive and many people feel work better for them. And there is a lot of evidence there that suggests that they need to have access to those choices.

The courts are working hard now to open up choice. The FDA is working hard to close it down. The third party payer stuff is closing it down. Third party payers don't want to have choice. Multiplicity apparently makes it harder for them to manage. They've got to figure out what this one's doing and that one's doing rather than it be sort of a box that everybody gets. Its a constant problem with everything we do in this country -- this issue of the individual versus the whole. Because somewhere there's a balance. Because you can't have in this country close to 300 million people or 6 billion people worldwide all going in a different direction. I don't think they would go in a different direction. They would cluster in various ways. But it terrifies the people who run the power centers of the culture to think that everybody doesn't fit into four or five categories that they can manage. You know, they can account for them, they can underwrite them, they can predict, and so forth, its terrifying to people who are running large institutions to believe that all the people that are affected by their institution might be affected differently. So they just kind of close that down.

It seems that this kind of attitude filters down to the people. A couple years ago, my grandfather was told that he should have open heart surgery, that he had clogged arteries, but he found out about chelation therapy, and he decided to do that instead, and several years of that and his heart works fine and he's very healthy. And he had neighbors and friends of his saying, "Oh, you're a 'short-timer'... you're going to die if you don't have the surgery. They had all bought into this idea. It seems that consumers often fuel these myths...

Well individuals do. This is interesting, because first of all, in spite of the fact that people have a tendency to react the way your grandfather's friends did, there are millions of people buying outside of the health care system right now. They are buying things that are not part of the health care system, they are paying cash for them, they are paying their own money, not third-party payer money. Its a huge revolution. The docs are very upset about it, they want to close it down and say its a bad thing.

But one of the things to notice, when you have a person like your grandfather, when you have clogged arteries and decide to go to chelation. I believe that the way he will be treated by people with a problem like his will be different than people who don't have that problem. And I would venture to say that most of the quotations that you just made about, "you're crazy, you're going to go to hell, you're going to die" are by people who are not facing the same choices he's facing. Now people who face the same questions he's facing, may choose not to do what he's doing, but they will want to know everything about what he's doing. They'll say "what is it, how does it work, maybe I should talk to the guy" There are people all over this country who are making heartfelt agonizing decisions about what to do about their healthcare and they will often come down on the side of the established order after thinking about it carefully. But they will generally not so denigrative of the people making other choices because they have some understanding of what the agony of choice is about. Lots of kibbitzers will stand on the side and will just throw eggs, why are you doing that. But the last laugh is, your grandfather's fine and probably some of those other people who chose to go the other way aren't around any more.