TIME.com: 10 Questions for Ralph Nader -- August 5, 2002

Did you think there was this much corporate corruption?
No. And isn't it saying something that it exceeded my anticipation? It is impossible to exaggerate the supermarket of crime. It's greed on steroids.

Why didn't we know about it all sooner?
What amazes me is that there are thousands of people who could have been whistle-blowers, from the boards of directors to corporate insiders to the accounting firms to the lawyers working for these firms to the credit-rating agencies. All these people! Would a despotic dictatorship have been more efficient in silencing them and producing the perverse incentives for them all to keep quiet? The system is so efficient that there's total silence. I mean, the Soviet Union had enough dissidents to fill Gulags.