Charity work is good; but politics addresses root causes
Nader speaks to college students about the great paradox of Generation X, the non-voting, self-absorbed, bottom-line crowd - which just happens to do more community service than any in the history of the country. They may be apolitical, but they are
not apathetic. They go, almost automatically, to hospitals and soup kitchens, to ghetto classrooms, to the lonely and afraid in old people’s homes. Nader tells them, after praising their phenomenal good deeds: “You burn yourselves out doing charitable
work. But if you get into politics and go to the cause of these problems, you will have a just society where you don’t need so much charitable work.“
Nader says they are right to rail against global sweatshops and rain forest abuse - two topics never
raised by the big guys. Nader says Bush & Gore both avoid college campuses. ”They like elementary and high schools better - good photo ops and less danger of blind-siding questions and pickets.“
Source: Mary McGrory editorial, Boston Globe, p. A15
Oct 14, 2000
Attack corporate welfare kings, not poor welfare queens
While President Clinton and the Congress have gutted the welfare system for poor people, no such top-down agenda has emerged for corporate welfare recipients. The savage demagoguery directed against imaginary “welfare queens” has never been matched with
parallel denunciations of gluttonous corporate welfare kings.
While the minimal government benefits still afforded the poor are provided only to the most impoverished, no such “means testing” is applied to corporate welfare beneficiaries. By and large
the bigger the company, the more it extracts in government supports.
The new welfare law sets strict time limits for how long poor people can receive government supports, but no such time limitations attach to government handouts to big business.
The welfare law denies benefits even to legal immigrants; corporate welfare, by contrast, is far more non-discriminating-Uncle Sam subsidizes foreign corporations as well as domestic businesses., including millions to Canadian mining companies.
Source: Cutting Corporate Welfare, p. 23-25
Oct 9, 2000
Limit executive compensation to 30-to-1 over lowest pay
Limits on Executive Compensation in Government-Supported Corporations: Where the government is conferring substantial, voluntarily received benefits on corporations,
it could reasonably limit the scope of beneficiaries to those who do not engage in particular sorts of socially undesirable behavior. One such behavior is excessive executive compensation, which heightens income and wealth inequalities,
and tears at the nation’s social fabric. Government subsidies, including tax expenditures, could be denied to corporations whose executives receive more than a predetermined level of compensation,
say those whose ratio of executive-to-lowest-paid-employee compensation is more than a certain amount, perhaps 30-to-1.
Source: Cutting Corporate Welfare, p.120
Oct 9, 2000
Domestic Marshall Plan to abolish poverty
He calls for a domestic “Marshall Plan to abolish poverty and the class/race system”; a public works project to rebuild America’s cities; a big affordable housing program, and an effort to expand mass transit.
He would end the so-called war on drugs and instead focus on treatment and rehabilitation.
Source: Scot Lehigh, Boston Globe, page D1
Oct 8, 2000
Democracy can’t co-exist with gross income inequality
In 1941, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis made a prescient observation when he wrote: “We can have a democratic society or we can have the concentration of great wealth in the hands of the few. We cannot have both.” Today, that concentration of
wealth and its political power has reached stunning intensities. In large companies, people who work in the same enterprise are now earning $1 for every $416 that the CEO takes away. In 1940, it was $1 for every $12. Today the financial wealth of the
top 1% of households exceeds the combined wealth of the bottom 95% of American households. Earlier this year Bill Gates’ wealth was equal to the combined wealth of the poorest 120 million Americans. Whatever this enormous imbalance says about the Great
software imitator from Redmond, Washington, it means that about tens of millions of Americans, who work year after year, decade after decade, are nearly broke. What democracy worth its salt would have led to this profound inequity?
Source: Nomination Acceptance Speech
Jun 25, 2000
Retail malls siphon off business from central cities
On New Haven’s proposed $500 million Long Wharf mall: “This is welfare for the rich on the backs of the poor and middle class. The attention of the mayor should be how to create a more cohesive, self-sustaining, prosperous central city. You don’t
do that by siphoning off retail dollars to a nearby massive mall. Big businesses are on a collision course with American democracy, and the American democracy is losing.”
Source: New Haven Register, page a3,a6
May 18, 2000
Homelessness is peaking despite good economy
[Instead of economic statistics, ] let’s look at the people indicators. We have homelessness. Affordable housing levels are at a peak in terms of not being met even though Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are
reporting record profits. And then the facilities, the schools, the clinics, the public works that serve ordinary Americans aren’t being repaired. If you take people indicators, there’s quite a different economy.
Source: Interview on ‘Meet the Press’
May 7, 2000
Big business lobbying subordinates democracy
The unconstrained behavior of big business is subordinating our democracy to the control of a corporate plutocracy that knows few self-imposed limits to the spread of its power to all sectors of our society.
Moving on all fronts to advance narrow profit motives at the expense of civic values, large corporate lobbies have produced a commanding, multi-faceted and powerful juggernaut. They flood public elections with
cash, and they use their media conglomerates to exclude, divert, or propagandize. They brandish their willingness to close factories here and open them abroad if workers do not bend to their demands. By their control in
Congress, they keep the federal cops off the corporate crime, fraud, and abuse beats. They imperiously demand and get a wide array of privileges and immunities: tax escapes, enormous corporate welfare subsidies, federal giveaways, and bailouts.
Source: Green Party Announcement Speech
Feb 21, 2000
Training & earned income credits are corporate subsidies
Q: Is the earned income credit -- which is now around $30 billion -- a subsidy for employers or employees that have this selfish disregard for the public interest?
A: Well it certainly took the steam off the drive for raising the minimum wage
or at least adjusting it for inflation -- the earned income credit. Now it’s become very complex and embroiled in Congressional politics. But the job training programs were more a subsidy to corporations who really didn’t create many jobs with
all these billions of taxpayer dollars it received over the last 25 years. Corporate Welfare is alive and well. The Corporate Welfare programs in the federal government are double the poverty welfare programs -- if you look at tax
expenditures and all the direct subsidies and giveaways and bailouts and loan guarantees, etc. That should be a major agenda.
Source: National Public Radio, interview by Diane Rehm
Apr 3, 1996
Ralph Nader on Consumer Rights
Help for ordinary people should replace corporate welfare
Ralph Nader railed against big business from the heart of corporate America yesterday. Nader criticized New York City for offering multimillion-dollar tax breaks and other incentives to persuade the New York Stock Exchange to stay in Manhattan. “Here is
this bastion of global capitalism on welfare. It will take hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars in order to build them a new building. At the same time, hundreds of neighborhoods are suffering from inadequate funding of their vital needs.”
Source: Jayson Blair, NY Times
Sep 1, 2000
Address corporate crimes piecemeal AND by revoking charters
Q: What are your views on Richard Grossman of the Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy? He criticizes the piecemeal, one-by-one approach of addressing corporate crimes and advocates revoking their charters to do business whenever they harm the
common good. A: I agree with both. I think you’ve got to do the retail law enforcement, which of course not only helps people immediately who are being harmed or cheated by these criminal violations or fraudulent behavior, but it informs people.
Every time there’s a prosecution, every time there’s law enforcement, it informs people of the misdeeds of these corporations. On the other hand, you’ve got to go to the basic charter that state governments and in some respects the federal government
provides to create these corporations and the conditioning of proper corporate behavior historically by these charters when they were given by legislatures in various states in the early part of the nineteenth century has been forgotten.
Source: Alternative Radio interview with David Barsamian
Feb 23, 2000
Stop giving corporations the same rights as people
Q:Are you advocating reform, tinkering with the system, or would you support a fundamental overhaul?
A:When you have fundamental problems you’ve got to have fundamental overhauls. Right now corporations are treated as persons, just like flesh-and-blood
individuals. A corporation, an artificial legal entity, [is treated] as a person having all the rights under our Constitution. It’s absurd. You can’t have equality under the law with General Motors and John and Jane Doe having the same rights, when
General Motors has all kinds of privileges and immunities. They can shift costs differently. They can create their own parent, i.e., a holding company. They can sequester assets and limit liability by setting up a corporation. They can move abroad in
order to bring government to its knees. Can you imagine a million workers getting together and saying to the US government, If you don’t give us a significant pay raise & reduce our taxes we’re going to move abroad? A corporation does that all the time.
Source: Alternative Radio, interview by David Barsamian
Dec 9, 1995
Ralph Nader on Labor
Living wage spreads economic expansion to reach all areas
Q. We have double-digit unemployment [here in Fresno CA]. How can we get an economic expansion that touches all areas?
A. There are a lot of answers to that. One is that California has one of the highest child poverty rates in the US. In 1980 it
was 15% of the children growing up in deep poverty. It is now 25%. That is unconscionable. If you add a near-poverty category, it goes up to 46%. Why?
The economy is booming in California, but the wealthy are taking most of the gains. So we have to
ask ourselves, what do we do?
A living wage. One-third of the nation’s work force does not work for a living wage.
Universal health insurance.
Deal with pesticides, herbicides, contaminated drinking water, hovels instead of affordable, decent
housing.
Where do we get the money for that? How about taking it from the corporate subsidies, giveaways, handouts, & bailouts and bringing it back into the neighborhoods and communities where that public investment is so important.
Source: John Ellis, The Fresno (CA) Bee
Oct 22, 2000
Repeal Taft-Hartley; strengthen unions
As for the ideas that inform that rhetoric, Nader calls for full public financing of all elections and the repeal of Taft-Hartley, which limits labor’s tactics and power, to spread and strengthen unions. He would demand equal credit, equal insurance,
and equal mortgage lending from banks and corporations. He favors a single-payer universal health care system like Canada’s.
Source: Scot Lehigh, Boston Globe, page D1
Oct 8, 2000
Unions struggle even in heart of union country
If you can’t win a strike in Detroit, that shows you totally rigged the labor laws are in favor of big companies.
Source: Edwin Chen, LA Times
Sep 5, 2000
Vote for a union supporter, not against Republicans
Appearing at a union annual convention, Nader offered himself as a strong alternative to Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore. He promised to protect labor rights, fight for a higher minimum wage and push for universal health care. “Democrats
have the support of most unions without getting anything back. All they get is the phrase, ‘You’d better support us because the Republicans are terrible.”’
Source: AP Story, NY Times
Aug 29, 2000
Message to Democrats: Don’t take labor for granted
Ralph Nader was on a tear, railing against chief executives’ salaries, the corporate-dominated campaign finance system and cuts in factory inspections. Several of the steelworkers seated around him were
nodding, and then nodding again, in silent approval. “You’re the guys who work hard. You’re the guys who pay the taxes. You’re the guys who fight the wars, and then they say, ‘Tough. We’re closing the
factory. It’s globalization.’ And then they use factories overseas where dictators repress the wages to compete against you. When you’re taken for granted, you’re taken. When organized labor can say to these
candidates, ‘You’re not going to take us for granted anymore, we have an alternative and the alternative is Nader and the Green Party,’ then they’ll start calling.“
Source: Steven Greenhouse, New York Times
Jul 23, 2000
Raise the minimum wage immediately
There is an immediate need to raise the minimum wage. In March of 1998, California’s minimum wage was $5.75 per hour, yielding $11,960 in gross annual income.
The California minimum wage, although higher than the national minimum, remains 26% less in spending power than the minimum wage in effect in 1968.
Source: Statement on Child Poverty
Jun 26, 2000
Functional wages are falling despite economic boom
There are about 47 million workers, over one-third of the workforce, making less than $10 per hour, many at $5.25, $6.00, $7.00, with no or few benefits. The majority of workers still, after ten years of overall economic growth, make less today, in
inflation adjusted dollars, and work 160 hours longer per year than workers did in 1973! Moreover, today’s workers have to spend more to get to work and commute longer distances. They pay more for what were family functions that were once free or
inexpensive. A record number of people are without health insurance. $6.2 trillion in consumer indebtedness to supplement living wages, and inadequate crumbling public works that serve the mass populace, from schools, health clinics, mass transits,
drinking water systems and other services. The lower unemployment rate is masked by low wages and millions of part-time laborers who are registered as employed if they work 21 hours a week and cannot get a full-time job.
Source: Nomination Acceptance Speech
Jun 25, 2000
Top CEOs make 415 times entry wages
Give them [corporations] too much power and they’ll run roughshod over you. No shame, no sense of boundary. Everything’s for sale.. Giant corporations have hijacked our democracy, have no allegiance to our country or communities, and are
increasingly controlling our government, media, childhood. These top CEOs are making 415 times the entry wage in their own company. You know what it was in 1940? 12. 1980? 40. Now, 415.
Source: George Skelton, LA Times
Feb 23, 2000
Limit executive salaries & perks
Shareholders, who are the owners of companies, should not have their assets wasted or worker morale victimized by executives who give themselves huge salaries, bonuses, greenmail, and golden
parachutes, self-perpetuating boards of directors, and a stifling of the proxy voting system to block shareholder voting reforms.
Source: The Concord Principles, An Agenda for a New Democracy, # 9
Feb 21, 2000
Student pressure can help oppressed textile workers abroad
Students [are starting to join] with labor and religious groups in the anti-sweatshop, anti-child-labor movement. Students will focus on large retailers, such as Wal-Mart, that buy merchandise from Third World nations that grind their workers to the
ground. Students have pressured retailers on campus and off to publicly disclose the factory names and addresses. Consumer dollars can speak power and truth. The alternative is to keep allowing the abuses that lead to obscene profits for corporations.
Source: “In the Public Interest” newspaper column
Aug 17, 1999
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