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Ralph Nader on Welfare & Poverty
2004 Reform nominee; 2000 Green Candidate for President
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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 Homelessness
Severe shortage in affordable housing
High on the agenda of the advocates for the homeless-whose organization is formally known as Health Care for the Homeless (HCH) - is the closing of the enormous gap in the supply of affordable housing.
The nation is five to six million units short of the demand for the barest affordable housing. This fact places heavy pressure on the effort to find decent shelter for low and moderate income families.
Source: In the Public Interest, "Tax Cuts Homeless Problems Grow"
Jun 3, 2003
14M families spend half of their income on housing
Fourteen million families spend more than half of their entire income on housing much of it crowded and substandard, leaving little for other necessities such as food, clothing and medical care.
Any payout for housing beyond that often leads to serious economic problems which push families into bankruptcy and homelessness - not to mention the fact that many forgo proper nutrition and medical care in an attempt to keep their homes.
Source: In the Public Interest, "Tax Cuts Homeless Problems Grow"
Jun 3, 2003
1.35 million children are homeless
Lack of a stable place to live is traumatic for adults, but for children the experience is particularly cruel. More than 1.35 million children are homeless at some point each year.
They exist in shelters, cars, parks or pushed into already badly overcrowded quarters. The homeless life disrupts their education, exposes them to communicable diseases, malnutrition, depression and drug addictions.
Source: In the Public Interest, "Tax Cuts Homeless Problems Grow"
Jun 3, 2003