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John Edwards on Corporations2004 Democratic Nominee for Vice President; Former Jr Senator (NC) |
A: That’s just right-wing rhetoric. There is nothing angry about what I’m talking about. What I want to do is make the promise of America available to everybody. And I do think there are huge obstacles to making that happen. Just take health care as an example. I do believe that the drug company and insurance companies lobbies stand as an obstacle to what we need to do. That doesn’t mean all corporations are bad. Of course there are great corporate citizens in this country. But these entrenched moneyed interests, that have been in Washington lobbying for a very long time, have a reason, an incentive to keep the system exactly the way it is. And unless we’re able to get through that, America can’t get what it needs.
If you look at it from a distance, we have economic growth in America; we still do. But almost th entirety of that economic growth is with the very wealthiest Americans and the biggest multinational corporations.
You ask any middle class family in America, and they will tell you they do not feel financially secure. They’re worried about their job; they’re worried about paying for health care; they’re worried about how they’re going to send their kids to college; they’re worried about, in many cases, their home being foreclosed on.
The great moral test that all of us have as Americans, which is to make certain that our children have a better life than we have. This is the great challenge that we’re facing in this election. Are we going to do what our parents and our grandparents did, who worked to ensure that we would have a better life?
A: That is not what I would do. I think that there have been an awful lot of corporate tax loopholes that have been created over a period of decades now. In fact, there is actually a tax incentive today for American companies that are sending jobs overseas. I think that needs to be stopped. That loophole needs to be closed.
Q: Some economists say that this very high US corporate tax rate, one of the highest in the world, is really, in the end, hurting American workers because it simply encourages these companies to go overseas where the tax structure is a lot lower.
A: Well, I think what we have actually done, bot through our trade laws and our tax laws, is incentivize companies to go overseas. I think those incentives need to be changed, both in our trade structure and in our tax structure. We need to be pay more attention to the impact on middle class families.
A: This whole issue of balance--if you look at what’s happened--and this didn’t just happen under George Bush; this has been going on for a decade and a half now--in my hometown, the mill that my father worked in, and the people that I grew up with--that mill’s closed now. The jobs are gone. The same thing has happened in Newton, Iowa, and all across this state.
I met a man a few years ago, who talked about having to look his child in the eye and explain why her daddy, who had worked in that mill his entire life, that factory, had lost his job and hadn’t done anything wrong, because his child did not understand.
American trade policy is catering to the interests of big corporate America. It has been for a decade and a half. And we desperately need a president of the United States who, instead of asking, is this going to help corporate profits--is this actually going to stand up for American workers and American jobs.
A: I think we have an enormous struggle to try to restore the power in the country and the democracy back to the American people and take it away from big corporate interests, et cetera, who’ve taken over the democracy.
EDWARDS: Yeah, I was wrong. I was wrong and you were right Chris. I should not have voted for that bankruptcy bill. It was a bad, bad piece of legislation. I think any of us who voted for it were wrong to have voted for it. I think there were some good provisions in it but I think on the whole when you look it at it actually did damage to low income families and working families in this country.
The reporter quotes former Labor Secretary Robert Reich: “Rhetorically, if you’re calling Edwards an economic populist, it’s true he cares a lot about the poor,” says Reich (who is hardly radical, though he himself cared too much about the poor to stay for Clinton’s 2nd term). “He evinces a lot of concern for the middle class and middle-class anxieties. But he’s not in any way attacking the rich or corporations. He is not explaining one fundamental fact of modern economic life, which is that the very rich have all the money.”
A: I laid out an aggressive plan to get rid of the tax breaks that are available to hedge fund managers. They’re not right, they’re not fair, and they are not available to ordinary Americans.
Q: But working for a hedge fund that has foreclosed on mortgages in Louisiana, is that the kind of image that you want in a presidential campaign?
A: When I found out that there were foreclosures going on in New Orleans, I immediately told people at Fortress that they needed to take action. If you look at what my life has been about, instead of isolating one short period of time, it is very clear I have spent my life fighting for the poor & the disenfranchised.
GRAVEL: Outsourcing is not the problem. What is the problem is our trade agreements that benefit the management and the shareholders.
EDWARDS: This is something I don’t have to read about in a book. I’ve seen it up close. I saw what happen when the mill that my dad worked in all his life, and I worked in myself when I was young, closed and the jobs went somewhere else. It was not just devastating to him & to the community, and the same thing has happened all over America. America’s got to compete. We have to be the best-educated, most innovative workforce on the planet. We also need trade agreements with real environmental and labor standards that the president of the United States is willing to enforce. And we need to eliminate all tax breaks for companies who are taking their jobs overseas and getting a tax break for doing it.
A: I think the financial markets are an important component of trying to figure out what it is we need to do about the fact that we have 47 million people without health care, 37 million people who wake up in poverty every day. They play an enormous role in how money moves in this country. And I believe that we have a responsibility to the people in this country who wake up every day worried about feeding and clothing their children. And I think those people in New York who work in financial markets understand--in some ways, at least--what can be done and can play a significant role in trying to lift people up who are struggling. I am proud of what I’ve been doing for the last few years. You know, I’ve been all over the country, organizing workers into unions and raising the minimum wage, and also working at a poverty center at the University of North Carolina.
FACT CHECK: Edwards made several allegations about what Cheney had done as CEO of Halliburton. We can only give Edwards partial credit for his Halliburton attack, however. He implied that Cheney was in charge of the company when it did business with Libya in violation of US sanctions, but that happened long before Cheney joined the company. Edwards was also slightly off when he said Halliburton paid millions in fines “ while Cheney was CEO.” He meant that it paid fines for matters that took place while Cheney was in charge. And in fact, the SEC announced Aug. 3 that Halliburton will pay $7.5 million to settle a matter that dates back to 1998, when Cheney was CEO.
A: We can have a real impact on the loss of jobs. We can do something to bring jobs back to replace the jobs that we’ve lost. I’ve seen mills close, I’ve seen what it does to communities, I’ve seen what it does to families. We need to close loopholes in our tax code to give breaks to companies that are leaving, give tax breaks to American companies that will keep jobs here.
North Carolina’s product liability statute was not crafted with the best interests of [negligence victims] in mind. For example, it protected a manufacturer from liability if its product had been altered or modified from its intended use. Sta-Rite contended, “If the screws are in place [on the drain cover], it’s not a hazard,“ but they didn’t indicate in their instructions that screws were required,] Sta-Rite had dumped a product on the market without considering its hazards. Underlying this case was Sta-Rite’s corporate indifference. It’s hard to sit there and listen to strangers say, ”Lawsuits like these are what’s wrong with America!“ and then go home to your innocent daughter and her feeding tubes. [The jury awarded $25 million against Sta-Rite].
The trucking industry did indeed take notice of the verdict. Trucking firms in the state of North Carolina were soon placing greater emphasis no driver safety training. Some companies even abandoned the practice of paying drivers by the mile.
Unfortunately, the insurance companies lobbied the Republican state legislature and soon a bill was passed disallowing punitive damage awards against a company as a result of an employee’s actions, unless the particular action was specifically ratified by corporate officers.
Yes, our lawsuit had sent a message, and that message ultimately was: if you don’t like the law, change it. The message to me was: if you can’t help enough people being a lawyer, consider being a lawmaker.
EDWARDS: We ought to have trade agreements that have real protections in them that allow our people here at home to compete. But we also ought to close down loopholes in our tax code that give American companies an incentive to go overseas. In fact, we ought to give tax breaks to American companies that will keep jobs right here in America.
We have to protect the jobs we have. We have to create jobs. And in order to create jobs, we ought to identify those places in America where job losses occurred and say to new business, “If you’ll start there, we’ll give you the seed money with a national venture capital fund”; and second, to existing businesses and industry, “If you’ll locate in an urban area, in an inner city, in a rural area, we will give you incentives to go there.”
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