Ralph Nader's Blog, page 35

Ranking the Infinite Greed, Power and Controls of Giant Corporations

By Ralph Nader

August 6, 2020

The combination of greed and power often spin out of control and challenge the enforceable rule of law and the countervailing force of the organized civic community.

When greed and power are exercised by giant multinational corporations that escape the discipline of the nation-state, the potential for evil becomes infinite in nature. Enough is never enough.

Global giant companies, aided and abetted by their corporate attorneys and accountants, can literally decide how little taxes they are going to pay by shifting profits and expenses among different tax haven countries such as Ireland, Luxembourg, and Panama.

These same companies then proceed to lobby any nation, including most prominently the United States. Congress and the White House are pushed to cut formal tax rates, pack the tax laws with loopholes, and lower further the effective tax rate. The formal top tax rate for billions of company profits is now 21%, while the actual tax rate is lower – much lower for banks, insurance companies, drug companies, and behemoth tech companies like Apple that master tax avoidance.

“Generous” is not a word one can associate either with Apple or it’s avaricious, CEO Tim Cook. One of the first moves Tim Cook made, after replacing legendary Apple Founder, the cancer-stricken innovator Steve Jobs, was to arrange a $378 million, 2011 compensation package for himself and launch the biggest stock buyback in corporate history. Apple, which is worth $1.5 trillion has spent $327 billion since 2013 to buy back 2.5 billion shares of stock. Yet Apple has done little to produce productive investments, remediation of used and very toxic Apple products when discarded, or increase pay for the 350,000 serf-labor workers in China toiling under its merciless contractor Foxconn.

Apple made $104 billion in the last 12 months, puffed up by tax-avoidance, tax cuts and a no tariff deal with Trump on its Chinese imports, yet Tim Cook has rejected pleas to spend a little over $2 billion (deductible) to award a full year’s pay bonus to the 350,000 Foxconn workers who build Apple’s iPhones and iPads.

Apple’s massive stock buybacks have, however, increased the metrics to set compensation levels for Tim Cook and his executive sidekicks. Unfortunately, stock buybacks do little to tamp down excessive prices for Apple products. The massive stock buybacks also send a message that Apple’s management has no other uses for its corporate cash – not for R&D, not for improving the nature and security of its workers’ pensions, not for investing in curtailing the damaging side effects of Apple products on the environment and not for reducing other offloaded damage to society.

Tim Cook and Apple are also stingy, given their vast wealth, with charitable contributions. So stingy that Apple’s bosses do not even come close with the company’s charitable deduction limit of five percent of adjusted gross income. In 2018 Apple gave $125 million to charities. Apple’s net income for 2018 was $59.53 billion – a tiny fraction of one percent!

Recently, the New York Times published articles showing how tiny the executive pay cuts were by the very few executives who announced and declared sympathy for their laid-off and impoverished workers. The media has also been reporting illicit maneuvers developed by corporate attorneys to help chain stores get relief payments that should have gone to legitimate small businesses. (Why isn’t the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) speaking out against this abuse and avarice?)

Replacing some of their greed with generosity could be directed to the estimated $6 billion to $11 billion needed this coming school year to give low-income students full equipment and connectivity to the internet for remote learning during the Covid-19 pandemic restrictions. States and localities need $4 billion to assure the voting process will be fair and that all votes be counted and on time. The Republicans in the Senate are blocking the money needed to guarantee free and fair elections. Four billion dollars for the profit-glutted Silicon Valley giants Facebook, Google, Apple plus Amazon, and Microsoft, is peanuts. These high-tech digital giants could easily contribute the money needed to avert a widely predicted election time disaster and weeks of understaffed counting after November 3rd. Imagine such a show of patriotism from these companies.

Then there are the matters of woefully inadequate supplies, facilities, and training programs to counter the spreading Covid-19 pandemic that is crumbling the economy. These record-setting profitable companies, with soaring stock prices due to their monopolistic powers or consumer-gouging, should return some of Trump’s giveaway tax cuts of 2017 and the burgeoning corporate welfare payments from crony-capitalistic Washington, D.C. to help their afflicted or vulnerable fellow Americans. Many of these people are their own workers, friends, and relatives.

Economists should develop a “Hedonistic Index,” to rank the “greed-with-power” status of the 500 largest U.S. corporations.

People have the right to know how CEOs and major corporations do on the “Hedonistic Index” of greed and power. After all, at the end of the day, we are all paying the price of the full measure of the infinite avarice spiraling from these corporate supremacists and their private governments of controls.

Ranking the Infinite, Greed, Power and Controls of Giant Corporations

By Ralph Nader

August 6, 2020

The combination of greed and power often spin out of control and challenge the enforceable rule of law and the countervailing force of the organized civic community.

When greed and power are exercised by giant multinational corporations that escape the discipline of the nation-state, the potential for evil becomes infinite in nature. Enough is never enough.

Global giant companies, aided and abetted by their corporate attorneys and accountants, can literally decide how little taxes they are going to pay by shifting profits and expenses among different tax haven countries such as Ireland, Luxembourg, and Panama.

These same companies then proceed to lobby any nation, including most prominently the United States. Congress and the White House are pushed to cut formal tax rates, pack the tax laws with loopholes, and lower further the effective tax rate. The formal top tax rate for billions of company profits is now 21%, while the actual tax rate is lower – much lower for banks, insurance companies, drug companies, and behemoth tech companies like Apple that master tax avoidance.

“Generous” is not a word one can associate either with Apple or it’s avaricious, CEO Tim Cook. One of the first moves Tim Cook made, after replacing legendary Apple Founder, the cancer-stricken innovator Steve Jobs, was to arrange a $378 million 2011 compensation package for himself and launch the biggest stock buyback in corporate history. Apple, which is worth $1.5 trillion has spent $327 billion since 2013 to buy back 2.5 billion shares of stock. Yet Apple has done little to produce productive investments, remediation of used and very toxic Apple products when discarded, or increase pay for the 350,000 serf-labor workers in China toiling under its merciless contractor Foxconn.

Apple made $104 billion in the last 12 months, puffed up by tax-avoidance, tax cuts and a no tariff deal with Trump on its Chinese imports, yet Tim Cook has rejected pleas to spend a little over $2 billion (deductible) to award a full year’s pay bonus to the 350,000 Foxconn workers who build Apple’s iPhones and iPads.

Apple’s massive stock buybacks have, however, increased the metrics to set compensation levels for Tim Cook and his executive sidekicks. Unfortunately, stock buybacks do little to tamp down excessive prices for Apple products. The massive stock buybacks also send a message that Apple’s management has no other uses for its corporate cash – not for R&D, not for improving the nature and security of its worker’s pensions, not for investing in curtailing the damaging side-effects of Apple products on the environment and not for reducing other offloaded damage to society.

Tim Cook and Apple are also stingy, given their vast wealth, with charitable contributions. So stingy that Apple’s bosses do not even come close with the company’s charitable deduction limit of five percent of adjusted gross income. In 2018 Apple gave $125 million to charities. Apple’s net income for 2018 was $59.53 billion – a tiny fraction of one percent!

Recently, the New York Times published articles showing how tiny the executive pay cuts were by the very few executives who announced and declared sympathy for their laid off and impoverished workers. The media has also been reporting illicit maneuvers developed by corporate attorneys to help chain stores get relief payments that should have gone to legitimate small businesses. (Why isn’t the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) speaking out against this abuse and avarice?)

Replacing some of their greed with generosity could be directed to the estimated $6 billion to $10 billion needed this coming school year to give low-income students full equipment and connectivity to the internet for remote learning during the Covid-19 pandemic restrictions. States and localities need $4 billion to assure the voting process will be fair and that all votes be counted and on time. The Republicans in the Senate are blocking the money needed to guarantee free and fair elections. Four billion dollars for the profit-glutted Silicon Valley giants Facebook, Google, Apple plus Amazon, and Microsoft, is peanuts. These high-tech digital giants could easily contribute the money needed to avert a widely predicted election time disaster and weeks of under-staffed counting after November 3rd. Imagine such a show of patriotism from these companies.

Then there are the matters of woefully inadequate supplies, facilities, and training programs to counter the spreading Covid-19 pandemic that is crumbling the economy. These record-setting profitable companies, with soaring stock prices due to their monopolistic powers or consumer-gouging, should return some of Trump’s giveaway tax cuts of 2017 and the burgeoning corporate welfare payments from crony-capitalistic Washington, D.C. to help their afflicted or vulnerable fellow Americans. Many of these people are their own workers, friends, and relatives.

Economists should develop a “Hedonistic Index,” to rank the “greed-with-power” status of the 500 largest U.S. corporations.

People have the right to know how CEOs and major corporations do on the “Hedonistic Index” of greed and power. After all, at the end of the day, we are all paying the price of the full measure of the infinite avarice spiraling from these corporate supremacists and their private governments of controls.

Ralph Nader and Colleagues Call on Speaker Pelosi to Revive the Office of Technology Assessment

August 3, 2020

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi

Office of the Speaker

H-252 U.S. Capitol

United States Congress

Washington, DC 20515

RE: Your Authority to Fund the Defunded Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) Constructive Leverage!

Dear Speaker Pelosi,

A critical arm and intellectual infrastructure of Congress – the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) – has been defunded since Speaker Newt Gingrich ordered such, after he toppled the complacent Democrats in November 1994. This left Congress without sound independent advice by some 140 scientists and technologists on a long list of decisions by the Congress to oversee, stop, reduce, or start funding for scientific and technological programs.

Not until 2009-2010, when the Democrats regained control of both Houses, did a broad coalition of scientists, civic advocates, and members of the Congress, led by Democratic Representative Rush Holt (a former Princeton University scientist), urge you as Speaker to revive the OTA. A distinguished number of Nobel laureates, former staff and officials of the OTA, and your Democratic colleagues, sought hearings backed by an impressively documented case for refunding. To no avail. You then opposed public hearings and apparently told aides that you did not want to give the Republicans an opportunity to accuse Democrats of creating another bureaucracy on Capitol Hill. (The OTA’s budget was a parsimonious $21 million in its last year. A bureaucratic OTA is a figment of fevered Republican imagination). It is very alarming that the damage Gingrich did in lobotomizing Congress continues after him. The number of expert congressional overseers has been slashed beyond the bare bones, while the massive Executive Branch to be overseen has grown topsy-turvy and for the worst.

So, another decade was lost. Another vacuum of credible advice by Congress’s own OTA (as has occurred to a lesser extent with the diminished GAO and CRS) enveloped sectors and issues such as artificial intelligence, systemic invasions of privacy, boondoggle, huge ballistic missile defense and nuclear upgrade expenditures, climate disruption, Boeing 737 Max, genetic engineering, citizen surveillance technology, autonomous vehicles, nanotechnology, Covid-19, fracking, computer procurement waste, atomic energy, renewable energy, health care, medical devices, pharmaceuticals, food additives, catastrophic environmental disasters, such as the BP oil spill, occupational safety, the controlling power of corporate algorithms, consumer product hazards, and more.

What filled this vacuum was corporate-driven pseudo-science (see former OSHA director David Michaels’ new book, The Triumph of Doubt: Dark Money and the Science of Deception), which twisted and tortured legislation and appropriations. Business lobbyists thwarted oversight while the number and experience of congressional staff overseers shrank. This is a serious situation now under your watch.

There followed an open sesame for unscrupulous corporations that arrested prudent ways to avert trillions of dollars in waste, perils to the American people and other peoples abroad, inverted perverse priorities, and resulted in bad, dangerous decisions that have ramifications to this day.

You now can move toward action-driven enlightenment despite the Republican control of the Senate. For your House majority can create a unicameral OTA and fund it without the affirmation of the Senate majority wallowing in its Dark Ages. The House OTA can be reconstituted functionally as an arm of the House independent of the Senate. Acting on behalf of the House alone, you cannot be blocked by the Senate as you were in 2019 when the House included $6 million for the bicameral OTA in its House-passed version of the Legislative Branch Appropriations Act, 2020 (H.R. 277). As a matter of law, 31 U.S.C. 1105, 1107, and custom, neither the Senate nor the President can interfere with the budget proposed by the House for itself, including the funding of House Committees or House Offices.

You and your colleagues also can make an overwhelming substantive case for funding a House OTA based on scores of audits, investigations, and reports that invite first-class advice, assessment, and testimony from your own public servants. The small technology unit in GAO, while useful for GAO’s culture, is not sufficient. There is a massive backlog of congressionally neglected work to be done. Consider how pathetic the questioning has been by Committee members, already deprived of adequate staff (the Gingrich model), of the Silicon Valley executives once the Congress finally got these imperial bosses to agree to come and testify. Similarly, both Democrats and Republicans have been seriously fact-deprived in their hoopla support for failed attempts at deregulating and boosting the hyped premature autonomous vehicles push by the industry, especially in 2017 and 2018. Worse has been the automatic annual funding by Congress of the mega-billions of dollars for the ballistic missile defense boondoggle, criticized by leading technical experts, without oversight since its inception during the Reagan years.

Corporate lobbyists and installed corporate-indentured officials in the Executive Branch will no doubt oppose such a revived OTA. Its reports will be staples of public congressional hearings. Congressional ignorance makes Congress much easier to ignore. Your iron control of the House of Representatives can make Republican opposition flaccid and evidentially self-serving to their greed and corporatism. Please use your power to address the problems that stem from the absence of OTA and fund it this time.

The undersigned are sending this letter to other members of Congress, numerous scientific and engineering associations, individuals, distinguished academic and non-academic scientists and technologists and, of course, the media.

Please do not prejudge from the last decade. As recent events and civic energy demonstrate, this is a new era with new possibilities once deemed politically difficult in those past years of inertia and self-censorship. Seize the hour!

Two of the undersigned, in their exercise of civic duties, have written you several letters on important matters without ever receiving an acknowledgment, much less a serious response. Is this your established office practice, apart from constituent services for your San Francisco residents? The right of citizens to petition for redress of grievances is enshrined in the First Amendment in furtherance of self-government. Public officials should act accordingly.

Sincerely,

Ralph Nader, Esq.

Bruce Fein, Esq.

Claire Nader, Ph.D.

Joan B. Claybrook, Esq.

Louis Fisher, Esq.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi Writes to Me!

By Ralph Nader

July 31, 2020

Years ago, Elizabeth Brennan Moynihan told me about her disgust with the Democratic Party’s outside consultants. These consultants were not competent. They were arrogant, costly, and looking out first for their interests, not the candidates they were supposed to advance. She threw them out and personally took over her husband, Senator Daniel P. Moynihan’s successful re-election campaign.

Bill Curry, former counselor to President Bill Clinton and later a cogent critic of the “Arkansas sweet talker” said these consultants stay hired even after losing election after election. They blame the candidates, not themselves, nor the way they misshape the strategies and insipid television ads (from which they take a 15% cut).

Curry said these repeat offenders, whom he noted, make much of their money from corporate clients, have a clear conflict of interest, and are an ongoing menace to the Party.

I was reminded of their observations when I received two fundraising letters from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Elected politicians long ago stopped writing their own appeals for campaign dollars. This chore is farmed out to well-paid and wealthy consultants flaunting their supposed smooth expertise. They must have scoured their brilliant insights to come up with this doozy on the envelope – “R.Nader, I Won’t Back Down. Are You With Me?” I wonder how much the consultant was paid to think that defensive and vague message would tempt voters to tear open their mail and lunge for the return envelope to send the dough.

Bear in mind, this is the age of a Trumpian criminal enterprise and a destructive, rampant lawlessness, a hyper-corrupt Trump regime stiff-arming the people daily on the behalf of the giant corporate supremacists. And Nancy tells us she’s not backing down. Wow – what political ambition it takes to defend expensive Obamacare (that still left 30 million people uninsured and more than double that number underinsured), instead of bucking up to support full Medicare for All. The Medicare for All Act, (H.R.1384) would create a system that is more efficient and lifesaving with free choice of doctors and hospitals.

Playing defense embeds itself in Nancy’s survey included in the fundraising appeal. We are asked to rank the following:

(1) Defending choice (without adding maternal, neonate, and childcare).

(2) Stopping voter suppression (without expanding known ways to surge voter turnout).

(3) Protecting social security (instead of also expanding this lone barrier to severe elderly poverty and repealing the huge Trump tax cut for the rich and corporations. Note that both were pressed for by the ignored Bernie Sanders campaign).

(4) “Fighting climate change and opposing Trump’s weakening environmental laws” (instead of displacing fossil fuels and recognizing the objectives of the Green New Deal advanced by Democratic Party Progressives).

No mention of law and order for corporate crime and runaway costly corporate welfare, and no mention of telling bungling, dangerous Trump to step aside to let pandemic scientists, doctors, and managers run the federal effort to suppress the spreading Covid-19 disaster.

Of course, a letter can only contain a few top defensive issues. So, the House Speaker gives us a line titled “other”, “to hear from” us as, she adds, our “opinions are important.”

Fair enough Nancy, see the four letters by me and constitutional law specialists with important opinions that were not even acknowledged much less responded to by your office.

I believe our proposals – available to all incumbents and challengers  –  will help citizens and Congress take America closer to the just rule of law and constitutional observance which will enable a better life for the people and the environment of our country.

Granted your letter was very focused on winning elections. But winning elections without enabling basic mandates that translate into good livelihoods can leave voters with that familiar empty post-election letdown malady. May we hear from you?

Letter to AOC 7.31.20

July 31, 2020

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

229 Cannon House Office Building

U.S. House of Representatives

Washington, DC 20515-3214

Dear Representative Ocasio-Cortez,

Your going to the floor of the House of Representatives to take to task Representative Ted Yoho for his disgusting and sexist epithet following your exchange with him exposed to a national audience the range of such foul talk by more than a few male members of the House. Words matter for they often clothe wrongful attitudes and the conditions behind them.

You are in the eye of the mass media – deservedly so. But such an asset for communicating your actions, policies, and observations may not last very long. At least that is often the history of authentic political figures who take on entrenched interests even from elected office. Ever-higher expectations for your work toward a more just society invites the following suggestions.

Consider three actions to address official inertia and wrongdoing that you could take.

First, the savage sexual predator in the White House, Donald J. Trump – has engaged in more than boastful misogynistic language. He has sexually abused and assaulted many women and repeatedly lied and publicly vilified his victims in the process. As you know, tort lawsuits filed by some of these women are pending in the courts. The MeToo constituency has the opportunity to make Trump’s predatory behavior an issue in this year’s presidential campaign. However, the media and civic groups have failed to continue to make Trump’s deplorable behavior an issue. So has Congress, including both female and male Democratic legislators. In early February, we hand-delivered personally the enclosed letter to nearly 100 House Democratic members, including all 89 Democratic women House Representatives. The staff was more than courteous in receiving what amounted to a documented petition to have a House Committee investigate this deeply rapacious behavior. This “abuse of the public trust,” in our Founders language, by Mr. Trump should not be ignored.

I delivered the letter directly to your office. Not one of the nearly 100 members, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi, even bothered to respond. The lack of response resulted, not surprisingly, in no media coverage by any of 20 reporters, columnists, and editors in the mass media who had previously covered Trump’s brutish assaults. Is he too terrible to hold accountable?

Don’t you think it is worthy of a House Committee’s time to investigate a pattern of behavior that is a destructive role model for boys and young men – as Trump continues to get away with what a small fraction of such transgressions have cost Congressional Democratic Senator Al Franken and Congressman John Conyers?

Second, the New York Times reported a few days ago your demand for Governor Andrew Cuomo to adopt, with the legislature, a “billionaires’ tax” to help a deficit-ridden New York bolster the state’s social safety net. Political observers don’t expect action on this proposal. On the other hand, the New York Public Interest Group (NYPIRG), one of the leading student advocacy groups in American history, assembled a diverse coalition of 50 civic groups and held a press briefing led by NYPIRG director Blair Horner on May 28, 2020. Your office was sent their persuasive media release (see attached) demanding that Governor Cuomo stop rebating some $40 million a day from the tiny stock transfer sales taxes that the state collects and electronically sends back to Wall Street brokers.

This rebated progressive sales tax is well known to state and Congressional legislators. There was no response from you or your staff or from any other members of the N.Y Congressional Delegation. Given NY state’s $16 billion budget deficit this year, the estimated $16 billion in rebated tax revenues could help provide assistance to struggling communities statewide. Isn’t this worth your immediate attention?

Please take the lead here and help shine your media spotlight on something critically important to illuminate.

Third, you’ll remember how President Trump violated the “speech and debate clause,” in our Constitution when he pressed Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to bar the entry of two members of Congress traveling to Israel and the Palestinian West Bank in the exercise of their Constitutionally protected oversight duties. At the time we urged the excluded Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, to make more of this impeachable offense – unprecedented in American history, according to two constitutional law specialists. Our letter (attached) to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, similar ones to you and other members of the House, went unanswered, except for a call from Rep. Tlaib’s office. You can still send Mr. Trump a stiff written warning to never try this again with many members of the House co-signing. Otherwise, Trump will just add this to his lengthy list of impeachable offenses that the Democrats let him get away with, absent even an official condemnation to also deter such dictatorial behavior by succeeding Presidents.

Were you and the class of 2018 in the Democratic camp more connected from the outset with national progressive citizen groups on a regular basis, meeting with them in your offices, listening to their recommendations, the above three actions might not have been neglected. Right after the 2018 election, I wrote the attached column putting forth several tests that would determine how serious the Congressional newcomers were about getting fundamental neglected actions underway, not just saying the right words and issuing good public statements. History shows that legislators cannot get much done without the close engagement of the civic community (e.g. civil rights and environmental groups, unions) and the civic community can’t get any laws or public hearings without the legislators. Social Justice causes require regular close cooperation, consultation, and open acknowledgment of such to persuade the media that these civic groups have a power base in Congress and vice-versa. Alas, this was not done, with few exceptions, not even by the heralded “Squad.”

We welcome your considered response to each of the above suggestions, notwithstanding many months of unsuccessful striving to connect and having you and others respond to matters of contemporary importance. These include matters of war and peace, and of White House constitutional, statutory and treaty violations (see attached list of 12 impeachable offenses we assembled that were placed in the Congressional Record by Congressman John Larson, December 18, 2019.) Eleven offenses were completely set aside by your Party’s leadership, including some strongly recommended for action by the House Judiciary Committee.

Thank you.

For Peace and Justice,

Ralph Nader

Attachments.

The post Letter to AOC 7.31.20 first appeared on Ralph Nader.

Ralph Nader letter to AOC

July 31, 2020

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

229 Cannon House Office Building

U.S. House of Representatives

Washington, DC 20515-3214

Dear Representative Ocasio-Cortez,

Your going to the floor of the House of Representatives to take to task Representative Ted Yoho for his disgusting and sexist epithet following your exchange with him exposed to a national audience the range of such foul talk by more than a few male members of the House. Words matter for they often clothe wrongful attitudes and the conditions behind them.

You are in the eye of the mass media – deservedly so. But such an asset for communicating your actions, policies, and observations may not last very long. At least that is often the history of authentic political figures who take on entrenched interests even from elected office. Ever-higher expectations for your work toward a more just society invites the following suggestions.

Consider three actions to address official inertia and wrongdoing that you could take.

First, the savage sexual predator in the White House, Donald J. Trump – has engaged in more than boastful misogynistic language. He has sexually abused and assaulted many women and repeatedly lied and publicly vilified his victims in the process. As you know, tort lawsuits filed by some of these women are pending in the courts. The MeToo constituency has the opportunity to make Trump’s predatory behavior an issue in this year’s presidential campaign. However, the media and civic groups have failed to continue to make Trump’s deplorable behavior an issue. So has Congress, including both female and male Democratic legislators. In early February, we hand-delivered personally the enclosed letter to nearly 100 House Democratic members, including all 89 Democratic women House Representatives. The staff was more than courteous in receiving what amounted to a documented petition to have a House Committee investigate this deeply rapacious behavior. This “abuse of the public trust,” in our Founders language, by Mr. Trump should not be ignored.

I delivered the letter directly to your office. Not one of the nearly 100 members, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi, even bothered to respond. The lack of response resulted, not surprisingly, in no media coverage by any of 20 reporters, columnists, and editors in the mass media who had previously covered Trump’s brutish assaults. Is he too terrible to hold accountable?

Don’t you think it is worthy of a House Committee’s time to investigate a pattern of behavior that is a destructive role model for boys and young men – as Trump continues to get away with what a small fraction of such transgressions have cost Congressional Democratic Senator Al Franken and Congressman John Conyers?

Second, the New York Times reported a few days ago your demand for Governor Andrew Cuomo to adopt, with the legislature, a “billionaires’ tax” to help a deficit-ridden New York bolster the state’s social safety net. Political observers don’t expect action on this proposal. On the other hand, the New York Public Interest Group (NYPIRG), one of the leading student advocacy groups in American history, assembled a diverse coalition of 50 civic groups and held a press briefing led by NYPIRG director Blair Horner on May 28, 2020. Your office was sent their persuasive media release (see attached) demanding that Governor Cuomo stop rebating some $40 million a day from the tiny stock transfer sales taxes that the state collects and electronically sends back to Wall Street brokers.

This rebated progressive sales tax is well known to state and Congressional legislators. There was no response from you or your staff or from any other members of the N.Y Congressional Delegation. Given NY state’s $16 billion budget deficit this year, the estimated $16 billion in rebated tax revenues could help provide assistance to struggling communities statewide. Isn’t this worth your immediate attention?

Please take the lead here and help shine your media spotlight on something critically important to illuminate.

Third, you’ll remember how President Trump violated the “speech and debate clause,” in our Constitution when he pressed Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to bar the entry of two members of Congress traveling to Israel and the Palestinian West Bank in the exercise of their Constitutionally protected oversight duties. At the time we urged the excluded Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, to make more of this impeachable offense – unprecedented in American history, according to two constitutional law specialists. Our letter (attached) to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, similar ones to you and other members of the House, went unanswered, except for a call from Rep. Tlaib’s office. You can still send Mr. Trump a stiff written warning to never try this again with many members of the House co-signing. Otherwise, Trump will just add this to his lengthy list of impeachable offenses that the Democrats let him get away with, absent even an official condemnation to also deter such dictatorial behavior by succeeding Presidents.

Were you and the class of 2018 in the Democratic camp more connected from the outset with national progressive citizen groups on a regular basis, meeting with them in your offices, listening to their recommendations, the above three actions might not have been neglected. Right after the 2018 election, I wrote the attached column putting forth several tests that would determine how serious the Congressional newcomers were about getting fundamental neglected actions underway, not just saying the right words and issuing good public statements. History shows that legislators cannot get much done without the close engagement of the civic community (e.g. civil rights and environmental groups, unions) and the civic community can’t get any laws or public hearings without the legislators. Social Justice causes require regular close cooperation, consultation, and open acknowledgment of such to persuade the media that these civic groups have a power base in Congress and vice-versa. Alas, this was not done, with few exceptions, not even by the heralded “Squad.”

We welcome your considered response to each of the above suggestions, notwithstanding many months of unsuccessful striving to connect and having you and others respond to matters of contemporary importance. These include matters of war and peace, and of White House constitutional, statutory and treaty violations (see attached list of 12 impeachable offenses we assembled that were placed in the Congressional Record by Congressman John Larson, December 18, 2019.) Eleven offenses were completely set aside by your Party’s leadership, including some strongly recommended for action by the House Judiciary Committee.

Thank you.

For Peace and Justice,

Ralph Nader

Fed Guarantees Unproductive Debt and Perilous Speculation

By Ralph Nader

July 24, 2020

The Federal Reserve Board – our unaccountable Central Bank – needs more citizen and Congressional supervision. Fees from financial institutions fund its operations, not Congressional appropriations. It is as secret as it wants to be and that’s plenty. (See Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country by William Greider). Plus, the Fed can print money at will. In the past several years it has “produced” trillions of dollars that juiced the stock market’s speculation.

Back nearly 90 years ago, the influential British economist, John Maynard Keynes, warned about stock markets veering into speculation and away from investments to build the real economy. Today, he might view stock markets as the epitome of wasteful “casino capitalism.” They have very little to do with raising money for useful investments and everything to do with making bets, as in multi-tiered derivatives, puts, and options to make money from money. Most often using, in Justice Louis Brandeis’s phrase, “other people’s money,” the Wall Street gamblers reap lucrative fees from unproductive speculation.

Fed Chairman, Jerome H. Powell, has chosen to instill “confidence” in the stock markets and credit markets by injecting trillions of dollars into the financial system to reassure the Wall Street speculators that the Covid-19 pandemic won’t crash the money markets into chaos and bankruptcies.

But Powell, the Fed and the bankers who dominate the Fed and its regional branches have set the stage for this constant bailout of reckless bubbles and debt binges. By keeping interest rates too low, now near zero, they have encouraged non-financial companies to go deeper and deeper into riskier debt ($6.8 trillion and surging). Borrowing has been so cheap that some of this debt was incurred by companies just to buy back their stock! Stock buybacks do not produce anything but higher metrics for executive compensation (See article, Why Stock Buybacks Are Dangerous for the Economy by William Lazonick).

Powell has turned a deaf ear to tens of millions of Americans, with modest incomes, who together have trillions of dollars in money market and bank savings accounts and are getting almost nothing by way of interest income. The result is less consumer spending. Yet Powell arrogantly says he’s not even thinking about raising interest rates even to one percent. Lenders like this approach because the sky-high interest rates they charge are not regulated.

Meanwhile, this huge pile of money looking for some return on investment is being lured into the stock market further driving up price-to-earnings (P/E) ratios into nosebleed territory.

Powell shrugs and assures the big boys on Wall Street that the Fed will have their back without limits. In return, the corporations continue their unproductive speculation and what the New York Times called a Fed-driven “debt binge.”

To make matters worse, these trillions of dollars are chasing fewer listed companies on the stock exchanges. Mergers, acquisitions, bankruptcies, and raising money from cheap debt instead of equity, over the past 25 years have cut the number of companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange by half.

Note how little all these financial machinations directly help the average families in America. More money is controlled by the few than ever before, but little is going into productive investments in the creation of jobs and services sorely needed in this, shaky “real economy”.

Some economists have written that “the stock markets are not the economy.” True enough if they are describing how stocks can soar on Wall Street while the Main Street economy plummets. Unfortunately, few economists focus on the stock market speculators sucking money belonging to the people (pension and mutual funds) into the speculation vortex while corporate bosses borrow cheap money, at record low-interest rates, for self-serving unproductive uses.

The Fed is pursuing a short-term game of guaranteeing corporations against self-imposed riskiness (the Fed is even starting to buy corporate bonds). This authoritarian Central Bank, with its own bulging red ink balance sheet, is turning its massive injections of “liquidity” into a narcotic for Big Business.

Such addictions hurt many innocent people back home trying to keep jobs, find jobs, and pay their bills. The House Democrats must hold rigorous public hearings on the Fed which ironically is demanding that Congress provide more immediate relief for ordinary people.

In May the House Democrats passed a $3 trillion package addressing these needs and sent the bill to a balking Republican-controlled Senate.

Now it is time for various House Committees to publicly question Chairman Powell about the costs of the Fed’s callous indifference to the real economy and struggling Americans.

Calls Mounting For Trump to Step Aside From Covid-19 Bungling

By Ralph Nader

July 17, 2020

Public Citizen’s open letter, co-signed by over twenty nonprofit civic organizations working for the public health, demanded that Trump and Pence immediately give up their disastrous daily mismanagement of the Covid-19 response. Trump’s bungling and ignorance have allowed the Covid-19 virus to spread faster at an alarming rate around the country.

Public Citizen’s letter to Trump and Pence asserted that their “callous disregard for human life during the still-raging coronavirus pandemic is appalling and must cease,” and called for both of them to “immediately step aside from any further role in leading or communicating about the federal response to the pandemic, and to delegate full operating authority over the response to senior professional public health and medical experts within the agencies of the U.S. Public Health Service.” (See letter at citizen.org).

Dr. Peter Lurie, President of the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) is circulating a sign-on letter to current and former public health officials and professionals to be sent to President Trump defending Dr. Anthony Fauci and calling for science-based policies and the involvement of government scientists as the nation develops its response to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.

More Republicans in the Congress are agreeing with this shift to scientific and managerial expertise. Trump’s chaotic, mindless, wrongheaded, ego-obsessed careening week after week is aiding and abetting the spread of the virus. The Trump regime is not leading; it is obstructing the state efforts to combat the virus, over-riding or undermining the scientists and pushing lethal nostrums to desperate citizens.  Trump and his toadies are also failing to provide needed supplies, facilities,  uniform safeguards and clear guidance to the state officials.

Republican Senators, Susan Collins (Rep. Maine) and Shelley Moore Capito (Rep. West Virginia) have publicly declared that Trump should “step back” and let the “health professionals” be in daily operating charge. Many more GOP legislators privately and not so privately agree.  They are seeing their poll numbers drop because of the Trump virus debacle.

The Democrats should take the initiative and draft  a veto-proof bi-partisan bill to establish a special Commission to oversee  the federal government’s management of the pandemic by scientists , public health officials and  management experts. Moreover, members of Congress, whether singly or together, should demand that the giant medical and public health associations in this country speak out and demonstrate the utter urgency of the situation, presently controlled by a ferocious, ignorant fool. (They can use more diplomatic language).

Senators and Representatives must get to work and hold public hearings featuring people who know what they’re talking about. Former heads of the CDC led by Thomas Frieden are ready to testify. Prominent Deans of medical schools and heads of national and state public health associations have much to say and recommend. Nurses have already voiced their concerns by picketing  the White House.

The Trump Administration’s lethal incompetence is unprecedented in American history. The fatalities and sickened are increasing in the pandemic’s surge. The economy is falling apart. Tens of millions are unemployed, facing hunger and eviction. The Pentagon stockpiles nuclear weapons while public health budgets are depleted, and schools beg for funds to safely open in the fall.

At the same time, the Captain Queeg in the White House is actually boasting that he has stopped enforcement of disease-preventing federal protections, and is continuing to push for terminating critical nursing home regulations and pressing to end Obamacare that will leave 23 million more Americans without health insurance. Sheer madness!

Wake up America!  We need to do far more than we have done to force Trump to resign or at least step aside.   Wake up Trump supporters!  This virus is non-partisan and its destruction is insatiable. Our country cannot any longer afford to have a crazy man in the White House.

For the sake of many lives that can be saved, every person should call the White House comment number (202-456-1111) or the White House switchboard (202-456-1414) and tell Trump to step aside for the good of the country.  Your messages tell Presidents which way the political winds are blowing. Make this “rumble of the people” speak loud and clear NOW!

The Enduring Case for Demanding Trump’s Resignation

By Ralph Nader

July 10, 2020

Today’s New York Times headline boldly exclaimed, “PRESIDENT IS ‘NOT ABOVE THE LAW,’ JUSTICES DECIDE.” But then the Supreme Court majority found a way not to apply the law to Trump’s defiance of Congress.

Didn’t this question get decided in 1776 and more formally in 1787 by our Founders?

In obtaining information for overseeing the Executive Branch, the plenary power of Congress neither needs affirmation by the courts nor can tolerate years of judicial delays. It is time for the illogical Justices, who find few limits to vast Presidential powers either domestically or in pursuit of undeclared wars of Empire, to stop shredding Congress’s constitutional authority.

The very conservative Justice Clarence Thomas, in his dissent, addressed the futility of Congress employing the courts to obtain information by subpoena for legislation, for example, strengthening the President’s financial disclosure obligations. The maximum congressional strategy for securing presidential documents is through use of its impeachment authority, he wrote.

An article of impeachment was voted against President Nixon in 1974 for defying a congressional subpoena that was not validated by a court. Trump has defied scores of subpoenas, dozens of formal Congressional demands for information and testimony by Executive Branch officials. Yet, apart from the Ukraine impeachment in December 2019 by the Democratic House, Speaker Nancy Pelosi has kept eleven other serious ongoing impeachable offenses by Trump and his lawless regime on the shelf. You can read these impeachable offenses compiled by constitutional law experts, Bruce Fein, Louis Fisher, and me, and presented by Congressman John Larson (D-CT) in the December 18, 2019, Congressional Record H-12197.

Absent a robust defense of our democracy by the Supreme Court or Congress, the citizenry must mobilize a mass demand for Trump’s resignation – for all of America’s sake. Whether the case is made for the rule of law or against disastrous, dangerous, and delusionary policies from Trump’s Wall Street over Main Street White House, the support should be treated as non-partisan and as the essence of patriotism.

On June 5, 2020, the Portland (Maine) Press Herald called for Trump to resign, urging Trump to ask himself – “Can the country take five more months like the last five?” The editorial asserted that “your shortcomings are unleashing historic levels of suffering on the American people.”

When this staid newspaper took this position, it did not evaluate the prospect of success. That is not its responsibility. Nor should any such prejudgment of Trump’s rejection of resignation inhibit hundreds of Congressional lawmakers, civic group leaders, columnists, and editorial writers, who have made the overwhelming case against corrupt Donald Trump in great documented detail. But, unfortunately, most of these people have failed to reach the obvious conclusion from their convictions.

The case for Trump’s resignation should never be withheld by weighing the odds of that happening. The demand itself is the necessity of our times. Here are some reasons:

1. Trump’s ignorance and ego-driven bungling and obstructions of professional scientific management of the Covid-19 pandemic occur daily and often in open sight. After weeks of delay fatal to tens of thousands of Americans, his continuing abandonment of presidential leadership in assuring supplies, facilities and critical coordination for the states warrant removal of this flailing, failing, careening so-called chief executive. America cannot wait to stop the irreparable destruction that will occur from now until January 20, 2021.

2. The mass resignation demand highlights in an organized way the case for Trump’s removal (supported by 60% of women in a November 26, 2019, CNN poll) that Congress possesses and has failed to pursue in both the House and Senate.

No one so guilty of violating the basic laws of our land, so corruptly selling our government to giant corporations while asking CEOs for campaign contributions should disgrace our White House any longer. Trump’s increasingly shrill bigotry, pressing for selective voter intimidation and suppression, and incitements to violence illustrates what Alexander Hamilton meant by citing the “abuse of the public trust” as an impeachable offense.

3. The widespread discourse and debate pursuant to a mass resignation demand will highlight the specifics of Trump’s damage to our country. He arbitrarily declares another “economic emergency” so as to make corporate crimes worse by literally stopping enforcement of consumer, worker, environmental and economic protections. Big corporations over people again.

The resignation demand highlights his abuses against women over the years, his regime’s leaving young people defenseless against rapacious commercial universities and student loan exploiters, his support for freezing a $7.25 per hour federal minimum wage and other anti-worker slams that are all under-reported.

4. Because Trump doubles down on his many outrageous refusals to “faithfully execute the laws,” spending monies not appropriated by Congress, pursuing nine wars undeclared by Congress, giving his cronies lucrative government contracts, all the while daily distracting with his new-cycle-dominating foul-mouth tweets and personal attacks, the media has become jaded to the larger questions of why this madman is still in the Oval Office.

The reliance on the election in November afflicts many civic groups from pressing for Trump’s eviction now. “Me Too” activists still go after powerful misogynists but have given up on the 800-pound elephant in the room – Trump. Other citizen advocacy organizations cite their condemnatory reports, their press releases and their lawsuits against Trump. The failed gambling czar laughs at all this, even when the media reports on these meritorious efforts.

Trump will get away with everything until January 20, 2021, unless he is removed from office, whether by impeachment and conviction, or a massive public resignation demand that sinks his poll numbers, leading him to quit because he can’t stand losing the election.

5. Trump himself will nourish community-level resignation demands by his increasing interference with the rights of voters, leading the GOP to daily clashes with election officials, civil rights groups, and the people’s notions of fair play.

Already underway in GOP controlled states are pernicious efforts to obstruct voter registration such as the closing of precincts in minority areas, purging of certain voters, and crazed harassment of low-income voters, including requiring notarized mail-in votes or launching inappropriate challenges of signatures. There are neither prosecutors nor judges who can stop these and other dictatorial ravages in time for November 3, 2020.

With Trump still in office, prepare for an embroiling election crisis, as he unleashes street violence and harassing lawsuits before favorable judges citing the results as “rigged,” a “hoax,” and “stolen,” no matter his margin of defeat. With the pandemic of Covid-19 still taking casualties, why not try to get him out of the office and in the process inform and arouse the public? Genuine conservatives and current and retired military people are seething against Trump acting in their name and taking them for granted. They are ready to join the effort to protect our democracy and the rule of law.

The history of the Democratic Party, losing repeatedly to the worst Republican Party ever at the national and state levels, is not propitious for the coming months. Are Democratic operatives up to either a pre- or post-election day Trump and his unscrupulous GOP fanatics? The stakes are too high to rely on the Democrats.

It is our obligation as citizens to organize and demand Trump’s resignation and focus millions of voters on turning out the Trumpsters and their four-year Dark Age that is wrecking America.

Statement by Ralph Nader and Bruce Fein on Trump v. Mazars

The partial U.S. House of Representatives victory in the enforcement of four subpoenas for Trump and family financial records from third parties in Trump v. Mazars today in SCOTUS underscores the folly of congressional resort to federal courts in lieu of impeachment for defiance of subpoenas. The subpoenas were issued in April 2019. The SCOTUS decision sends the case back to lower courts for further review, which will not be complete until after November’s balloting, making them politically irrelevant. Moreover, House subpoenas expire at the end of the issuing Congress–in this case, January 4, 2021 before SCOTUS will have time to address the issues again after its remands. Congress will be back to square one in January.

This is no way to run a railroad. We are working with Congressmen Larson, Raskin, and others for a House Resolution making defiance of a congressional subpoena an impeachable offense. Once exercised, it should concentrate the mind of the Executive Branch wonderfully on subpoena compliance with alacrity.

Justice Clarence Thomas’ dissent in Trump v. Mazars makes clear that the congressional impeachment mode endows Congress with virtually limitless oversight or investigatory authority over the President. All the more reason to make defiance of a congressional subpoena an impeachable offense.

-Ralph Nader and Bruce Fein