Ralph Nader's Blog, page 36

Democratic Convention: New Faces, Similar Policies but Sharp Contrast with Trumpism

By Ralph Nader

August 21, 2020

A national political nominating convention, as the Democrats have just completed, is, to be sure, a mutual admiration event. A steady stream of speakers led to the finale with the acceptance speech by the presidential candidate, Joe Biden. But the Convention has another declared purpose:  to show the country what the Democratic Party stands for and the future it wishes to shape for the American people.

Repetition is expected and it was no surprise that speaker after speaker attacked “inequality” and the injustices of discrimination against minorities, women, and the poor.

Intriguingly was what the three-day talkfest left out.  The Democratic Party avoided the issue of what to do about the gross maldistribution of power between the tiny few and the rest of the people in America.  This glaring omission signaled that the aggressive progressive wing of the Party – led by Bernie Sanders and youthful incumbents in Congress could have their priorities excluded with impunity by the Party bosses. The overriding desire for unity against Trump became the muzzle for most of the progressive delegates.

When unity, as if any Democrat had anything else in mind in stressing the defeat of dangerous and corrupt Donald, becomes a tool to demand unanimity on policies, alas, the Party is up to its old establishment ways.

The Biden/Harris Democratic Party looks like it will repeat the Clinton/Obama practice of avoiding major hurdles to peace and justice. Here are some glaring omissions:

Trump shreds the Constitution daily with numerous impeachable offenses. He is getting away with these abuses because of the AWOL Congress’s indifference to his unprecedented dictatorial seizure of legislative authority, including his recent brazen executive usurpations of Congress’s power of the purse and taxation. Some of Trump’s acts include criminal violations of federal law.
The gross distortion of the federal budget with over 50% of operating expenditures going to the Pentagon, the bloated military contractors, and the pursuit of a boomeranging, draining Empire. Speakers could have felt secure by quoting President Eisenhower’s farewell warnings regarding the military-industrial complex. Empires starve their country’s necessities and the U.S. is no exception to such misallocation of funds.
There was much talk of expanding social safety net programs, but little or no discussion about how to pay for these vital programs, but no demand, other than a passing reference in Biden’s speech, to repeal the $2 trillion Trump tax cut for the super-wealthy and giant corporations like CEO Tim Cook and Apple. There was no demand to cut enormous corporate welfare payouts – crony capitalism and no push for a financial sales tax on Wall Street trading, notwithstanding recent support for that huge source of new revenue from Michael Bloomberg and Wall Streeter Robert Rubin.
The corporate crime wave keeps roiling higher and higher with immense costs to regular people and their families. It would have been easy and popular to call for more law and order and adequate enforcement budgets to catch corporate crooks. Billing fraud and abuse, just in the health care industry, costs consumers and taxpayers one billion dollars a day!
One would think that the unconstitutional, illegal, mass surveillance by federal agencies, in violation of the Fourth Amendment, would be worth a shout out. Privacy destruction is on people’s minds. Is this deemed too controversial for the Democratic Party?
What about telling people about changes the Democrats want to make in the country’s foreign policy? What about the role of monopolistic corporations escaping taxes by using overseas tax havens, fomenting trouble, and exploiting indigenous people in foreign lands?
Wouldn’t you think Convention speakers would report the crimes, misdeeds, and corporate takeovers of our government’s agencies and departments by Trump’s big-business henchmen? Look at EPA, OSHA, the CFPB, and the Departments of Interior, Labor, Agriculture, and other health/safety regulatory agencies and the life-saving and economic protections Trump and his cronies have shut down. In Minneapolis on Monday, Trump, in one fast minute, strung together his serial madcap attacks on the Democrats, who in the hours at their Convention, did not adequately return the favor.
It would have been extraordinary had the Democrats addressed the Trump voters, especially those blue-collar workers who left the Democratic Party because the Party deserted them on economic/trade matters. Barack Obama did mention “white factory workers” whose jobs were displaced. But the tens of millions of low-income whites did not hear the Democrats directly saying much about working-class grievances.

It is standard practice for the presidential nominee’s team to clear drafts of all Convention speeches to make sure none stray too much from the permissible positions and non-positions of the candidate. If Joe Biden followed this practice, then what Convention speakers said and did not say reflects Mr. Biden’s range of proposed action and inaction.

However, the Democratic Convention’s embrace of replacing Trump’s deliberate chaos and confusion with recovery and rebuilding the country did seem to come through persistently over three days. The Democrats presented a contrast to the crazed, bungling, ego-maniacal Trump spewing hate, inciting violence, and emitting hourly lies.

The post Democratic Convention: New Faces, Similar Policies but Sharp Contrast with Trumpism first appeared on Ralph Nader.

Needed: Indicators for Measuring Injustice and Societal Decay

By Ralph Nader

August 14, 2020

Economic indicators – data points, trends, and micro-categories – are the widgets of the big information industry. By contrast, indicators for our society’s democratic health are not similarly compiled, aggregated, and reported. Its up and down trends are presented piecemeal and lack quantitative precision.

We can get the process started and lay the basis for qualitative and quantitative refinement. Years ago, when we started “re-defining progress” and questioning the very superficial GDP and its empirical limitations, professional economists took notice. Unfortunately, with few exceptions, economists cling to the yardsticks that benefit and suit the plutocrats and CEOs of large corporations.

Here are my offerings in the expectation that readers will add their own measures:

A society is decaying when liars receive mass media attention while truth-tellers are largely ignored. Those who are chronically wrong with outrageous and baseless predictions are featured on news broadcasts, op-ed pages, and as convention and conference speakers. On the other hand, those who forewarn and are proven to be accurate are not regaled, but instead, they are excluded from the media spotlight and significant gatherings. Consider the treatment of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz post-Iraq invasion, compared to people like Congressman Dennis Kucinich, Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn who factually warned Washington not to attack illegally a country that didn’t threaten us.
A society is decaying when rampant corruption is tolerated, and its perpetrators are rewarded with money, votes, and praise. When President Eisenhower’s chief of staff, former New Hampshire Governor Sherman Adams, accepted a vicuña coat from a textile manufacturer, he was forced to resign. The daily corruption of Trump and the Trumpsters towers beyond measure over Adams’ indiscretion. Yet calls for Trump and his cronies to resign are rare and anemic. Tragically, the law and the norms of decency have done little to curb the corrupt, criminogenic, and criminal excesses of Trump & company. Even government prosecutors and inspectors generals have been fired, chilled, and sidelined by Trump and his toady,  Attorney General Barr.
A society is decaying when a growing number of people believe in fantasies instead of realities. Social media makes this an ever more serious estrangement from what is actually happening in the country and in the world. Believing in myths and falsehoods leads to political servitude, economic disruption, and social dysfunction. The corrupt concentration of power ensues.
An expanding economy focusing increasingly on ‘wants and whims’ while ignoring the meeting of basic ‘needs and necessities’ shatters societal cohesiveness and deepens miseries of many people. Adequate housing, healthcare, food, public services, education, mass transit, health & safety standards, and environmental protections are the prerequisites for a humane democracy. The economy is in shambles for tens of millions of Americans, including hungry children. Minimal economic security is beyond the reach of tens of millions of people in our country.
With few exceptions, the richer the wealthy become, the more selfish they behave, from severely diminished contributions to charities to the failure to exert leadership to reverse the breakdown of society. Take all the failures of the election machinery from obstructing voters to simply counting the votes honestly with paper records. The U.S. Senate won’t vote to give the states the $4 billion needed for administering the coming elections despite the Covid-19-driven need for expanded voting by mail. The Silicon Valley, undertaxed, mega-billionaires could make a $4 billion patriotic donation to safeguard the voting process in November and not even feel it.
Rampant commercialism knowing no boundaries or restraints even to protect young children is running roughshod over civic values. Every major religion has warned about giving too much power to the merchant class going back over 2000 years. In our country, justice arrived after commercial greed was subordinated to humane priorities such as abolishing child labor and requiring crashworthy cars, cleaner air, water, and safer workplaces. Mercantile values produce predictable results, from excluding civic groups from congressional hearings and the mass media to letting corporations control what the people own such as the vast public lands and public airwaves.
Then there is the American Empire astride the globe, enabled by an AWOL Congress and propelled by the avaricious military-industrial complex. In his 1961 farewell address, President Dwight Eisenhower presciently forewarned that “[W]e must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” All Empires devour themselves until they collapse on the countries of their origins. Over 55% of the federal government’s operating spending goes to the Pentagon and its associated budgets. The military-industrial complex increasingly leads to quagmires and creates adversaries abroad, as it starves the social safety net budgets in our country. Our country’s military spending with all its waste is surging and unaudited. The U.S. spent more than $732 billion on direct defense spending in 2019; this is more than the next ten countries with the largest military expenditures.
A society that requires its people to incur crushing debt to survive, while relying on casinos and other forms of gambling to produce jobs, is going backward into the future.
Public officials who repeatedly obstruct voters from having their votes received and counted accurately and in a timely fashion continue with impunity to try to steal elections. Then Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp (now governor of Georgia) “stole” the election in 2018 from gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams. Abrams said Kemp was an “architect of voter suppression.” And that because Kemp was the Georgia Secretary of State during the race, he was “the referee, the contestant and the scorekeeper” for the 2018 gubernatorial election. He escaped accountability. Democracy decays.
Access to justice is diminishing. Tort law – the law of wrongful injuries – has been weakened in many states with arbitrary caps on damages for the most serious injuries. It also is harder than ever for citizens to get through to real people in government agencies.

Time to conclude and look forward to your indicators of societal decay. Send them to info@csrl.org or CSRL, P.O. Box 19367, Washington, DC 20036. The more Americans know where their country is heading, the more they may just want to work for a better future by participating in or supporting the movements dedicated to turning our democracy around.

A Memorable Statement to Contemplate

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” – Martin Luther King Jr.

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.