Ralph Nader's Blog, page 48
October 10, 2018
Let’s Start a Kavanaugh Watch to Check All Five Corporate Judges
By Ralph Nader
October 10, 2018
Brett Kavanaugh, the new Injustice of the Supreme Court of the United States, must be pleased by the leading news stories on Monday and Tuesday regarding his swift swearing-in on Saturday. The multiple perjurer, corporate supremacist, presidential power-monger, and a past fugitive from justice (regarding credible claims of sexual assault), Kavanaugh saw critical media coverage become yesterday’s story. The mass media has moved on to other calamities, tragedies, superstorms, and celebrity outrages. Opponents of his nomination must persevere anew.
The future of the Supreme Court looks grim considering Kavanaugh’s judicial decisions and involvement in war crimes and torture as Staff Secretary to President George W. Bush. It is likely that Kavanaugh will be the cruelest and most insensitive justice on the high Court. His support of corporate power will have few limits. That’s saying something, given the rulings of Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch.
Kavanaugh’s decisions and political statements are so off the wall, I’ve called him a corporation masquerading as a human being. Corporations’ uber alles is his pre-eminent core philosophy. Public Citizen’s analysis of his judicial record (apart from his extremist political ideology) showed that in split-decision cases (which are the most ideologically revealing cases), Kavanaugh ruled 15 times against worker rights and 2 times for worker rights. On environmental protection, he ruled 11 times for business interests and 2 times for the public’s interest. On consumer protection, he ruled 18 times for businesses and only 4 times for consumers. As for monopoly cases, he ruled 2 times for the corporation and zero times for market competition.
Kavanaugh also likes to rule for government power when it is arrayed against the people – ruling 7 times for police or human rights abuses and zero rulings for victims. On the other hand, governmental decisions that are protective of people interests will find Kavanaugh blocking the court room door more often than not. (See Public Citizen’s report).
The Alliance for Justice report on nominee Kavanaugh summed up their research with these words:
“He has repeatedly sided with the wealthy and the powerful over all Americans. He has fought consumer protections in the areas of automobile safety, financial services and a free and open Internet. Kavanaugh has also repeatedly ruled against workers, workplace protections and safety regulations… Kavanaugh has repeatedly ruled against efforts to combat climate change and the regulation of greenhouse gases. He also repeatedly ruled against protections for clean air..”
Locking in the 5 to 4 dominant corporate muscle of the Supreme Court will endanger you as a consumer and will jeopardize your health and economic well-being. Unless you become a corporation, your freedoms will be jeopardized. (See the Citizens United Decision in 2010 that allowed our elections to be overwhelmed with unlimited commercial campaign money and propaganda).
The cold-blooded, most corporate-indentured Republicans dominate our political process today. Mitch McConnell (see Kentucky Values), led by the election-buying Koch brothers, drove Kavanaugh’s nomination through the Senate, excluding important witnesses who wished to testify. To shore up claims of legitimacy, McConnell allowed the FBI to conduct a sham investigation that was shaped by Trump’s White House lawyer Don McGahn and the FBI head, Christopher Wray. Wray had previously worked with his friend Kavanaugh on the Starr investigation of Bill Clinton’s sexual misconduct.
Resilience and action are required. The Supreme Court is deeply political – forget about the claims of judicial independence by the five Justices in the majority. Their votes on issues of class, race, presidential and corporate power, peoples’ rights, and remedies and access to justice (day in court with trial by jury) against corporations are quite predictable.
A new Kavanaugh Watch group – lean and sharp – needs to be created to publicize the Five Corporatist Judges. Their unjust decisions, hiding behind stylized plausibility and casuistry, need to be unmasked and regularly relayed to the American people. Their speeches to the Federalist Society (that shoehorned them onto the Court) and other plutocratic audiences need to be publicized and critiqued. Importantly their refusal to recuse themselves, due to conflicts of interest or prior expressions of bias (as in Kavanaugh’s eruption on his last day of the Senate Judiciary hearings), need to be denounced. (See Laurence Tribe’s op-ed in the New York Times). Also, their light workload, as in the low numbers of cases they take, in contrast to the many cases they decline to hear, both requires more public attention.
The life-time ensconced enforcers of corporate state control over the lives of the American people and often innocent people abroad (permitting undeclared bloody wars of choice) must be confronted by “We the People.” We need to remember that the words “corporation” or “company” are not mentioned in the Constitution that starts with the phrase, “We the People.”
Finally, are there a few billionaires in the country, concerned enough about what their children, grandchildren and great grandchildren are going to inherit from our generation, to make a significant founding grant to launch the Kavanaugh and company watch dog project?
To donate, please visit: https://csrl.org/donate/.
October 4, 2018
The Root of the Internet’s Disrepute: Online Advertising!
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By Ralph Nader
October 4, 2018
In all the mounting media coverage of problems with the Internet, such as invasion of privacy, vulnerability to hacking, political manipulation, and user addiction, there is one constant: online advertising. Online advertising is the lifeblood of Google, Facebook, and many other Internet enterprises that profit by providing personal data to various vendors. Moreover, the move of tens of billions of dollars from conventional print and broadcast media continues, with devastating impacts, especially on print newspapers and magazines.
But does online advertising work for consumers? The Internet was once considered a less commercial medium. But today consumers are inundated with targeted ads, reviews, comments, friends’ reactions, and other digital data. Unfortunately for advertisers, consumers are not intentionally clicking on online ads in big numbers.
Google’s search ads tackle people when they search for a product or service. A controlled study by eBay research labs in 2014 concluded that Google was greatly exaggerating the effectiveness of such ads—at least those bought by eBay. eBay’s researchers concluded that “More frequent users whose purchasing behavior is not influenced by ads account for most of the advertising expenses, resulting in average returns that are negative.” This is the “I-was-gonna-buy-it-anyway problem,” says an article in the Atlantic.
The Atlantic notes:
Whether all advertising—online and off—is losing its persuasive punch…Think about how much you can learn about products today before seeing an ad. Comments, user reviews, friends’ opinions, price-comparison tools…they’re much more powerful than advertising because we consider them information rather than marketing. The difference is enormous: We seek information, so we’re more likely to trust it; marketing seeks us, so we’re more likely to distrust it.
Some companies like Coca-Cola have cooled on using online advertising. But advertising revenues keep growing for Google, Facebook, and the other giants of the Internet. These companies are racing to innovate, connecting ads to more tailored audiences, which tantalize and keeps hope springing eternal for the advertisers. The Internet ad sellers also provide detailed data to advertise themselves to the advertisers staying one step ahead of growing skepticism. This is especially a problem when there is inadequate government regulation of deceptive advertising. It is the Wild West! Online advertising revenues are the Achilles’ heel of these big Internet companies. Any decline will deflate them immensely; more than public and Congressional criticism of their intrusiveness, their massive allowed fakeries, their broken promises to reform, and their openings to unsavory political and commercial users. If they lose advertising revenue, a major revenue bubble will burst and there goes their business model, along with their funding for ventures from video hosting to global mapping.
After reviewing the many major negatives attributed to the Internet, the New York Times’ Farhad Manjoo writes, “So who is the central villain in this story, the driving force behind much of the chaos and disrepute online?… It’s the advertising business, stupid.” He adds, perhaps optimistically, “If you want to fix much of what ails the internet right now, the ad business would be the perfect perp to handcuff and restrain.”
Randall Rothenberg, who heads a trade association of companies in the digital ad business, urges advertisers “to take civic responsibility for our effect on the world.” Then he shows his frustration by saying that, “Technology has largely been outpacing the ability of individual companies to understand what is actually going on.” All of this even before artificial intelligence (AI) takes root. Meanwhile, Facebook, Google, and Twitter keep announcing new tools to make their ads “safe and civil” (Facebook), open and protective of privacy. At the same time matters keep getting worse for consumers. The backers and abusers keep getting more skilled too (see Youtube Kids ).
In a recent report titled “Digital Deceit,” authors Dipayan Ghosh and Ben Scott wrote:
The Central problem of disinformation corrupting American political culture is not Russian spies or a particular media platform. The central problem is that the entire industry is built to leverage sophisticated technology to aggregate user attention and sell advertising.
If so, why isn’t more public attention being paid to this root cause? Not by the mass media which is obviously too compromised by the Congress, by academia, or by more of US before “We the People” become the conditioned responders that Ivan Pavlov warned about so many years ago.
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September 26, 2018
Gross Hospital Negligence Does Not Exempt Celebrities
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By Ralph Nader
September 26, 2018
Solid studies by physicians at leading medical schools have been warning of the huge casualty toll that flows from preventable problems in hospitals. A 2016 peer-reviewed study by physicians at the Johns Hopkins University of Medicine estimated that at least 5,000 people a week in the U.S. lose their lives due to such causes as hospital-induced infection, medical malpractice, inattentiveness, and other deficiencies. Media attention lasted one day.
What will it take to make the powers-that-be outside and inside the government reduce what medical analysts call the third leading cause of death in America? Let that statement sink in—preventable problems in hospitals are the third leading cause of death in America after heart disease and cancer!
Indignation and frustration over the massive avoidance of action to save American lives and reduce even more preventable injuries and sicknesses prompted the issuance of an eye-opening, factual report by the Center for Justice and Democracy (lodged at New York Law School) titled “Top 22 Celebrities Harmed by Medical Malpractice.” Surely in a celebrity culture, this documented report should have made headlines and prompted widespread commentary. Unfortunately, the report received little coverage from major news outlets.
Let’s see if you agree that this compilation, written by Emily Gottlieb and conceived by Joanne Doroshow, the Center’s Director, should have been newsworthy. Surveys cited in the Report show that “Four in 10 adults have experience with medical errors, either personally or in the care of someone close to them.” “Nearly three-quarters [73 percent] of patients say they are concerned about the potential for medical errors.”
Count tennis superstar, Serena Williams, was among them. She had to save her own life overcoming inattentive medical personnel “that initially dismissed her legitimate concerns about lethal blood clots following the birth of her child.” That story made news. Other celebrities passed away without the public knowing the causes until lawsuits were filed and settlements were rendered. For the most part, the physicians have received reprimands, temporary suspensions, but rarely lost their license to practice.
Joan Rivers, the long-time comedian, entered an endoscopy center in July 2014 for a routine throat procedure in New York. Her vital signs started failing, but her caretakers were “so busy taking cell phone pictures of their famous patient that they missed the moment her vital signs plummeted,” according to her daughter Melissa who filed a successful lawsuit ending in a private settlement.
Celebrity doctors who “cater to ‘the demands of wealthy and/or famous drug-seekers’” are overprescribing pain killers and other drugs. Reckless practices “led to the premature deaths of legendary entertainers like Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe and Judy Garland, to name just three.” More recently, over-prescription of drugs has harmed or killed Michael Jackson , Prince, Anna Nicole Smith, and 3 Doors Down guitarist Matt Roberts, to name a few. These were not one-time prescriptions but rather deadly ministrations over time by physicians who knew the conditions and vulnerabilities of their famous patients.
Other tragedies recounted in the Center’s report, based on lawsuit evidence and/or a medical board sanction, include singer Julie Andrews (destroyed her singing career); Marty Balin, Jefferson Airplane’s co-founder and lead-singer (destroyed his career); comedian Dana Carvey (led to “serious illness”); Maurice Gibb, the Bee Gees’ star (“died in a Florida hospital”); NASCAR champion, Pete Hamilton (survived “horrendous surgical errors causing… multiple complications”); and John Ritter, the Emmy award-winning actor, was “misdiagnosed and improperly treated at a hospital where he died.”
The great sports writer, Dick Schaap died after routine hip replacement surgery, when contemporary tests showed his weakened lungs indicated that the procedure would be too dangerous.
In 1987, the pioneering artist, director, and producer, Andy Warhol, underwent gallbladder surgery and died a day later when medical personnel put too much fluid intravenously into his body.
The Center’s report concludes by noting that “health care in the United States can be incredibly unsafe, and this is true even for well-known actors, singers, musicians, athletes and other personalities …wealth and fame cannot shield someone from being victimized by a preventable medical error.”
Safety and health reforms are long overdue in hospitals and clinics astonishingly. The American Medical Association has not produced any calls to action with effective recommendations. State regulators are heavily compromised by conflicts of interest and low budgets. The federal government is AWOL. A minimum of 5,000 lives lost a week, not counting the casualties in clinics and medical offices is a serious health crisis. This ongoing epidemic should lead to public alarms and reforms long known but kept on the shelf. Contact your members of Congress and demand public hearings. The evidence cannot be ignored any longer.
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September 24, 2018
Consumer Voices Needed in US Privacy Debate
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By Ralph Nader and Marc Rotenberg
Last week the Federal Trade Commission scheduled two days of hearings to explore new challenges to consumers in the digital age. The hearings were heralded by incoming chair Joe Simons as the first comprehensive review of the consumer agency’s role in almost two decades. The only problem is that the FTC forgot to invite the consumers. There were professors and former commissioners. They were industry lobbyists, described as “experts in consumer protection law,” and agency officials. But no one was invited to represent the people the Commission is expected to protect or the people who would be impacted by the Commission’s actions.
The problem of silencing consumers is not limited to the FTC. Senate Commerce Chair John Thune has scheduled a hearing this week on “Examining Safeguards for Consumer Data Privacy.” The event is timely and the Chairman should be commended for convening the hearing. But the current witness list is all industry. There is a VP from AT&T and from Amazon. The Chief Privacy officer from Google was invited, as was the Legal Director for Twitter. Vice Presidents from Apple and Charter also made the cut.
But no one asked consumer representative to describe the current challenges American consumers face in the online marketplace. Do not be surprised if we get an exchange similar to the question Senator Orin Hatch asked Mark Zuckerberg when the Facebook CEO testified in Congress back in April, “what type of legislation would you like?”
The problem is not simply that a consumer agency or a Senate committee should routinely invite consumer representatives to testify on consumer issues. That is obvious. The problem is that that the framing of the discussion, without the consumer voice, reflects the assumptions and biases of the industry.
For example, at the FTC hearing last week industry lobbyists continued to focus on outdated notions of harm. Little was said about the growing risk of data breach and identity theft in the United States or the FTC’s failure to enforce its own consent orders. The industry lobbyists expressed skepticism about new efforts to safeguard consumers, but no consumer representative was there to defend or amplify these proposals. And all the big FTC merger approvals – Google’s acquisition of Doubleclick, Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram and then WhatsApp – were ignored.
Public policy suffers when critical voices are excluded. The range of options that policy makers consider is narrowed. This has a corrosive effect on democratic institutions, making it even more difficult to solve real problems. In the privacy world, for example, we now know that foreign adversaries are targeting the personal data gathered by US companies. That was true in the Equifax data breach that compromised the authenticating details — the social security numbers and dates of birth — of over one hundred million American consumers. It is true in many other data breaches, yet current US consumer protection law nowhere acknowledges the problem. As Senator Warren has rightly said, data protection is now a matter of national security.
There is also a close tie between unbounded data collection and industry consolidation. Firms use their detailed knowledge of consumers to fortify their monopoly position and stifle innovation. Consumers in these two-sided markets have little say over who has access to their data or how it is used. And there is little evidence that “data portability,” a concept favored by the monopolists, has promoted new entrants or competition. These issues should have been at the top of the list for an FTC hearing on consumer protection and competition. But crickets.
Beyond consumer protection, national security, competition, and innovation, there is one of other issue that looms large in the debate on data protection – the future of democracy. This is partly about the manipulation of public opinion by the Internet giants, such as Facebook, and the specific case Cambridge Analytica, but there are also structural problems that have retrenched corporate statism.
Speaking at Davos in 2018, George Soros made clear the threat that the tech titans pose to democratic institutions. As Soros explained, “as Facebook and Google have grown into ever more powerful monopolies, they have become obstacles to innovation, and they have caused a variety of problems of which we are only now beginning to become aware.” Soros warned in January “there is an even more alarming prospect on the horizon,” there could be an alliance between authoritarian states and IT monopolies that would join corporate surveillance with state-sponsored surveillance.
Soros called out China and Russia and in just the last few months the Intercept reported on Dragonfly, Google’s secret project to develop a search engine for the Chinese government that would not only censor search results but would also uniquely link search queries to identifiable users. That is a risk with Google search that US privacy advocates have warned the FTC about for more than a decade, yet the consumer agency has failed to act even as that technique are is deployed to censor speech and support authoritarian governments.
Another recent story reported in the libertarian magazine Reason notes “Google complied last week with the Russian government’s demand that it remove YouTube ads featuring Alexei Navalny, a well-known critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin.” The same company that has called the Right to Be Forgotten, which protects the privacy rights of Internet users, “censorship” seems quite willing to take down core political speech. Perhaps if the FTC had blocked Google’s acquisition of YouTube, as consumer groups had urged, there would be more freedom to express controversial views in Russia today. That issue was also ignored during the FTC hearings.
There are many reasons why it is so vital that public institutions, such as the FTC and the Senate Commerce Committee, ensure the participation of consumer advocates in the debate over the future of privacy protection. Change is taking place quickly and it is those advocates who are in the best position to advise policy makers. The alternative, which we are now witnessing, is a backward-looking justification of ineffective policies or an invitation to industry to design the regulations it would favor. Neither approach will solve the problems facing consumers and the country.
In a recent letter to the Senate Commerce Committee, Jeff Chester with the Center for Digital Democracy expresses “surprise and concern” that not a single consumer representative was invited to testify. Mr. Chester asks whether any of the industry groups will put forward proposals to establish baseline privacy legislation, strengthen penalties for data breaches, or reduce the secret profiling of American consumers. “How can members of the Committee develop sensible solutions if they are not even aware of the full range of options?” he wrote. Many consumer organizations supported Mr. Chester’s efforts.
The voices of these consumer advocates should be heard. It is not too late to start a meaningful dialogue on the future of privacy in America.
Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate. Marc Rotenberg is President of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
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September 21, 2018
Statement on the FAA Authorization Bill
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The FAA authorization bill, facing a September 30 deadline, includes a provision, section 3129, authorizing the Secretary of Transportation to decide whether fees by the airlines are “unreasonable or disproportionate to the costs incurred.”
Skyrocketing airlines fees total nearly $5 billion a year and are the leading cause of airline passenger complaints to Congress. Members of Congress fly a lot and they are also irritated by airline fees. So why is section 3129 not a shoo-in for passage? Maybe a survey of all those freebies the airlines bestow upon our Senators and Representatives provides an explanation. On May 1, 2018 we sent a survey to every member of Congress about their views on airline perks reserved for the political class. See: https://nader.org/2018/05/01/letter-t...
Not one member of Congress responded to the survey which was sent to them twice. Shouldn’t your Senators and Representatives hear from you, air travelers? Tell the politicians to stop taking these freebies, stop taking airline campaign money and vote for section 3129.
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September 18, 2018
Questions, Questions Where are the Answers?
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By Ralph Nader
September 18, 2018
In an oft-reported exchange between Gertrude Stein, an American widely known for her wisdom and glittering 1920s Parisian literary salon, and one of her earnest admirers, the admirer asked her – “What are the answers, Madame Stein?” She replied “What are the questions?”
Within our media/political/corporate culture of self-censorship and taboo topics, we should restate Ms. Stein’s rejoinder—what are the questions of gravity and relevance that are chronically unasked?
Here are some questions that should be asked, until answered!
Why are Supreme Court nominees, including Judge Brett Kavanaugh, not asked by the Senate Judiciary Committee about corporate crime, tyrannical, one-sided fine print contracts, weakened tort law and U.S. violations of constitutional and international law affecting all Americans?
Why do reporters and elected and regulatory officials decline to ask questions about peer-reviewed studies concluding a minimum of 250,000 Americans are losing their lives every year due to preventable problems in hospitals? (see Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine’s May 2016 report). Five thousand fatalities a week on the average plus many more preventable injuries and illnesses should be an ongoing subject of urgent inquiry for action.
Computerized billing fraud is rampant. Last year in the health care industry alone, computerized billing fraud amounted to about $350 billion dollars. The leading expert, Harvard’s Malcolm Sparrow, and a Congressional GAO report estimate at least 10% of all health expenditures are a result of fraudulent billings. Why aren’t the TV networks, PBS and NPR, and the major newspapers all over this massive ongoing heist?
Sanctions imposed on foreign agencies and personnel are flying out of Washington. What are these sanctions, how are they enforced, are they legal under international law, is there any due process to protect the innocent or indirect victims, and how are they countered? There are regular stories about the U.S. government announcements of sanctions, but no follow-up questions about this burgeoning unilateral foreign policy.
The Taliban is composed of no more than 30,000 to 35,000 fighters without an air force, navy or heavy ground armor. Why are they holding down for over a decade U.S. forces and their allies many times their number, with advanced weaponry, and enlarging their territorial control? Is it because expelling foreign invaders motivates their astonishing determination? And who are all those suicide bombers and what is motivating them to stand in line waiting for the call?
Why has the Congressional scrutiny of the wasteful, unauditable military budget crumbled as never before with the Democrats voting for more money than even Trump initially asked for in the last funding cycle? Over 50 percent of the federal government operating expenses goes to defense? Both parties act as if adequate money for infrastructure repair in this country is nowhere to be found.
Why aren’t the hundreds of full-time reporters covering Congress demanding to know why members, or their staff, routinely do not reply to substantive letters, calls, or e-mails, without constant hammering by citizens? The exception is if you are a campaign donor. Why are Congressional offices often so unavailable during working hours? If you are lucky you can leave a message on the office voicemail. Inside the heavily guarded Russell Senate Office Building, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) even locks the door to his suite of offices.
Similar non-responsiveness holds true with government agencies in the executive branches at the federal and state levels. A group of citizens, including me, has been waiting for months to get a reply from the Justice Department about their request for the Department‘s position on starting a long needed corporate crime database. One would think that newspapers, begging for readers, would do regular, random surveys of these agencies who, after all, work for the people they are shutting out. Small wonder citizens are turned off government when they can’t get through to get answers to their critical inquiries.
When I manage to get through to them, I tell newspaper, radio, or TV reporters and editors about agencies that do not respond (corporations are another dark void of obstruction) they invariably say that this would be a good service story for their readers, viewers, and listeners. Yet somehow, they never do such surveys of agencies, perhaps because as news people they have an easier time in getting through.
Have you had a serious personal or critical inquiry put to your U.S. Senator or Representative that has gone unanswered? Send us your ignored letter or email or telephone request by October 1, and we’ll try to get you an answer from your hired hands on Capitol Hill. Or shall we call the place “Wuthering Heights”?
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Letters from Nicholas Kachman
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Nicholas Kachman spent his professional career as a chemical engineer at General Motors from 1957 to 1993, specializing in curtailing toxic hazards in the workplace and into the outside environment by GM. For years he was GM’s technical liaison with the Environmental Protection Agency on regulatory matters. After his retirement, Mr. Kachman wrote in 2015 the revealing book, GM – Paint It Red: Inside General Motors’ Culture of Failure (Mariner Publishing), which described his insider’s account of the mega-billion dollar boondoggle that was supposed to deal with the serious air pollution from the notoriously toxic auto painting process in car factories. He continues to provide moral and technical admonitions to his former employer, as exemplified in the following two letters to GM officials.
See the letters below:
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September 13, 2018
Where is the Democrats’ Contract with America 2018?
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By Ralph Nader
September 13, 2018
What does the Democratic Party stand for? The big question persists! Typical of the Democrats, they delegated this question to political consultants who came up with the vapid slogan, “A Better Deal.” The specifics under that moniker are too general and, as a result, too easily dismissed by the public.
The Democratic operatives need to take a page out of Newt Gingrich’s playbook when he toppled an anemic Democratic House of Representatives in the stunning 1994 elections and became Speaker of the House.
During the 1994 Congressional campaign, Gingrich’s party released a “Contract with America.” It was so anti-American that comedians called it a “Contract on America.” For example, the “Contract with America” attacked the fundamental right of having your full day in court, based on falsely asserting there was an “endless tide of litigation.” That was only one of the ways Gingrich pleased the big corporations.
House Democratic leaders Nancy Pelosi and her deputy, Steny Hoyer, just can’t put forward a compelling agenda. They seem unable to speak assuredly and concretely about how their agenda will improve peoples’ lives.
Congressman Hoyer returned from a listening tour of the U.S. where he only listened to himself. In his summation speech, Hoyer declined to put numbers and specifics about raising the minimum wage or expanding healthcare. Moreover, his tour seemed to ignore the multiple devastations that unaccountable global corporations are having on this country.
Fortunately there are a few dozen insurgents in the Democratic Party who are winning Congressional primaries and are addressing progressive specifics. But their numbers need to grow.
Unfortunately, the “Old Guard” still dominates the Democratic Party. Maybe this November election will change this. If the Democrats wish finally to prevail over the worst, cruelest, most corrupt, war-mongering, Wall Street toady Republican Party in history, they need to be clear in their convictions. The Democrats need a resounding declaration of what they stand for with major news conferences, political ads, get-out-the-vote materials, and speeches before large audiences.
A Democratic Party “Contract with America” should include a $15 per hour federal minimum wage—up from the present frozen $7.25 an hour. It should endorse a Medicare–for-all system that emphasizes preventive care, cost controls on drug companies, and prevention of criminal or immoral overcharging. Serious attention should be paid to saving lives and preventing injuries and diseases. Preventable problems in hospitals are taking at least 5,000 lives per week (see Johns Hopkins May 2016 report).
A Democratic “Contract with America” should commit to what over 85 percent of the American people want—tough law enforcement on corporate crime, fraud, and abuse. Consumers, workers, and small taxpayers would understand such a pledge. Many anxieties, dread, and fear in peoples’ hassled daily lives come from lawless or abusive companies. Taxpayers would relish cracking down on businesses that defraud Medicare, Medicaid, military contracts, and almost always get away with it.
The Contract should include an empowering agenda and also a commitment to democracy — shifting power from the few to the many workers, consumers, and voters. The Democrats know how to overcome Republican voter suppression and how to make it easier for Americans to band together to defend themselves, through open access to the courts, forming labor unions, consumer cooperatives, and taxpayer watchdog associations.
It is also time to launch a long overdue dedication to major public works and infrastructure projects that will produce millions of good-paying jobs—paid for by restoring corporate and super-rich taxes, along with decreasing the bloated, wasteful military budget that exceeds half of the entire federal government’s operating expenditures.
The Democratic Party should reverse course and tell taxpayers they will oppose all those massive corporate welfare (crony capitalism) subsidies, hand-outs, and bailouts that embody the hypocrisy of so-called corporate capitalists right down to those stadiums and ballparks taxpayers pay for without even getting naming rights!
Democrats, frantically dialing for corporate campaign dollars, have become anemic, fuzzing their campaigns with weak rhetoric and losing so much of the peoples’ trust. They have joined with the Republicans on waging boomeranging wars instead of waging peace and engaging in treaties protecting workers, consumers, and the environment.
The Party requires crisp clarity, repeated again and again in believable ways and means in the coming weeks. So when the words “Democratic Party” are spoken, millions of voters would know what it stands for so they can hold candidates specifically accountable should there be any post-election betrayals.
So, Democratic National Chairman, Tom Perez, where is the Party’s Contract with America? Send him a message at https://www.tomperez.org/contact-1/.
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September 5, 2018
Stop Brett Kavanaugh— A Corporation Masquerading as a Judge
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By Ralph Nader
September 5, 2018
Observers say that confirmation of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to become President Trump’s second pick for a lifetime job on the Supreme Court will make the Court more conservative. It is more accurate to say Kavanaugh will make the Court more corporatist.
With Kavanaugh, it is all about siding with corporations over workers, consumers, patients, motorists, the poor, minority voters, and beleaguered communities.
Repeatedly Kavanaugh’s judicial opinions put corporate interests ahead of the common good—backing the powerful against the weak, the vulnerable, and the defenseless.
Apart from his declared views pouring power and immunity into the Presidency (which is why Trump wants him), Kavanaugh could be the most corporate judge in modern American history. Two meticulous reports on his judicial decisions, one by the Alliance for Justice (AFJ) and one by Public Citizen demonstrate that for him it’s all about corporations uber alles.
Here is AFJ’s summary:
Kavanaugh has repeatedly ruled against efforts to combat climate change and the regulation of greenhouse gases. He also repeatedly ruled against protections for clean air. He has repeatedly sided with the wealthy and the powerful over all Americans. He has fought consumer protections in the areas of automobile safety, financial services, and a free and open internet. Kavanaugh has also repeatedly ruled against workers, workplace protections and safety regulations.
Do you want him to be on the Supreme Court?
Kavanaugh is a corporate supremacist to a fanatic level of protecting corporate cruelty and greed. Giving him an unaccountable lifetime position on the Court will weaken our democracy and empower the corporate state.
What will he do when cases involve robots harming workers or consumers; corporate algorithms corkscrewing consumers; corporations turning the governments against their citizens; and corporate criminals being bailed out by taxpayers?
Fortunately, Kavanaugh gives us more than a clue from his many judicial decisions and dissents, especially with healthcare cases coming before the Court. Public Citizen’s factually-based report on Judge Kavanaugh’s opinions in split-decision cases provides insight into his judicial philosophy.
He ruled 15 times against worker rights, 2 times for worker rights. On environmental protection, he ruled 11 times for business interests and 2 times for the public’s interest. On consumer and regulatory cases, he ruled 18 times for businesses and 4 times for consumer protection interests. In the area of antitrust or anti-monopoly, he ruled 2 times for the corporations and zero times for market competition.
He seems to love government power when it is arrayed against the people, ruling 7 times for police or human rights abuses versus zero rulings for the victims. But he rules against government agencies when they are protecting the interests of the people over those of corporations.
Even more extreme, he does not like human beings to sue corporations or sue the government. But if you are a corporation, the courthouse doors are always open.
Kavanaugh rules like he is a corporation masquerading as a human. But in his introductory statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee, he wanted us to see him a regular guy, weirdly remembering the row and seat number at two professional sports games his father took him to as a child and listing all the names of his sixth grade daughter’s basketball team.
Shame on Chairman Charles Grassley (R-IA) for severely restricting the voices from civil society allowed to testify before the Judiciary Committee. No wonder Code Pink had to protest from the galleries.
Watch out for a cruel man with a folksy smile. Watch once again the Democratic Senators on the Senate Judiciary Committee minimizing Kavanaugh’s bias for corporations— except for Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI).
Given the lives, injuries, and sickness at stake; given the dictatorially approved taxpayer-funded corporate welfare and bloated corporate contracts with governments draining the peoples’ necessities, given Kavanaugh’s mindless support for corporate dollars corruptly buying elections, maybe the motto against this awful nomination should be “Kavana-ugh!”
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August 31, 2018
Letter to President Donald Trump
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August 31, 2018
President Donald Trump
White House
1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW
Washington, DC 20500
Dear President Trump:
There is a double peril for consumer safety and our national security for you to ponder during your Labor Day vacation. First, the New York Times reported that China is withholding samples of a dangerous flu virus—the lethal H7N9 avian flu—from U.S. health authorities. A World Health Organization agreement requires participating countries to share potentially dangerous influenza samples “in a timely manner.” These specimens are urgently needed to develop vaccines and treatments in anticipation of a global pandemic emanating from the Chinese mainland, as have other lesser epidemics in the past.
China’s delay in sending these lab samples is being explained as part of China’s response to your trade tariffs—as a signal that China has another strong hand to play. This is truly a dangerous game of chicken. Are you up to considering the gravity of this behavior for both the public health and national security of the peoples of the United States?
The second peril can be placed right on the backs of the giant U.S. drug companies, who you charged earlier were, in your words, “getting away with murder.” You were probably referring to their extreme price gouging and their role in promoting recklessly opioid drugs to both physicians and patients. Well, add some more gravity by giving tweet time and air time to our country’s dangerous dependency of the outsourcing of manufacturing of major drugs and drug ingredients to China and, to a lesser extent, India.
These drugs include: Antibiotics, anticoagulants, antidepressants, blood pressure medicines, cancer drugs, birth control pills, and many others. Penicillin is no longer manufactured in the USA.
The immensely profitable U.S. drug companies are not satisfied with the absence of reasonable drug price controls, as are established in most other nations, and billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded research and development, including clinical trials, given away to selected drug giants, nor the billions of dollars in tax credits for their conducting research. They are not satisfied with charging Americans the highest drug prices in the world for the same drugs that are often available for lower prices in other countries. No, they want even more profits. They have put patients in our country in serious jeopardy. One contaminated drug— Heparin, a blood thinner—already took scores of American lives before it was recalled.
If you want a fuller story about the extraordinary amount of dependence on China for drugs and essential ingredients, produced under less than FDA standards would have allowed in this country, please read the new book, China Rx by Rosemary Gibson and Janardan Prasad Singh (Prometheus Books). According to Gibson and Singh “Noncompliance with U.S. standards is a deliberate competitive strategy. As long as they aren’t caught, they continue to win contracts. Lower prices discourage production in the United States and force worldwide sourcing, thereby risking poorer quality products.”
Read the favorable comments on the flap by very worried people such as former attorney general Edwin Meese III; Jim Guest, former president of Consumer Reports; Major General Larry J. Lust (Ret.); Scott Paul, president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing; Daniel Slane, commissioner, US-China Economic and Security Review Commission; and University of Minnesota professor and author Michael T. Oserholm, arguably the nation’s leading expert on infectious diseases.
Your immediate attention should be directed to the ticking time bombs that should not be allowed to tick away on your presidential watch. You are on full public notice that urgent action is necessary.
Thank you for your serious and immediate consideration.
Sincerely,
Ralph Nader
PO Box 19312
Washington, DC 20036
info@csrl.org
202-387-8034
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