Ralph Nader's Blog, page 50
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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August 29, 2018
Fifteen Ways the Democrats Can Lose the November Elections
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By Ralph Nader
August 29, 2018
Focus on Donald Trump’s personal scandals, the Russian interference, and Trump’s outrageous and hugely distracting daily tweets.
Overlook what Trump’s henchmen are specifically doing to cause more deaths, injuries, and disease. Ignore this administration’s efforts to scuttle health and safety standards; stop law enforcement against corporate outlaws who pollute the environment, marketplace, and workplace; take federal cops off the Wall Street crime beat that is eating into your savings, while speculating with your pensions and mutual funds. Avoid all the above, while you’re dialing for dollars for your campaign coffers.
Giving lip service to raising the federal minimum wage. Do not mount a tough, authentic campaign with details and timetables to help the 30 million Americans still making less than workers made in 1968, adjusted for inflation.
Avoid talking about the need to crack down on corporate crooks who are bleeding Americans dry—to the tune of one trillion dollars a year.
Refuse to put forward a Canadian style healthcare for all system, with free choices of doctors and hospitals. Single payer would result in life-saving outcomes and come in at half the per capita cost of the current price gouging, wasteful, claim-denying monstrosity ruled by big insurance companies, big drug companies and big hospital chains.
Do not talk specifics about public corruption. Do not put forward a detailed plan to take on corruption with adequate enforcement budgets and penalties that fit the crimes.
Do not talk about public funding of campaigns, clean elections, universal voting (with write-ins and none-of-the-above options), ending voter suppression, and returning to paper ballots that can never be hacked. Keep spending huge amounts of your time at fat-cat fundraising parties or calling possible donors on the phone.
Fail to speak forcefully for more workers rights and strong labor unions, more consumer protections, and more access to the courts for wrongfully injured or defrauded Americans. Fail to focus more on climate disruption, the bloated military budget that is draining our public infrastructure and depriving Americans of good jobs. Keep censoring yourself by treating these causes like taboo subjects.
Never mention education reform meaning students learning civic skills from books and experiential learning in their communities. Prohibit the seeds of democracy from being planted. Do not push for cracking down on fraudulent for-profit universities and forgiving student debt, ending massive corporate tax loopholes and starting tuition-free higher public education.
Be sure to ignore important local issues of concern that affect already engaged conservative and liberal voters. The powers-that-be at all levels have few votes compared to the vast number of eligible voters. Be sure that you spend most of your campaign money on redundant television ads rather than on neighborhood by neighborhood get-out-the-vote drives.
Make sure you rehire those conflicted, avaricious political consultants who have already been overly paid to lose the last four Congressional elections to the worse, most corrupt, war mongering, Wall Street toady, anti-worker, anti-consumer, and anti-environment Republican Party in history. Give these consultants another chance to deep-six your close races.
Avoid connecting with the emerging left/right alliance for criminal justice reform of mass incarceration, brutish prison conditions, runaway prosecutors, and the war on drugs.
Do not address the horrific costs of Empire. Ignore the futile wars without end, the blowbacks and destruction of innocent peoples and their communities in more and more countries, the violations of our Constitution. Stand by as the federal government violates federal laws and international treaties. Especially ignore what most of our returning veterans want to tell us about these boomeranging disasters spawned by both parties.
Don’t get near the fundamental issue of shifting power from the few to the many, of building democratic institutions, of providing inexpensive facilities so people can more easily band together to protect themselves. (If you don’t know what all this involves, that is because you’ve frozen out the civil society from your sterile campaigns, which historically has been the builder of a more just democracy).
Stifle the progressive, young insurgents in the Democratic Party, as you did with Bernie Sanders’ primary campaign in 2016. Again entrench the old Guard of loser Democratic apparatchiks.
If you do all the above, the Republicans will continue to enjoy their control of the federal branches of our captured government and many state legislatures. It is time for Democrats to stop singing from the corporate state’s songbook, and really stand “with liberty and justice for all.”
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August 22, 2018
Calling for Ten Million More Voters, a Few Billionaires, and a Just Congress
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By Ralph Nader
August 22, 2018
About 80 days separate the people from the November 6th Congressional elections. Judging by the past midterm turnout, at least 125 million age-eligible voters will stay home. Too many people say: “Can’t be bothered;” “politicians don’t care about me;” “all politicians lie so why should I be part of that game;” “I’m not into politics;” “Nobody I like.”
Whoever finds the way to bring ten million or so of these non-voters to the polls in swing Congressional Districts will solidly control the Congress. Control of the House of Representatives by the Democratic Party stops most of Trumpism in its tracks, assuming the Democrats use their power and uphold their sworn duties in domestic and military/foreign matters under the Constitution.
Ten million non-voters becoming voters may not seem so decisive. Remember, however, that John Kerry lost to George W. Bush in 2004 by less than 90,000 votes just in Ohio. Donald Trump swung the key Electoral College votes in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin by a mere 107,000 votes.
Therefore, let’s ask the question: What’s it worth in costs compared to benefits? How do we achieve a progressive Congress, committed to the needs and rights of the American people and not beholden to the big corporations? A mere half a billion dollars would achieve that objective—about what the Koch brothers’ network intends to spend this year.
The benefit of increasing the turnout of informed voters is a more enlightened Congress. A new and improved Congress could produce huge savings in dollars, lives, health, safety, and improve the environment. In addition, a new Congress could end boomeranging illegal wars, enact a long-overdue increased minimum wage, corporate tax reform, facilitate faster conversion to solar-renewable energy, and restore our public facilities with good local jobs. Our public transit, national parks, schools, highways, bridges, libraries, and community health clinics all need repairs. Ending massive, taxpayer-funded corporate welfare and taming the bloated, skyrocketing military budget that is devouring our public resources are also benefits of rebuilding a responsive Congress.
The list could go on, but permit a single example. Over a decade ago, it was revealed that a single disclosure line, put back in the tax forms filed by business partnerships, would end a loophole that has cost Uncle Sam anywhere from $7 billion to $20 billion a year in tax revenue. The corporate-indentured Congress refused to approve such a line and fund its implementation.
In the massive accounts receivable for big business that is our federal budget, you can pick and choose what can be saved were a super-majority of our 535 Representatives and Senators accountable to the voters and they definitely can be.
How would a half-billion dollars for voter education and mobilization be spent effectively? Not by using the same old ways of getting out the non-voters that have failed again and again.
First, most get-out-the-vote efforts target registered voters. Non-voters are considered, for the most part, too hard to convert into voters.
The reasons are obvious. You don’t get these conversions by the usual last-minute phone banks, post cards and door knocks. You have to have adequate time and you need engaged neighborhood people-to-people resources for at least several weeks to achieve those persuasions through relationships of trust and discussion and you may need transportation facilities. Voter suppression and registration barriers also need to be overcome one voter, one family at a time.
In the late 1880s, dirt-poor Texas farmers started one of the greatest political revolts/reforms in American history. Spreading into many other states, this populist surge— against the rapacity of banks, railroads and their political toadies— elected Governors, took over state legislatures, installed members of Congress and almost won the presidency. What did the farmers have? Their land, open minds, courage, heart, passion, energy, and the Post Office.
What did they lack? Money (other than the $1 dues from each Texas farmer), telephones, paved roads, motor vehicles, radio, television, and the Internet. Yet somehow they pulled it off and we’re benefiting this day from their electoral, economic, and pro-farmer-labor reforms.
At present, every neighborhood, housing project, and community has what political analysts call “influentials,” long known and trusted people who can be persuasive in converting non-voters to voters. Two thousand full-time organizers can spark these “influentials” into action—if the organizers have the financial resources to pay for necessary expenses, arrange pot-luck suppers, and provide transportation to the polls.
Backup support by people skilled in administration, law, accounting, recruitment, public relations, and media would accelerate the pace and minimize pitfalls. Moving people together in buses to the polls followed by celebratory dinners increases the spirit, the elan of what would likely become a widely publicized movement, extending beyond Election Day, replete with visuals, posters, special songs, and even empowering parades.
Five billionaires could provide the money with one resolute meeting! Our country has more than that number of concerned philanthropists with records of enlightenment. They are worried about the downward direction of our country and what it means to the children and grandchildren, and to our precious environment, to our need for stable peace. They want to be good ancestors. They can make a very quick decision and start making it happen.
Are any possible benefactors listening? If so, contact us at nader.org.
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August 15, 2018
Going Fundamental Eludes Congressional Progressives
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By Ralph Nader
August 15, 2018
I’ve recently received fundraising letters from Senator Elizabeth Warren and Senator Chuck Schumer on behalf of their Democratic Party’s campaign committees. Mostly, all they ask for is money, though Schumer’s letter includes a short tough letter to President Trump for us to sign which they promise to deliver to the White House.
Although politicians review and sign fundraising letters, rarely do they write them. That lucrative task is left to political consulting firms that also profitably consult for corporations. That’s why the letters are so formulaic.
Over the years I have urged incumbents and candidates for elected office to do more than ask people for money. Why not ask them for their time, their minds, and their dedication by having “time-raisers,” not just “fund-raisers”? Great idea they uniformly say. This never gets done. Their consultants think asking for anything other than money diminishes donations. So the dreary letters continue to arrive with grand promises and few specifics. For example, both letters mentioned the need for higher minimum wages. Wages have been stagnant for many years while corporate profits and executive bonuses have skyrocketed on the backs of millions of American workers. But there is no mention of how high a minimum wage (gutted by inflation since the 1970s) these Democrats are committed to supporting. Similarly, there are no specifics that address protecting health care, social security, reversing huge tax cuts to big business, debloating military budgets and stopping costly, reckless wars. If politicians don’t give you specifics and timetables, they’re creating their own loopholes should they be elected.
Now comes the spanking new “People’s Budget” released by the House of Representatives Progressive Caucus of the Democratic Party (see
“The People’s Budget”). It is 40 pages with charts that rebuke and reject the cruel and vicious agenda of the corporatist, war-mongering, deficit-booming Republican toadies of Wall Street, and the fossil fuel and nuclear industries. The organized lobbies against the modest necessities of workers, consumers, and defenseless communities dominate the federal budget process.
But the CPC’s “People’s Budget” has its own infirmities. It doesn’t address very weak corporate crime enforcement, to repealing specific anti-labor laws, like the Taft-Hartley Act, to being number-specific in cutting the bloated, corporate crime-ridden military budget, or even giving a number to a higher minimum wage.
Showing both large expenditures for restoring social safety net programs and large savings by reducing corporate welfare, restoring corporate taxes, and adding some new ones such as a speculation tax on Wall Street transactions, the “People’s Budget” still comes off as a blizzard of funding for old programs with their welfare industries.
For example, the Progressive Caucus Budget does not recommend a universal basic income (UBI)—historically supported by liberal and conservative thinkers and politicians. UBI, in an age of rapid automation, would reduce the need for some of those welfare programs and bureaucracies.
The “People’s Budget” goes into details explaining its health care policies, without even mentioning what it proposes to do about $350 billion in annual billing fraud and abuse by the health care vendors. Not a word about 5,000 or more lives lost every week in our country from preventable problems in hospitals, according to a recent Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine study. These are gigantic tragedies destroying peoples’ lives, regardless of how important it is to provide affordable and accessible healthcare.
Although the “People’s Budget” covers a myriad of needs, it is strangely minimalist on strengthening democracy besides stopping voter repression. Can you have a “People’s Budget” without people power?
These Progressives should have included a section on “Shift of Power” from the few to the many, arguing for a fuller system of electoral reform, experiential civic skills training in schools, fundamental corporate reform (from corporate charters to corporate personhood), and giving people usable tools for democratic engagement.
A full-blown assault on the corporate destruction of freedom of contract (one-sided fine print) and the (tort) law of wrongful injuries should have come naturally to these Progressives. But it did not.
Timid on taking on corporate-induced deficits, quagmires of boomeranging Empire (though the “People’s Budget” advocates for auditing the Pentagon) and the massive waste and loss of life from health care commercialism (that far less expensive single payer has avoided in Canada, with better outcomes), the Progressive Caucus report reads too much like a revised New Deal laundry list.
Its wonky style does not lend itself to on the ground campaigning before voters hungry for regaining control over their lives and looking for changes that restore self-reliant economies detached from the speculative risks and greed of the global corporate disorder.
People are essentially looking for fair play, empowerment, respect, voice, and reduction of the overall rat race that provokes so much anxiety, dread, and fear. They want time, yes time, for their families and other pursuits than sinking into deeper debts from distant forces way beyond their accountability. This “People’s Budget,” to gain traction, cannot be about “bread” alone. Thomas Jefferson understood the political economy, but he also knew the importance of non-material goals that connected the economy to “the pursuit of happiness.”
Let’s hope candidates for the November election remember those finer intangibles that move more people to become better informed voters.
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August 7, 2018
Apple’s CEO Tim Cook— Serf Labor, Overpriced iPhones, and Wasted Burning Profits
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By Ralph Nader
August 7, 2018
The New York Times screamed its Headline— “In 1997, Apple was 90 Days from Going Broke. On Thursday [Aug. 2, 2018], It Became the first publicly traded American company to be valued at…$1,000,000,000,000.” The first trillion dollar company!
The boosters and commentators cheered, adding, “How High Could it Go?” In CEO’s Tim Cook’s announcement, we learned that there were $20 billion more of the shareholders money spent on wasteful stock buybacks. Stock buybacks enable fatter compensation metrics for Apple’s bosses (see Steven Clifford’s The CEO Pay Machine). Corporate managers love stock buybacks.
Earlier this year Apple executives dictatorially announced that it was going to spend $100 billion to buying back its stock, without of course, receiving the owners-shareholders’ approval. The owners might have preferred that some of that amount be used to pay them greater cash dividends. More far-sighted shareholders consider the presumably longer-view: institutional shareholders might have recommended more productive and equitable uses for that vast sum.
Some suggestions: Two billion dollars (a mere 2 percent of that $100 billion) would double the wages of its 1.3 million serf-workers driven to the wall by Apple’s Chinese-based mega-factory contractor. Another two billion would have made major improvements in the global recycling of the present deadly (to the environment and workers) handling of toxic discarded iPhones and computers. Some of that $100 billion could have gone to productive investments, R&D, shoring up Apple’s pension plan, raising wages of Apple’s employees, paying Apple’s fair share of taxes or, consumers take note, lowering the prices of their over-priced phones and components.
Apple’s media cheerleaders can only see blizzards of dollars. They don’t see the damage that this touted “successful business model” is doing to Apple stakeholders.
Exceptionally, Mark Phillips in his page one New York Times story on Apple’s report takes note of the corporate concentration in business profits and markets. “Economists,” he writes, “are starting to look into whether the rise of so-called super-star firms is contributing to the lackluster wage growth, shrinking the middle class and raising income inequality in the United States. The vast social and political influence wielded by their mega-companies has prompted lawmakers to demand more regulation to rein them in.”
Apple’s business model rests on low wage-labor in China and gouging iPhone consumers in the U.S. The federal cops on the corporate antitrust beat have been asleep for years— a somnolence well recognized by Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Google.
Phillips reports “Apple and Google provide the software for 99% of all smartphones. Facebook and Google take 59 cents of every dollar spent on online advertising in the United States. Amazon exerts utter dominance over online shopping and is quickly getting bigger, fast, in areas liking streaming of music and videos.”
The CEOs of these companies behave like “Emperors,” a designation levelled at Exxon/Mobile’s CEO years ago by prominent shareholder advocate Robert Monks at the company’s annual meeting. These new CEOs exude arrogance (sometimes with false Zuckerberg-like public humility). Once they hook their customers, the network costs for customers switching to a competition become higher with time and also serve to discourage any new would-be competitor. Years ago, dominant Hertz rent-a-car had Avis as a competitor. Who are the domestic non-collusive Avis equivalents to the aforementioned Big Four today?
The big institutional shareholders like Vanguard, Fidelity and giant worker pension-funds better wake up. Tim Cook can ignore small shareholder complaints with impunity. The big institutional shareholders, with their skilled staff, can get his attention. They can take a longer, responsible view and demand that he stop burning all their shareholder money with buybacks and give shareholders more in cash dividends and other important investments that produce productive and equitable outcomes.
Concentration of market power in other fields feed the likelihood of future instability through a domino effect. The top five megabanks in the U.S. control about half of the deposits, compared to about one-fifth twenty years ago. Labor’s annual share of the nation’s wealth gains have been declining since the 1990s. Speculation on Wall Street, slowed after the great crash of 2008, is roaring ahead toward the inevitable cliffs of unbridled greed. More taxpayer bailouts?
Grave risk levels are signaling caution; yet incredibly, a Republican Congress and Trump have loosened regulation on Wall Street.
As for you the people, your next big chance to grab hold of Congress and slow down these corporate supremacists comes in November. Do a little homework and find out who is on your side. “Slogan voters” are suckers.
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August 1, 2018
Why Not Tell Us Their Names?
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By Ralph Nader
August 1, 2018
In elementary school they taught us the names of inventors. Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, Robert Fulton the steamboat, Alexander Graham Bell the telephone, and Thomas Alva Edison the electric light bulb. Nowadays we rarely know the names of the inventors of modern technology—think biotechnology, nanotechnology, pharmaceutical technology, safety technology. Not every breakthrough is invented by a single person, but there are still clusters of people inventing new things each year.
Over twenty years ago, my associates searched for inventors of the air bag so we could celebrate their achievements. It’s not as if the names of such inventors are not known—their names often appear in technical publications or in the U.S. Patent Office’s archives. But inventors are not featured in the popular media or in our school courses. Corporations and their brands are credited for the work of their staff.
Some may think the era of the lone inventor is over and only collectives of inventors produce most of the significant breakthroughs. But you wouldn’t know this by examining the thousands of patents issued every month (see Patent Gazette). Lone inventors— inventors who are not attached to a company or other organization – are only represented in some of these patents. Many more, however, are employees who have to give their rights to institutions. Getting patents is extremely expensive for lone inventors.
Let’s focus on the anonymous people who invent or design things that increase our misery/anxiety/ripoff index. I’d want to know who designs those incomprehensible computerized bills that flood and so often defraud consumers from all sorts of sellers. Who creates those maddening forms that millions of Americans have to figure out and fill out?
Who drafts those demonic fine print one-sided standard form contracts that handcuff millions of American consumers—be they borrowers, home buyers, tenants, car buyers, insurance purchasers, or those Internet clickers who “agree” to “terms and conditions” they never read (see faircontracts.org).
Let’s call this situation what it is—contract servitude or contract peonage. There is, in fact, one prominent Philadelphia corporate lawyer who is the kingpin of this consumer contract abuse—Alan Kaplinsky of Ballard Spahr LLP. As Kaplinsky goes around the country, he exudes pride in fostering these “mice print” form contracts that enchain millions of people and leave them defenseless before big, bullying corporations. So voilà —we’ve located one antihero.
Then there are the wordsmiths who create those form “No” letters replying to consumers who complain about being dealt with unfairly or overcharged. Back comes these long slimy “No” letters full of smooth verbiage that evade the issues while faking a response to consumer complaints. Corporate and government bureaucrats are really experts at such “No” letters designed to wear you down so you don’t even make a second attempt to solve a problem. Who are the creators of such verbal naysaying?
A recent innovation is letters, unsigned by any human being, from corporations and big institutions demanding a person respond. A pension plan writes its pensioners every year requiring a form to be filled out confirming monthly receipt of payments and that the correct amount was being paid. Not sending in the form on time, the pensioners were advised, could result in suspension of payments due. Signed by the impersonal Pension Plan, not by an accountable human being who can be told—check your cancelled checks for heaven’s sake. Why are you bothering us?
Who in the U.S. invents and manufactures those huge bombs or those deadly cluster bombs that are illegally sent over to Yemen to kill and injure innocent children, women, and men in that war-torn, starving country? Who designs those deceptive, sugary television ads to get the little ones to take their path to obesity and related sicknesses?
The names of those who are culpable are anonymous, except for occasional tort lawsuits or whistleblowing that outs them.
In a world full of Facebooks, Googles, Amazons, Microsofts, credit rating bureaus, and ever more, your name and just about everything these snoopers can know about you are sold to their advertisers and others.
Who are the backroom mathematicians and electrical engineers who create and implement these algorithms that are taking over people’s lives everywhere?
Who are the creators of those Wall Street multi-tiered derivatives that speculate with and often lose other peoples’ money as in the giant financial crash of 2008? These towers of bubbling derivatives are so complex fewer people understand them than understand Einstein’s theory of relativity. Who are these geniuses of such high-stake gambling?
Let’s demand the creators of injustice, mayhem, irritation, and the waves of anxiety, fear, and dread reveal their names. Huge numbers of real humans, who cannot hide behind anonymity and who end up paying their bills by name, deserve to know the names of their tormentors.
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July 26, 2018
Savers Alert: Tens of Billions of Higher Interest Dollars are Yours for the Asking
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By Ralph Nader
July 26, 2018
American bank customers are losing billions of dollars in higher interest payments because they’re not being “frugal shoppers” and making a telephone call or sending an email to compare interest rates. If they did, they would find out that the Federal Reserve’s three years of gradual interest rate increases have finally pushed the banks—traditional and online—to make ten times more in interest payments to savers than millions of bank customers are now receiving.
There are over ten trillion dollars in bank savings deposits and money market accounts at places like Fidelity or State Street. In the past four years, such institutions have been reluctant to pass on the benefits of higher interest rates to their trusting savers. However, about a year ago when the interest spread between what the interest banks charge borrowers and the interest banks pay savers became too glaring to ignore. Prodded by more competitive online banks, with little overhead, and by the widening spread between short-term CDs and plain savings accounts, modestly alert savers can collect up to 2.25 percent in interest on minimums of $25,000 or less, depending on the institution.
Example, one person I know was keeping about $100,000 of life savings in a local saving bank at the rate of .02 percent. This was an undisturbed nest egg for years. A conversation with a neighbor led her to call the bank and ask for a better deal. Sure enough, she didn’t know that she could get a 12 month CD paying 2.25 percent interest. (She opted for the better interest rate).
She didn’t know about the better offerings because her Bank, like most financial institutions, does not believe in affirmative action to inform their trusting customers of the better deals available to them. Consequently, inattentive Americans are literally leaving tens of billions of dollars on the table, which the banks happily scoop up into their record quarterly profit reports. The same is true for giant mutual funds like Fidelity that has historically lagged behind its more successful competitor, Vanguard.
Absent personal friendships, very few bank officials contact their savings depositors and tell them they can make thousands of dollars more a year in interest payments with similar accounts. Typical conditions associated with higher interest paying accounts include: maintaining a minimum balance, limiting savers to a few withdrawals a month, and tying up one’s money for several months or even a year. If you want to shop around online, you’ll find recent offerings by banks for a one year C.D. with no minimum deposit at a rate of 2.5 percent. Smart savers can ask their bank to match these rates. And with the Fed saying it will raise rates two more times this year alone, these deals are only going to get better.
Savings are federally insured by the FDIC up to $250,000 per account.
The worst interest rates are often from the giant banks—deemed too big to fail—that are flush with cash and enjoying lucrative tax breaks. They are staying put, offering ridiculous 0.01 percent to 0.02 percent interest rates. They won’t match smaller bank rates. In short, you’ve been given little more than a lock box.
One would think that national and local television and radio stations would leap to get more money so easily for their viewers and listeners. Well, banks and mutual funds advertise on these stations.
One would think that the federal and state bank regulatory agencies would inform consumers to be alert and check for the unnoticed available higher interest rate accounts. Maybe they’re too busy promoting banks, checking solvency indicators, and talking deregulation in the age of the Trumpsters (Trump likes to appoint deregulators straight from the banking industry).
We could take a lesson from video entrepreneurs like Eugene Jarecki, whose successful 2010 video “Move Your Money” urging customers to vote with their feet by leaving misbehaving banks for more reputable community banks or credit unions. (Mr. Jarecki is now busy promoting his new documentary, The King, on Elvis as a broad metaphor for Trump’s America, rampant materialism, and self-indulgence).
Large consumer organizations—such as Consumers Union (CU) with millions of subscribers and the Consumer Federation of America (CFA) with scores of institutional members, including consumer groups and unions, have a role to play. Come on CU and CFA—move some of the billions of retained bank dollars into higher interest rate payments for hard-pressed Americans. They and other middle class savers will thank you.
How about going full blast with eye catching news releases and social media? Add some dramatic news conferences and mass media interviews to make this a grand party of immediate benefits. Let’s go Marta Tellado (CU president) and Jack Gillis (CFA president)!!!! Why should the barons of finance keep laughing all the way to the bank?
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July 20, 2018
Letter to Gary Kelly of Southwest Airlines
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Gary Kelly, CEO
Southwest Airlines
2702 Love Field Dr.
Dallas, TX 75235
Dear Mr. Kelly:
Why would an airline company, which is so sensitive to its consumers that it does NOT charge for reservation changes or baggage fees etc. (as other airlines such as Delta, United, and American do), announce that it will no longer serve peanuts to airline passengers after August 1, 2018?
Peanuts are a part of Southwest’s brand from back when the stalwart Herb Kelleher started this upstart airline in Texas. He said its fares are peanuts and gave away peanuts to symbolize that marketing advantage.
Why give up such a history? Could your critics say that is because your fares are no longer so comparatively lower? You wouldn’t want that to hit the grapevine, would you?
Second, why would Southwest give up its little omnipresent blue billboard? Your passengers sometimes ask for a few more packs of peanuts for their friends. Passing out free peanuts contrasts with the miserliness of other airlines and has made for great word of mouth advertising. Ask Herb how important customer word of mouth promotion is for success.
Third, pretzels are not as nutritious as peanuts. Peanuts are good for you.
Fourth, your announcement said that “Peanuts forever will be part of Southwest’s history and DNA.” Then why discontinue? Your response is that some customers have peanut-related allergies. For years you have solved that problem. If just one passenger says he or she is allergic to peanuts, you don’t serve them in the air, but your good caretakers are often willing to give them to peanut loving passengers as they disembark. From my experience, peanut distribution is suspended in about one of eight or nine trips. The current protocol worked. Why break it? You don’t ban pets from your planes because passengers are allergic to pets, do you?
This letter is a clarion call to all peanut fans who fly Southwest to urge you to rescind your ill-advised decision – made without the least consultation to your customers, by the way. Have you other undisclosed reasons that you haven’t shared?
National Peanut Day is on September 13, 2018. Please respond as soon as possible. Peanuts are especially good in August.
Sincerely,
Ralph Nader
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