I dedicate this page for Mr Ralph Nader,this man who has and still behind so many positive changes in our life around the world,we should support him and so many like him whose don't sympathized by the great lobbies.
You'll find here so many articles that are written by him.Enjoy it.
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Time for Full-Time Town Jesters
By Ralph Nader
October 17, 2012
There’s an old saying “in humor there is truth.” Until the 18th century, British monarchs, surrounded by sycophantic entourages, retained court Jesters to tell them the truth in the garb of satire and motley costumes with donkey ears, red-flannel coxcomb and bells.
Of course, the Jester also played the fool, made famous in Shakespeare’s plays, laughing and joking with his mock scepter. Jesters often played music, clowned around, spoke in riddles and generally reduced the tensions and pomposity of the Royal Court.
According to Wikipedia, Queen Elizabeth (reigned 1558-1603) reportedly “rebuked one of her fools for being insufficiently severe with her.” In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Feste the Jester is described as “wise enough to play the fool.”
Some Jesters became historical figures such as Jeffrey Hudson, Muckle John and Archibald Armstrong. James VI of Scotland signed documents lazily without reading them until his Jester, George Buchanan, got him to sign his abdication: The king got the message. No one else could have survived such a sobering trick, other than the lowly Jester.
In King Lear, Shakespeare used the Jester as a symbol “of common sense and honesty… for insight and advice on the part of the monarch taking advantage of his license to mock and speak freely to dispense frank observations and highlight the folly of his monarch,” according to Wikipedia.
The Greatest Environmentalist of the 20th Century
October 9,2012
By Ralph Nader
Dr. Barry Commoner, equipped with a Harvard PhD in cellular biology, used his knowledge of biology, ecosystems, nuclear radiation, public communication, networking scientists, political campaigning, and community organizing to become the greatest environmentalist in the 20th century. He died on September 30 at the age of 95, deeply involved in challenging conventional dogmas in the field of the genetic engineering.
The range and depth of his work flowed from an integrative public philosophy of what makes the world work or not work in the interaction between what he called the “technosphere and the ecosphere.” His best-selling books were brilliant, clear and motivating.
In all the years I’ve known him, he maintained his methodical approach to analyzing problems and recommending superior strategies to achieve superior solutions. He kept his composure even in the most raucous public gatherings where others were arguing or shouting at one another. The mainstream media liked his calm demeanor, conveying a searing evaluation that went to the root causes of what and how we produce. He made the cover of Time magazine, as a symbol of the first Earth Day’s activities nationwide in April 1970, was a frequent guest of network TV shows and wrote for major publications such as The New York Times.
A fundamental inquirer, Commoner took on his fellow scientists who seemed indifferent to the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union and the radioactive fallout from A-bomb testing. While working as, in the Times’ words, a “brilliant teacher and a painstaking researcher into viruses, cell metabolism and the effects of radiation on living tissue” at Washington University, he sparked the St. Louis Committee for Nuclear Information, which in turn mobilized enough scientists around the country to push for the nuclear test ban treaty that President John F. Kennedy proposed in 1963.
One of his “laws of ecology” is that “everything is connected to everything else,” and he wasn’t just referring to natural systems. Wars, corporate power and greed, injustice, discrimination and poverty connect to what makes people sick and die.
He declared that prevention, rather than wrangling over piecemeal regulation, was the most effective way to protect our air, water, soil and food. He pointed to lead in gasoline that was prohibited at long last, not gradually regulated. The banning outright of vinyl chloride was another example of prevention.
He told Scientific American: “What is needed now is a transformation of the major systems of production….Restoring environmental quality means substituting solar sources of energy for fossil and nuclear fuels; substituting electric motors for the internal-combustion engine; substituting organic farming for chemical agriculture, expanding the use of durable, renewable and recyclable materials – metals, glass, wood, paper – in place of petrochemical products that have massively displaced them.”
He told me in the 1980s that he wanted to write a book about the necessity and practicality of replacing the petrochemical industry. Commoner urged the Department of Defense in detail to use solar technologies for economic and environmental reasons and thereby jumpstart an expanding civilian market for solar. The Navy, where he served in World War II, did install thousands of photovoltaics at remote locations to save money and cut pollution. Procurement by government is a great stimulus to innovation and avoids the regulatory delays by corporate lobbyists.
Pollution in the workplace attracted his expertise when we needed it in pressing for the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970. When he brought poverty into his focus, he showed how impoverished racial minorities were exposed to higher intensities of polluting installations where they lived, due to their powerlessness. This “laid the groundwork for what later became known as the environmental justice movement,” as Professor Peter Dreier of Occidental College recently wrote.
Always the practical modern Renaissance man, Commoner helped start the Citizens Party in 1979 and was chosen as the party’s presidential candidate. He knew how Third Parties are structurally marginalized in the U.S., as compared with the Green Party in Germany, but he wanted to enlarge the public consciousness to connect causes and consequences. He later joked about the time a reporter in New Mexico asked him: “Dr. Commoner, are you a serious candidate, or are you just running on the issues?” Too bad the media didn’t heed his clarion calls to action.
Unperturbed, Commoner applied his knowledge in many other directions, including a pioneering pilot recycling program in New York City, to show how most trash could actually be reused or recycled.
Today’s younger environmental activists hardly know of Commoner and his three great books – The Closing Circle (1971), The Poverty of Power (1976) and Making Peace With the Planet (1992), all of which remain unsurpassed and timely in their integrative frameworks for understanding and leveraged action.
I called Barry to congratulate him on his 90th birthday. “It happens,” he replied wryly. For the people, flora and fauna on the planet Earth, it is a great gift that Barry Commoner “happened.”
His students, supporters and some wealthy benefactors in this nation should extend his broad-gauged approach (“the finely-sculptured fit between life and its surroundings”) by establishing an Institute of Thought and Action in his name. Those interested in this proposal should contact Barry’s former colleagues at Queens College or his widow Lisa Feiner.
Get a Signed Copy of Ralph Nader's New Book, The Seventeen Solutions, In Stores Today
Releasing today, October 2, 2012
"The Seventeen Solutions: Bold Ideas for Our American Future" by Ralph Nader (HarperCollins Publishers)
To obtain a signed copy of "The Seventeen Solutions" visit www.politics-prose.com/
For more information on the book, visit seventeensolutions.com
Overview:
More than ever, America needs fresh ideas—and bold solutions. Now, Ralph Nader—perhaps our last great civic idealist—offers seventeen ideas to rescue our country from corruption, complacency, and corporate domination.
America is in crisis. After enduring two decade-long wars and a devastating financial meltdown, We the People have been abandoned by the leaders we elected to serve our interests. Now, in response to our desperate times, pioneering reformer Ralph Nader offers a new program of seventeen ambitious but common-sense solutions to our chronic economic and social problems.
Among them:
• Reforming the tax system
• Making our communities more self-reliant
• Reclaiming science and technology for the people
• Protecting the family
• Getting corporations off welfare
• Creating national charters for corporations
• Reducing our bloated military budget
• Organizing congressional watchdog groups
• Enlisting the enlightened super-rich
• And more...
In "The Seventeen Solutions", Nader offers a stark assessment of our shared straits, but his solutions constitute an eye-opening plan to save America—before it's too late.
Rigged Presidential “Debates” Amidst the Supine Media
October 02,2012
By Ralph Nader
The three upcoming so-called presidential debates (actually parallel interviews) between Obama and Romney show the pathetic mainstream campaign press for what it is – a mass of dittoheads desperately awaiting gaffes or some visual irregularity by any of the candidates. The press certainly does not demand elementary material from the candidates such as the secret debate contract negotiated by the Obama and Romney campaigns that controls the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD), the campaigns’ corporate offspring.
A similar secret contract between George W. Bush and John Kerry in 2004, obtained by George Farah, executive director of Open Debates (www.opendebates.org) showed just how the two Parties rig the debate process. Both Parties agreed that they would: (1) not request any additional debates, (2) not appear at any other debate or adversarial forum with any other presidential or vice presidential candidate, and (3) not accept any television or radio air time offers that involve a debate format. Were this deal to be between two corporations, they could be prosecuted for criminal violation of the antitrust laws.
This year voters are not allowed to know about the current backroom fix between Obama and Romney.
Farah revealed more. The Bush/Kerry closeout of the voters and the media extended to their agreeing not to ask each other direct questions but only rhetorical questions, and to clear any questions from the audience by their chosen moderator prior to the debates. Of course third party candidates are excluded. In 2000 and 2004, national polls showed majorities wanting me in the debates – the only way non-billionaires could reach tens of millions of voters – but the captive CPD and their compliant director, Janet Brown, created other exclusionary barriers.
Nothing seems to motivate the mainstream campaign press into challenging the two Party duopoly, its definition of important questions, or the rancid corporate sponsorship of the debates down to the hospitality parties the corporatists hold at the debate locations in Colorado, New York and Florida this October. The reporters must like the free wine and food.
Nor did the supine press inform the voters of recent written requests by numerous organizations in the Pittsburgh, District of Columbia and Portland, Oregon regions inviting the presidential candidates to debate in these areas (http://nader.org/2012/09/18/
Substantively, the supine press applies its own rules. Rule One is to avoid pressing questions that extend the public’s agenda beyond what the two major candidates are wrangling over. So if they don’t debate pulling back from unauthorized wars, invasions, incursions or other important foreign policy moves they are not asked. Rule Two is to ignore what major civic groups or groups with credible track records propose for the candidates to address. So Obama and Romney are not pressed by the press to expressly respond to many important issues including: what they would do on law enforcement against corporate crime, fraud and abuse, whether they favor a $10 minimum wage that catches up to 1968, inflation adjusted, for thirty million workers, or on their positions on either a Wall Street speculation tax that can raise big money or even a carbon tax.
Union organizing rights, workers’ health and safety, and a variety of important consumer protections are scarcely on the press table even when their own colleagues often report on these timely subjects.
When a matter is super-timely and they can interview the nation’s foremost expert on the politics of presidential debates – George Farah, author of No Debate – the major media is not interested. They have rejected his op-eds. Apart from local radio shows, he cannot get on national public radio, public TV or the commercial networks. It is not for lack of space and time being devoted to the Presidential campaigns.
I know Farah. He worked for me over a decade ago, right out of Princeton before going to Harvard Law School. He is an interviewers’ dream –speaks crisply, cogently and convincingly.
Maybe reporters should be given “curiosity training sessions” about what the public needs and wants to know but that the candidates are not interested in discussing.
Maybe columnists should work with the people on the ground instead of just working off clips and dealing with political flaks who restrict access to the candidates. Some columnists could benefit from a sabbatical for self-renewal.
Maybe editors and producers should expand beyond the usual “talking heads” and give the many important outside voices and movements some deserved coverage.
Our country needs a better performance by the major media that is stuck in routines, ruts and stagnant self-censorship from the national to the local levels. This is especially true of the concentrated television industry that uses our public airwaves, free of charge.
Barack to Mitt: Corporations Run the Economy
Sept 27,2012
By Ralph Nader
Here is an open letter that Barack Obama should write to Mitt Romney – pronto!
Dear Mr. Romney:
Not a day goes by without you blaming me for every slumping or stagnant economic indicator. Unemployment, increases in the number of food stamp recipients, government borrowing, and spending, home foreclosures, economic uncertainty for businesses, trade deficits – you name it. Only for droughts and hurricanes have you absolved me from responsibility.
I won’t go into what was inherited from your Republican party’s years in office. Deregulation, non-enforcement, non-disclosure by the financial industry, and subsidies and bailouts were that period’s hallmarks. But if I were to be held responsible for the state of the American economy, there would have to be a “command and control” economy enforced by the White House. You know full well that is not the case for several reasons.
First, our economy is dominated by corporations that make their own investment and hiring decisions. Two-thirds of the tens of millions of low-wage workers are employed by fifty large corporations, such as Walmart and McDonald’s. Thirty million American workers are laboring between the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour and what the minimum wage, adjusted for inflation from 1968, should be now – about $10 per hour. These companies are successfully opposing in Congress any increase in the minimum wage to such catch up with 1968. By the way, you favored an inflation-adjusted minimum wage for years. During the Republican primaries earlier this year, you changed your long-standing position and now oppose raising the minimum wage.
Moreover, many companies are sitting on more than $2 trillion in inactive cash reserves. I have no power to get more of that capital invested, other than to appeal to their USA corporate patriotism. I could also use that patriotic appeal to urge them to increase their dividends to shareholders which would pump tens of billions of dollars into our consumer economy to encourage much-needed spending. Some of these successful companies like Google, EMC and others offer no dividends at all to their owners. Those exhortations are just exhortations. CEOs can do what they want.
Second, I am not the Federal Reserve. The Fed has kept interest rates very low which has limited the return on savings. Tens of millions of middle and lower income people could spend those interest payments on the necessities of life. But the Fed is its own ruler, and its catering to the capital investment community don’t seem to be boosting the economy.
Third, there is the Congress and the oppositional unanimity by Republicans to block any economic, job-producing measures due to their priority of using a recessionary economy to help you defeat me in November. Remember Senate Republican leader, Senator Mitch McConnell’s oft-repeated words about that being their number-one priority?
I tried to promote a major public works construction and repair program in Congress. The Republicans in the House blocked it under the aegis of Representatives John Boehner and Eric Cantor. This program would have produced well-paying jobs, with multiplier effects, that could not be exported to China. Our communities have trillions of dollars in deferred maintenance afflicting schools, clinics, public transit systems, highways, bridges, dams, and water and sewage systems. I cannot make this happen without the Republicans in Congress. You and your running mate, Paul Ryan, have not exactly urged them to take up this jobs initiative.
You have declared that “Washington has become an impediment to economic growth.” Why then don’t you be specific, name and support an end to the vast array of corporate subsidies, handouts, bailouts and inflated government contracts, especially from the defense industry? Imagine what your friends on Wall Street and in Houston would think of you after that burst of candor.
See how many jobs disappear with the end of what conservatives call crony capitalism, the end of the huge, historic outpourings of government research and development monies that substantially built and help maintain innovations in the aerospace, biotech, pharmaceutical, computer, telecommunications and containerization industries – to name a few. And if you think taxpayer investment in public works all over the country is an “impediment to economic growth,” say so forthrightly, as you campaign battleground states.
I look forward to our first debate on October 3 in Denver and shall observe your struggle with consistency. While you’re at it, kindly bring your pre-2010 tax returns, so we can learn more about what you mean when you talk about your policy of tax cuts.
In solidarity for America,
Barack Obama, President
AT&T Presents: Your Congressional Representative™ Brought to You By Goldman Sachs.
The roar of the crowd, the flashbulbs, the excitement, the spirit of competition the…corporate logo-addled uniforms?
One might be describing a NASCAR event, or perhaps even an NBA game in the near future if NBA commissioner David Stern gets his way. Or, one could be describing a political campaign rally, if Congress was as willing as the NBA and NASCAR to proudly display the logos of the big corporations that finance them.
We recently launched the Suits for Sale campaign (suitsforsale.org) to bring attention to the dominance of big money in politics. It’s no secret that in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, Super-PAC’s have flooded campaigns with more money then ever before. So what better way to inform voters of who they are really voting for then to adorn our elected officials with the very corporate logos that brought them to power?
Let’s look at Rep. John Boehner of Ohio’s 8th Congressional district, current Speaker of the House, major corporate donation sponge, and model of our first Congressional jacket poster. A quick glance at Speaker Boehner’s top contributors reveals a whole slew of heavy hitters: AT&T, FirstEnergy Corp, Swisher International (maker of “America's favorite Swisher Sweets Cigars”), and American Electric Power. Sallie Mae, Walmart and Goldman Sachs were also big time contributors in previous campaign cycles.
For the 2012 election cycle, running completely unopposed by the Democrats, Boehner has raised more than $18 million campaign dollars—nearly twice as much as he raised in 2010 when he actually had an opponent. Even considering his elevated status as Speaker, it’s still a shocking amount of money.
Two Conventions: Profiles in Decadent Cowardliness
Sept 12,2012
By Ralph Nader
The Republican and Democratic Conventions are mercifully over but their corrosive impacts on our democracy persist.
First, did you know that taxpayers helped fund these conventions at a level of $100 million for logistics and police sequestrations of demonstrators in Tampa and Charlotte and an additional $18.2 million each for general convention expenses?
The two party duopoly obviously controls the honey pot in Congress. That corporate welfare is what they enacted in spite of the fact that the party’s convention committees are private corporations that should pay for their own big political party and their many smaller social parties with plentiful food and drink. No third party – Green, Libertarian or others – received any taxpayer money for their conventions this year.
Second, the Republican and Democratic Conventions have jettisoned their original purposes which were to resolve the contest for the presidential nomination and work up a platform. Both functions are now decided beforehand, setting the stage for a choreographed theatrical event of political pomposity and braggadocio. On the periphery are the omnipresent corporate lobbyists and their parties of free food and drink.
Did they ask you the taxpayers to foot so much of this bill? Silly question for an oligarchy greased by a plutocracy.
Taking these conventions at face value, one is shocked by how they are scripted right down to every line of every speech vetted by the politicos. Clint Eastwood’s spontaneity that so angered the GOP operatives was the exception.
The Republicans put three themes in just about every speech. Tell your personal story, recount your humble beginnings, and describe how you pulled yourself up by your own bootstraps. Show the people you’re human or at least humanoid, not corporatist. Keep heralding small business so you don’t have to talk about Big Business which has bad vibrations these days around the country. Also, praise, praise, praise Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan as family men with family values. Imagine Republicans telling the press that the convention was to “humanize” Romney and give the voters a warm, fuzzy feeling about their candidate so as to forget that his campaign is a clenched-teeth mouthpiece for Big Business.
The Democratic Convention evokes pity. They too had similar scripts at the podium – narrate your humble, hardworking family lines, talk incessantly about jobs so you won’t have to talk about wages. Especially muzzled was the willing Richard Trumka, head of the AFL-CIO, who, since 2009, has been given the back of Obama’s hand on “card check organizing rights” and on an inflation-adjusted minimum wage. His staged remarks even withheld any mention of a $10 minimum wage (See H.R. 5901 bill “Catching up with 1968”) and the raiding of worker pensions by corporate raptors.
The repetitive over-wrought praise of “el Presidente” in every speech became mawkish, reminding one of the “politics of personalism,” present in many countries with underdeveloped political institutions. Michelle Obama found no time for mentioning the Obama family and America’s mission to grow and consume nutritious food and keep fit to avoid the ravages of obesity. She was too occupied gushing over her aggressive drone commander’s touching nightly reading of letters from Americans about their problems.
The mass obeisance ended when the commander-in-chief himself sprung onto the stage to speak the language of hope, meanwhile avoiding addressing the number of undesirable conditions that need his attention at this singular opportunity.
Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks, trying to be sympathetic, was looking for some significant specificity:
“What I was mostly looking for were big proposals, big as health care was four years ago. I had spent the three previous days watching more than 80 convention speeches without hearing a single major policy proposal in any of them. I asked governors, mayors and legislators to name a significant law that they’d like to see Obama pass in a second term. Not one could. At its base, this is a party with a protective agenda, not a change agenda…”
Fortifying Brooks’ observation was Obama’s recounting of the differences between the Democrats and Republicans. They are almost all defensive in nature. Defend social security, Medicare, and abortion from the Republican offensive.
Where’s the War on Lethal Super-bugs?
Sept 5,2012
By Ralph Nader
What if two thousand U.S. soldiers were losing their lives every week in Afghanistan? Would the peddlers of the electoral politics of trivia, distraction and avoidance take notice? Of course.
Every week, two thousand Americans, or about 100,000 men, women and children a year, die from mostly preventable hospital-borne infections in the United States. The toll may even be higher (Center for Disease Control updates its figures soon).
To put this deadly disaster in perspective, hospital-induced infections kill more Americans than the combined fatalities from motor vehicle collisions, AIDs, fire and homicides combined. Additional millions more survive infections. The pain and costs are enormous.
Why the silence about this silent violence? Every President, including Barack Obama, says over and over again that the safety of the American people is his top priority. They spend trillions of dollars to guard against and confront stateless terrorists in blowback ways that seem to produce more terrorism in more countries. Yet the Washington lawmakers can’t seem to adequately respond to the little publicized yet dire warnings and casualty figures published by our leading scientists and public health officials about the big-time terrorists called lethal bacteria.
This year, our government is not even devoting the dollar equivalent of two unnecessary F-22 fighter planes to the fight against what the Washington Post calls “a global epidemic of hospital-acquired bugs that quickly grow resistant to the toughest drugs.”
The story behind this colossal callousness toward innocent, trusting people taken to hospitals for care and healing starts with the drug company executives who do not see much profit from developing new antibiotics. After all, selling drugs for depression, high blood pressure and “life-style drugs” make huge profits. Only vaccines are lower on the profit totem pole than antibiotics. Remember the ever-changing superbugs keep challenging the heavily government subsidized and tax-credited drug companies to invest in antibiotics research and development.
When the drug companies balked at spending money to discover anti-malaria drugs for our soldiers during the Vietnam War, the Pentagon opened its own research section at Walter Reed Army Hospital and developed several effective medicines itself.
David Shlaes, a specialist in drug development, told the Post that only four of the twelve largest global drug companies are researching new antibiotics. The last company to drop out was Pfizer, closing its Connecticut antibiotics research center, laying off 1200 employees and moving operations to China. Some corporate patriotism!
All Congress has recently done is give drug companies five more years of patent monopolies for inventing new antibiotics. This is the case even though just about every person can tell you of neighbors, friends or relatives who have caught serious infections in a hospital.
Last year, but unethically not disclosed until last month, the nation’s premier clinical research hospital at the National Institutes of Health, lost six patients to a super-bug resistant to all known antibiotics. Moreover, resistant strains of tuberculosis are spreading in Eastern Europe and Asia, according to a new study published in The Lancet.
Beyond the slowdown in developing new antibiotics – 13 new categories of antibiotics were discovered between 1945 and 1968 and just two new ones since then – is the massive over promotion of antibiotics through physicians who should know better. In addition, the daily feed of domesticated chickens, turkeys, cows and pigs is laced with antibiotics for disease prevention and growth-enhancement. This reduces animals’ natural immunity and leads to mutating resistant bacteria that can move into the human consumers of meat products.
Growing Doubts About Advertising
July 17, 2012
By Ralph Nader
Ask yourself when was the last time you saw any of those tiny ads on Google and Facebook and rushed to buy the products or services. For that matter, ask yourself whether any radio or television advertisements prompted you to go out and buy the product.
Sure the newspaper ads announcing short-term sales for clothes or household goods may get you to the market, along with the supermarket specials for foodstuffs. But generally speaking, you must wonder what the business community gets for its tens of billions of dollars annually pouring out of their advertising budgets.
I can almost hear the chuckles from Madison Avenue reacting to this skepticism about whether ads are worth their price. Such doubts are almost never publically discussed. One reason has its roots in the musing of pioneering department store magnate, John Wanamaker of Philadelphia. About a century ago, he said he thought that half the money he spent on advertising was effective, but didn’t know which half.
Another reason is that advertisements sell moods, feelings, self-exciting images about the product – selling the sizzle along with the steak, as the saying goes. These feelings connect to the corporate branding strategies and are hard to measure.
But they are believed by the “hidden persuaders,” to use Vance Packard’s famous phrase, to be very effective, precisely because they are emotional rather than rational. And never before has the technology of inducing these emotions – with visuals, colors, sounds and their synergies – been more hypnotic. It isn’t for nothing that trademarked slogans and names are expensively valued.
Recently however, it was General Motors, of all companies, that said very publically what many companies have been thinking for a long time. In May, stunning the advertising and internet industry, the world’s largest vehicle manufacturer announced that it would pull $10 million in ads from Facebook because they are not effective. A few days later, GM pulled out of the Super Bowl advertising frenzy – commercials for Super Bowl XVII are now going for $4 million per 30 seconds – on the grounds that it “simply could not justify the expense.” This is another way of saying the ads didn’t sell enough cars.
The mass media, which carries such exorbitant commercial messages, plays large corporate competitors, as in the auto and computer industries, against one another. “You don’t want to be left out of the Super Bowl, with its 111 million viewers, do you?” Of course, given the multiple distractions of family, dogs, cats, bathrooms, opening beer bottles, laughing at each other’s remarks, far fewer millions actually see the hyper-kinetic ads that bleed into one another before viewers even catch a logo.
Those managers arguing for ever larger ad budgets convey a “you gotta believe” mentality. It takes lots of myth, hope, gambling and reliance on the artistry and cleverness of the copywriters and ad designers to bring about the blockbuster breakthrough ad that arouses its beleaguered, saturated audience, enmeshed in a blizzard of sequential ads, and makes a memorable recollection of the product or service offered.
Most telling, of course, and most ignored in the experts’ evaluation of an ad’s excellence, is the prevailing absence of useful information for the consumer, including comparative information or information describing function, quality, reliable price, performance, safety and the like. Granted, on television and radio there is little time for a litany, but how about just one fact relating to usage or repair or disposal. Nah, say the faithful copywriters, that would break the emotional flow.
Some fifteen years ago, I discussed comparative pricing of auto insurance with my Princeton classmate, Progressive Insurance’s CEO, Peter Lewis. It wasn’t long before decisive Peter instituted the pioneering television ad that invited customers to submit their specifications to get the comparative price of equivalent policies by Progressive and its three or four competitors in a region. It seemed to work well for Progressive and certainly got people’s attention and generated word of mouth.
There is one organization that doesn’t lose any sleep over the question: “do advertising dollars work or are they largely wasted?” Consumers Union, through its monthly magazine Consumer Reports and its website services (www.consumerreports.org), gives you just the facts derived from its wide ranging honest testing programs. With over five million magazine print subscribers and three million online subscribers, more and more Americans are getting it the rational way.
By the way, Consumer Reports has never carried advertising in its seventy-five year history.
You'll find here so many articles that are written by him.Enjoy it.
Tell your friends to visit http://www.nader.org/ and sign up for Ralph Nader's weekly column.
Just click on the link that says: Sign up for Ralph Nader's Column
or click on the following link:http://nader.org/index.php?/
On Facebook : facebook.com/ralphnader.
On Twitter : @Ralph_Nader
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Time for Full-Time Town Jesters
By Ralph Nader
October 17, 2012
There’s an old saying “in humor there is truth.” Until the 18th century, British monarchs, surrounded by sycophantic entourages, retained court Jesters to tell them the truth in the garb of satire and motley costumes with donkey ears, red-flannel coxcomb and bells.
Of course, the Jester also played the fool, made famous in Shakespeare’s plays, laughing and joking with his mock scepter. Jesters often played music, clowned around, spoke in riddles and generally reduced the tensions and pomposity of the Royal Court.
According to Wikipedia, Queen Elizabeth (reigned 1558-1603) reportedly “rebuked one of her fools for being insufficiently severe with her.” In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Feste the Jester is described as “wise enough to play the fool.”
Some Jesters became historical figures such as Jeffrey Hudson, Muckle John and Archibald Armstrong. James VI of Scotland signed documents lazily without reading them until his Jester, George Buchanan, got him to sign his abdication: The king got the message. No one else could have survived such a sobering trick, other than the lowly Jester.
In King Lear, Shakespeare used the Jester as a symbol “of common sense and honesty… for insight and advice on the part of the monarch taking advantage of his license to mock and speak freely to dispense frank observations and highlight the folly of his monarch,” according to Wikipedia.
The Greatest Environmentalist of the 20th Century
October 9,2012
By Ralph Nader
Dr. Barry Commoner, equipped with a Harvard PhD in cellular biology, used his knowledge of biology, ecosystems, nuclear radiation, public communication, networking scientists, political campaigning, and community organizing to become the greatest environmentalist in the 20th century. He died on September 30 at the age of 95, deeply involved in challenging conventional dogmas in the field of the genetic engineering.
The range and depth of his work flowed from an integrative public philosophy of what makes the world work or not work in the interaction between what he called the “technosphere and the ecosphere.” His best-selling books were brilliant, clear and motivating.
In all the years I’ve known him, he maintained his methodical approach to analyzing problems and recommending superior strategies to achieve superior solutions. He kept his composure even in the most raucous public gatherings where others were arguing or shouting at one another. The mainstream media liked his calm demeanor, conveying a searing evaluation that went to the root causes of what and how we produce. He made the cover of Time magazine, as a symbol of the first Earth Day’s activities nationwide in April 1970, was a frequent guest of network TV shows and wrote for major publications such as The New York Times.
A fundamental inquirer, Commoner took on his fellow scientists who seemed indifferent to the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union and the radioactive fallout from A-bomb testing. While working as, in the Times’ words, a “brilliant teacher and a painstaking researcher into viruses, cell metabolism and the effects of radiation on living tissue” at Washington University, he sparked the St. Louis Committee for Nuclear Information, which in turn mobilized enough scientists around the country to push for the nuclear test ban treaty that President John F. Kennedy proposed in 1963.
One of his “laws of ecology” is that “everything is connected to everything else,” and he wasn’t just referring to natural systems. Wars, corporate power and greed, injustice, discrimination and poverty connect to what makes people sick and die.
He declared that prevention, rather than wrangling over piecemeal regulation, was the most effective way to protect our air, water, soil and food. He pointed to lead in gasoline that was prohibited at long last, not gradually regulated. The banning outright of vinyl chloride was another example of prevention.
He told Scientific American: “What is needed now is a transformation of the major systems of production….Restoring environmental quality means substituting solar sources of energy for fossil and nuclear fuels; substituting electric motors for the internal-combustion engine; substituting organic farming for chemical agriculture, expanding the use of durable, renewable and recyclable materials – metals, glass, wood, paper – in place of petrochemical products that have massively displaced them.”
He told me in the 1980s that he wanted to write a book about the necessity and practicality of replacing the petrochemical industry. Commoner urged the Department of Defense in detail to use solar technologies for economic and environmental reasons and thereby jumpstart an expanding civilian market for solar. The Navy, where he served in World War II, did install thousands of photovoltaics at remote locations to save money and cut pollution. Procurement by government is a great stimulus to innovation and avoids the regulatory delays by corporate lobbyists.
Pollution in the workplace attracted his expertise when we needed it in pressing for the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970. When he brought poverty into his focus, he showed how impoverished racial minorities were exposed to higher intensities of polluting installations where they lived, due to their powerlessness. This “laid the groundwork for what later became known as the environmental justice movement,” as Professor Peter Dreier of Occidental College recently wrote.
Always the practical modern Renaissance man, Commoner helped start the Citizens Party in 1979 and was chosen as the party’s presidential candidate. He knew how Third Parties are structurally marginalized in the U.S., as compared with the Green Party in Germany, but he wanted to enlarge the public consciousness to connect causes and consequences. He later joked about the time a reporter in New Mexico asked him: “Dr. Commoner, are you a serious candidate, or are you just running on the issues?” Too bad the media didn’t heed his clarion calls to action.
Unperturbed, Commoner applied his knowledge in many other directions, including a pioneering pilot recycling program in New York City, to show how most trash could actually be reused or recycled.
Today’s younger environmental activists hardly know of Commoner and his three great books – The Closing Circle (1971), The Poverty of Power (1976) and Making Peace With the Planet (1992), all of which remain unsurpassed and timely in their integrative frameworks for understanding and leveraged action.
I called Barry to congratulate him on his 90th birthday. “It happens,” he replied wryly. For the people, flora and fauna on the planet Earth, it is a great gift that Barry Commoner “happened.”
His students, supporters and some wealthy benefactors in this nation should extend his broad-gauged approach (“the finely-sculptured fit between life and its surroundings”) by establishing an Institute of Thought and Action in his name. Those interested in this proposal should contact Barry’s former colleagues at Queens College or his widow Lisa Feiner.
Get a Signed Copy of Ralph Nader's New Book, The Seventeen Solutions, In Stores Today
Releasing today, October 2, 2012
"The Seventeen Solutions: Bold Ideas for Our American Future" by Ralph Nader (HarperCollins Publishers)
To obtain a signed copy of "The Seventeen Solutions" visit www.politics-prose.com/
For more information on the book, visit seventeensolutions.com
Overview:
More than ever, America needs fresh ideas—and bold solutions. Now, Ralph Nader—perhaps our last great civic idealist—offers seventeen ideas to rescue our country from corruption, complacency, and corporate domination.
America is in crisis. After enduring two decade-long wars and a devastating financial meltdown, We the People have been abandoned by the leaders we elected to serve our interests. Now, in response to our desperate times, pioneering reformer Ralph Nader offers a new program of seventeen ambitious but common-sense solutions to our chronic economic and social problems.
Among them:
• Reforming the tax system
• Making our communities more self-reliant
• Reclaiming science and technology for the people
• Protecting the family
• Getting corporations off welfare
• Creating national charters for corporations
• Reducing our bloated military budget
• Organizing congressional watchdog groups
• Enlisting the enlightened super-rich
• And more...
In "The Seventeen Solutions", Nader offers a stark assessment of our shared straits, but his solutions constitute an eye-opening plan to save America—before it's too late.
Rigged Presidential “Debates” Amidst the Supine Media
October 02,2012
By Ralph Nader
The three upcoming so-called presidential debates (actually parallel interviews) between Obama and Romney show the pathetic mainstream campaign press for what it is – a mass of dittoheads desperately awaiting gaffes or some visual irregularity by any of the candidates. The press certainly does not demand elementary material from the candidates such as the secret debate contract negotiated by the Obama and Romney campaigns that controls the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD), the campaigns’ corporate offspring.
A similar secret contract between George W. Bush and John Kerry in 2004, obtained by George Farah, executive director of Open Debates (www.opendebates.org) showed just how the two Parties rig the debate process. Both Parties agreed that they would: (1) not request any additional debates, (2) not appear at any other debate or adversarial forum with any other presidential or vice presidential candidate, and (3) not accept any television or radio air time offers that involve a debate format. Were this deal to be between two corporations, they could be prosecuted for criminal violation of the antitrust laws.
This year voters are not allowed to know about the current backroom fix between Obama and Romney.
Farah revealed more. The Bush/Kerry closeout of the voters and the media extended to their agreeing not to ask each other direct questions but only rhetorical questions, and to clear any questions from the audience by their chosen moderator prior to the debates. Of course third party candidates are excluded. In 2000 and 2004, national polls showed majorities wanting me in the debates – the only way non-billionaires could reach tens of millions of voters – but the captive CPD and their compliant director, Janet Brown, created other exclusionary barriers.
Nothing seems to motivate the mainstream campaign press into challenging the two Party duopoly, its definition of important questions, or the rancid corporate sponsorship of the debates down to the hospitality parties the corporatists hold at the debate locations in Colorado, New York and Florida this October. The reporters must like the free wine and food.
Nor did the supine press inform the voters of recent written requests by numerous organizations in the Pittsburgh, District of Columbia and Portland, Oregon regions inviting the presidential candidates to debate in these areas (http://nader.org/2012/09/18/
Substantively, the supine press applies its own rules. Rule One is to avoid pressing questions that extend the public’s agenda beyond what the two major candidates are wrangling over. So if they don’t debate pulling back from unauthorized wars, invasions, incursions or other important foreign policy moves they are not asked. Rule Two is to ignore what major civic groups or groups with credible track records propose for the candidates to address. So Obama and Romney are not pressed by the press to expressly respond to many important issues including: what they would do on law enforcement against corporate crime, fraud and abuse, whether they favor a $10 minimum wage that catches up to 1968, inflation adjusted, for thirty million workers, or on their positions on either a Wall Street speculation tax that can raise big money or even a carbon tax.
Union organizing rights, workers’ health and safety, and a variety of important consumer protections are scarcely on the press table even when their own colleagues often report on these timely subjects.
When a matter is super-timely and they can interview the nation’s foremost expert on the politics of presidential debates – George Farah, author of No Debate – the major media is not interested. They have rejected his op-eds. Apart from local radio shows, he cannot get on national public radio, public TV or the commercial networks. It is not for lack of space and time being devoted to the Presidential campaigns.
I know Farah. He worked for me over a decade ago, right out of Princeton before going to Harvard Law School. He is an interviewers’ dream –speaks crisply, cogently and convincingly.
Maybe reporters should be given “curiosity training sessions” about what the public needs and wants to know but that the candidates are not interested in discussing.
Maybe columnists should work with the people on the ground instead of just working off clips and dealing with political flaks who restrict access to the candidates. Some columnists could benefit from a sabbatical for self-renewal.
Maybe editors and producers should expand beyond the usual “talking heads” and give the many important outside voices and movements some deserved coverage.
Our country needs a better performance by the major media that is stuck in routines, ruts and stagnant self-censorship from the national to the local levels. This is especially true of the concentrated television industry that uses our public airwaves, free of charge.
Barack to Mitt: Corporations Run the Economy
Sept 27,2012
By Ralph Nader
Here is an open letter that Barack Obama should write to Mitt Romney – pronto!
Dear Mr. Romney:
Not a day goes by without you blaming me for every slumping or stagnant economic indicator. Unemployment, increases in the number of food stamp recipients, government borrowing, and spending, home foreclosures, economic uncertainty for businesses, trade deficits – you name it. Only for droughts and hurricanes have you absolved me from responsibility.
I won’t go into what was inherited from your Republican party’s years in office. Deregulation, non-enforcement, non-disclosure by the financial industry, and subsidies and bailouts were that period’s hallmarks. But if I were to be held responsible for the state of the American economy, there would have to be a “command and control” economy enforced by the White House. You know full well that is not the case for several reasons.
First, our economy is dominated by corporations that make their own investment and hiring decisions. Two-thirds of the tens of millions of low-wage workers are employed by fifty large corporations, such as Walmart and McDonald’s. Thirty million American workers are laboring between the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour and what the minimum wage, adjusted for inflation from 1968, should be now – about $10 per hour. These companies are successfully opposing in Congress any increase in the minimum wage to such catch up with 1968. By the way, you favored an inflation-adjusted minimum wage for years. During the Republican primaries earlier this year, you changed your long-standing position and now oppose raising the minimum wage.
Moreover, many companies are sitting on more than $2 trillion in inactive cash reserves. I have no power to get more of that capital invested, other than to appeal to their USA corporate patriotism. I could also use that patriotic appeal to urge them to increase their dividends to shareholders which would pump tens of billions of dollars into our consumer economy to encourage much-needed spending. Some of these successful companies like Google, EMC and others offer no dividends at all to their owners. Those exhortations are just exhortations. CEOs can do what they want.
Second, I am not the Federal Reserve. The Fed has kept interest rates very low which has limited the return on savings. Tens of millions of middle and lower income people could spend those interest payments on the necessities of life. But the Fed is its own ruler, and its catering to the capital investment community don’t seem to be boosting the economy.
Third, there is the Congress and the oppositional unanimity by Republicans to block any economic, job-producing measures due to their priority of using a recessionary economy to help you defeat me in November. Remember Senate Republican leader, Senator Mitch McConnell’s oft-repeated words about that being their number-one priority?
I tried to promote a major public works construction and repair program in Congress. The Republicans in the House blocked it under the aegis of Representatives John Boehner and Eric Cantor. This program would have produced well-paying jobs, with multiplier effects, that could not be exported to China. Our communities have trillions of dollars in deferred maintenance afflicting schools, clinics, public transit systems, highways, bridges, dams, and water and sewage systems. I cannot make this happen without the Republicans in Congress. You and your running mate, Paul Ryan, have not exactly urged them to take up this jobs initiative.
You have declared that “Washington has become an impediment to economic growth.” Why then don’t you be specific, name and support an end to the vast array of corporate subsidies, handouts, bailouts and inflated government contracts, especially from the defense industry? Imagine what your friends on Wall Street and in Houston would think of you after that burst of candor.
See how many jobs disappear with the end of what conservatives call crony capitalism, the end of the huge, historic outpourings of government research and development monies that substantially built and help maintain innovations in the aerospace, biotech, pharmaceutical, computer, telecommunications and containerization industries – to name a few. And if you think taxpayer investment in public works all over the country is an “impediment to economic growth,” say so forthrightly, as you campaign battleground states.
I look forward to our first debate on October 3 in Denver and shall observe your struggle with consistency. While you’re at it, kindly bring your pre-2010 tax returns, so we can learn more about what you mean when you talk about your policy of tax cuts.
In solidarity for America,
Barack Obama, President
AT&T Presents: Your Congressional Representative™ Brought to You By Goldman Sachs.
Sept 21 2012
By Ralph NaderThe roar of the crowd, the flashbulbs, the excitement, the spirit of competition the…corporate logo-addled uniforms?
One might be describing a NASCAR event, or perhaps even an NBA game in the near future if NBA commissioner David Stern gets his way. Or, one could be describing a political campaign rally, if Congress was as willing as the NBA and NASCAR to proudly display the logos of the big corporations that finance them.
We recently launched the Suits for Sale campaign (suitsforsale.org) to bring attention to the dominance of big money in politics. It’s no secret that in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, Super-PAC’s have flooded campaigns with more money then ever before. So what better way to inform voters of who they are really voting for then to adorn our elected officials with the very corporate logos that brought them to power?
Let’s look at Rep. John Boehner of Ohio’s 8th Congressional district, current Speaker of the House, major corporate donation sponge, and model of our first Congressional jacket poster. A quick glance at Speaker Boehner’s top contributors reveals a whole slew of heavy hitters: AT&T, FirstEnergy Corp, Swisher International (maker of “America's favorite Swisher Sweets Cigars”), and American Electric Power. Sallie Mae, Walmart and Goldman Sachs were also big time contributors in previous campaign cycles.
For the 2012 election cycle, running completely unopposed by the Democrats, Boehner has raised more than $18 million campaign dollars—nearly twice as much as he raised in 2010 when he actually had an opponent. Even considering his elevated status as Speaker, it’s still a shocking amount of money.
Boehner once told CNN: “I am the business community, that’s who I am,” while in the same breath saying, “I don't do special interest favors.” This is the same John Boehner, who, as Congress debated the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform act in 2009, invited hundreds of financial industry lobbyists to Washington for a strategy session on de-fanging any significant reform. The same John Boehner who rakes in millions of dollars from the healthcare industry while presiding over a House of Representatives that has voted more than 30 times to repeal Obamacare—and has done little else.
The Suits for Sale campaign might seem whimsical, a Jon Stewart-esque way of calling attention to a serious problem in politics, but let’s envision it as something more. Let’s envision an aroused citizenry calling for accountability in their elected officials. Imagine hundreds of voters gathering outside of their Senators and Representatives offices—even the White House—with real corporate-logo covered suit jackets, demanding their officials to wear graphic depictions of who they truly represent.
Who knows, maybe if Congress actually had to conspicuously display their sponsors like NASCAR drivers, they might think twice about whose dollars they take.
The Suits for Sale campaign might seem whimsical, a Jon Stewart-esque way of calling attention to a serious problem in politics, but let’s envision it as something more. Let’s envision an aroused citizenry calling for accountability in their elected officials. Imagine hundreds of voters gathering outside of their Senators and Representatives offices—even the White House—with real corporate-logo covered suit jackets, demanding their officials to wear graphic depictions of who they truly represent.
Who knows, maybe if Congress actually had to conspicuously display their sponsors like NASCAR drivers, they might think twice about whose dollars they take.
Two Conventions: Profiles in Decadent Cowardliness
Sept 12,2012
By Ralph Nader
The Republican and Democratic Conventions are mercifully over but their corrosive impacts on our democracy persist.
First, did you know that taxpayers helped fund these conventions at a level of $100 million for logistics and police sequestrations of demonstrators in Tampa and Charlotte and an additional $18.2 million each for general convention expenses?
The two party duopoly obviously controls the honey pot in Congress. That corporate welfare is what they enacted in spite of the fact that the party’s convention committees are private corporations that should pay for their own big political party and their many smaller social parties with plentiful food and drink. No third party – Green, Libertarian or others – received any taxpayer money for their conventions this year.
Second, the Republican and Democratic Conventions have jettisoned their original purposes which were to resolve the contest for the presidential nomination and work up a platform. Both functions are now decided beforehand, setting the stage for a choreographed theatrical event of political pomposity and braggadocio. On the periphery are the omnipresent corporate lobbyists and their parties of free food and drink.
Did they ask you the taxpayers to foot so much of this bill? Silly question for an oligarchy greased by a plutocracy.
Taking these conventions at face value, one is shocked by how they are scripted right down to every line of every speech vetted by the politicos. Clint Eastwood’s spontaneity that so angered the GOP operatives was the exception.
The Republicans put three themes in just about every speech. Tell your personal story, recount your humble beginnings, and describe how you pulled yourself up by your own bootstraps. Show the people you’re human or at least humanoid, not corporatist. Keep heralding small business so you don’t have to talk about Big Business which has bad vibrations these days around the country. Also, praise, praise, praise Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan as family men with family values. Imagine Republicans telling the press that the convention was to “humanize” Romney and give the voters a warm, fuzzy feeling about their candidate so as to forget that his campaign is a clenched-teeth mouthpiece for Big Business.
The Democratic Convention evokes pity. They too had similar scripts at the podium – narrate your humble, hardworking family lines, talk incessantly about jobs so you won’t have to talk about wages. Especially muzzled was the willing Richard Trumka, head of the AFL-CIO, who, since 2009, has been given the back of Obama’s hand on “card check organizing rights” and on an inflation-adjusted minimum wage. His staged remarks even withheld any mention of a $10 minimum wage (See H.R. 5901 bill “Catching up with 1968”) and the raiding of worker pensions by corporate raptors.
The repetitive over-wrought praise of “el Presidente” in every speech became mawkish, reminding one of the “politics of personalism,” present in many countries with underdeveloped political institutions. Michelle Obama found no time for mentioning the Obama family and America’s mission to grow and consume nutritious food and keep fit to avoid the ravages of obesity. She was too occupied gushing over her aggressive drone commander’s touching nightly reading of letters from Americans about their problems.
The mass obeisance ended when the commander-in-chief himself sprung onto the stage to speak the language of hope, meanwhile avoiding addressing the number of undesirable conditions that need his attention at this singular opportunity.
Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks, trying to be sympathetic, was looking for some significant specificity:
“What I was mostly looking for were big proposals, big as health care was four years ago. I had spent the three previous days watching more than 80 convention speeches without hearing a single major policy proposal in any of them. I asked governors, mayors and legislators to name a significant law that they’d like to see Obama pass in a second term. Not one could. At its base, this is a party with a protective agenda, not a change agenda…”
Fortifying Brooks’ observation was Obama’s recounting of the differences between the Democrats and Republicans. They are almost all defensive in nature. Defend social security, Medicare, and abortion from the Republican offensive.
The Democrats are not on the offensive – getting tough on: corporate crime, consumer gouging, bank abuses, corporate tax avoidance and evasions. They are not on the offensive fighting for worker’s safety and labor rights or minimum wage increases or helping the poor earn more and pay less.
Even when Obama mentioned climate change – a recent no-no in the Democrat’s lexicon – his words were defensive, namely “climate change is not a hoax” he did not elaborate.
This defensive attitude against the cruelest, most ignorant corporate-indentured, anti-worker, war mongering Republican Party in history is also seen in the debates and programs of Democratic Congressional and state candidates.
Being on the offense with an agenda standing for and with the people who economically are being driven, along with their country, into the ground by unpatriotic global corporations and their political minions, should be easy. Unless, that is, the Democrats want to continue dialing for the same corporate campaign dollars.
Playing defense explains why veteran Democrat members of the House of Representatives tell me that the party is going to lose the House again to the likes of John Boehner and Eric Cantor. The Democrats cannot even defend the country from Republicans who think Ronald Reagan was too moderate and unelectable today.
- end -
Even when Obama mentioned climate change – a recent no-no in the Democrat’s lexicon – his words were defensive, namely “climate change is not a hoax” he did not elaborate.
This defensive attitude against the cruelest, most ignorant corporate-indentured, anti-worker, war mongering Republican Party in history is also seen in the debates and programs of Democratic Congressional and state candidates.
Being on the offense with an agenda standing for and with the people who economically are being driven, along with their country, into the ground by unpatriotic global corporations and their political minions, should be easy. Unless, that is, the Democrats want to continue dialing for the same corporate campaign dollars.
Playing defense explains why veteran Democrat members of the House of Representatives tell me that the party is going to lose the House again to the likes of John Boehner and Eric Cantor. The Democrats cannot even defend the country from Republicans who think Ronald Reagan was too moderate and unelectable today.
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Where’s the War on Lethal Super-bugs?
Sept 5,2012
By Ralph Nader
What if two thousand U.S. soldiers were losing their lives every week in Afghanistan? Would the peddlers of the electoral politics of trivia, distraction and avoidance take notice? Of course.
Every week, two thousand Americans, or about 100,000 men, women and children a year, die from mostly preventable hospital-borne infections in the United States. The toll may even be higher (Center for Disease Control updates its figures soon).
To put this deadly disaster in perspective, hospital-induced infections kill more Americans than the combined fatalities from motor vehicle collisions, AIDs, fire and homicides combined. Additional millions more survive infections. The pain and costs are enormous.
Why the silence about this silent violence? Every President, including Barack Obama, says over and over again that the safety of the American people is his top priority. They spend trillions of dollars to guard against and confront stateless terrorists in blowback ways that seem to produce more terrorism in more countries. Yet the Washington lawmakers can’t seem to adequately respond to the little publicized yet dire warnings and casualty figures published by our leading scientists and public health officials about the big-time terrorists called lethal bacteria.
This year, our government is not even devoting the dollar equivalent of two unnecessary F-22 fighter planes to the fight against what the Washington Post calls “a global epidemic of hospital-acquired bugs that quickly grow resistant to the toughest drugs.”
The story behind this colossal callousness toward innocent, trusting people taken to hospitals for care and healing starts with the drug company executives who do not see much profit from developing new antibiotics. After all, selling drugs for depression, high blood pressure and “life-style drugs” make huge profits. Only vaccines are lower on the profit totem pole than antibiotics. Remember the ever-changing superbugs keep challenging the heavily government subsidized and tax-credited drug companies to invest in antibiotics research and development.
When the drug companies balked at spending money to discover anti-malaria drugs for our soldiers during the Vietnam War, the Pentagon opened its own research section at Walter Reed Army Hospital and developed several effective medicines itself.
David Shlaes, a specialist in drug development, told the Post that only four of the twelve largest global drug companies are researching new antibiotics. The last company to drop out was Pfizer, closing its Connecticut antibiotics research center, laying off 1200 employees and moving operations to China. Some corporate patriotism!
All Congress has recently done is give drug companies five more years of patent monopolies for inventing new antibiotics. This is the case even though just about every person can tell you of neighbors, friends or relatives who have caught serious infections in a hospital.
Last year, but unethically not disclosed until last month, the nation’s premier clinical research hospital at the National Institutes of Health, lost six patients to a super-bug resistant to all known antibiotics. Moreover, resistant strains of tuberculosis are spreading in Eastern Europe and Asia, according to a new study published in The Lancet.
Beyond the slowdown in developing new antibiotics – 13 new categories of antibiotics were discovered between 1945 and 1968 and just two new ones since then – is the massive over promotion of antibiotics through physicians who should know better. In addition, the daily feed of domesticated chickens, turkeys, cows and pigs is laced with antibiotics for disease prevention and growth-enhancement. This reduces animals’ natural immunity and leads to mutating resistant bacteria that can move into the human consumers of meat products.
As the New York Times reported “eighty percent of the antibiotics sold in the United States” go into these animals. Their producers “are not required to report how they use the drugs – which ones, on what types of animal, and in what quantities.”
According to The Times, a small sampling by federal agencies found a “ferocious germ resistant to many types of antibiotics increasing on chicken breasts.” The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) says it is moving to require animal producers to get prescriptions from veterinarians for certain antibiotics that now they get off the shelf.
Congress has not been helpful, cutting its own deals with agribusiness and drug lobbies in return for campaign cash and other niceties at the expense of public health. Show most members of Congress a few described human terrorists in the mountains of Afghanistan and they give open checkbooks to the Pentagon and the C.I.A. Such imbalanced priorities bespeak of unstable mental health on Capitol Hill, especially since they and their families eat the same meat products and go to hospitals.
“This is a real crisis,” Henry Masur, chief of NIH’s Critical Care Medicine Department, told The Post. People have to start asking “where are the Doctors?” who routinely cater to patients with colds by prescribing unnecessary antibiotics without even knowing whether the affliction is viral or bacterial. “The patients demand this; they think they are being neglected without a prescription,” is the frequent frustrated response by physicians. Answer: “who is the doctor here?”
Some hospitals are cutting their hospital-induced infection rates by the disciplined checklists, getting tough on physicians and nurses washing their hands and general sanitation crackdowns. This more rigorous application of medicine’s famous injunction “do no harm” must be applied faster, deeper and more regularly in all hospitals and clinics.
By the way, where are the cartoonists? Picturing these super-bugs in their grisly roles while our leaders look the other way is a graphic approach to get people’s serious attention. Start drawing for life, you guys!
For information see: http://www.cdc.gov/hai/
According to The Times, a small sampling by federal agencies found a “ferocious germ resistant to many types of antibiotics increasing on chicken breasts.” The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) says it is moving to require animal producers to get prescriptions from veterinarians for certain antibiotics that now they get off the shelf.
Congress has not been helpful, cutting its own deals with agribusiness and drug lobbies in return for campaign cash and other niceties at the expense of public health. Show most members of Congress a few described human terrorists in the mountains of Afghanistan and they give open checkbooks to the Pentagon and the C.I.A. Such imbalanced priorities bespeak of unstable mental health on Capitol Hill, especially since they and their families eat the same meat products and go to hospitals.
“This is a real crisis,” Henry Masur, chief of NIH’s Critical Care Medicine Department, told The Post. People have to start asking “where are the Doctors?” who routinely cater to patients with colds by prescribing unnecessary antibiotics without even knowing whether the affliction is viral or bacterial. “The patients demand this; they think they are being neglected without a prescription,” is the frequent frustrated response by physicians. Answer: “who is the doctor here?”
Some hospitals are cutting their hospital-induced infection rates by the disciplined checklists, getting tough on physicians and nurses washing their hands and general sanitation crackdowns. This more rigorous application of medicine’s famous injunction “do no harm” must be applied faster, deeper and more regularly in all hospitals and clinics.
By the way, where are the cartoonists? Picturing these super-bugs in their grisly roles while our leaders look the other way is a graphic approach to get people’s serious attention. Start drawing for life, you guys!
For information see: http://www.cdc.gov/hai/
Growing Doubts About Advertising
July 17, 2012
By Ralph Nader
Ask yourself when was the last time you saw any of those tiny ads on Google and Facebook and rushed to buy the products or services. For that matter, ask yourself whether any radio or television advertisements prompted you to go out and buy the product.
Sure the newspaper ads announcing short-term sales for clothes or household goods may get you to the market, along with the supermarket specials for foodstuffs. But generally speaking, you must wonder what the business community gets for its tens of billions of dollars annually pouring out of their advertising budgets.
I can almost hear the chuckles from Madison Avenue reacting to this skepticism about whether ads are worth their price. Such doubts are almost never publically discussed. One reason has its roots in the musing of pioneering department store magnate, John Wanamaker of Philadelphia. About a century ago, he said he thought that half the money he spent on advertising was effective, but didn’t know which half.
Another reason is that advertisements sell moods, feelings, self-exciting images about the product – selling the sizzle along with the steak, as the saying goes. These feelings connect to the corporate branding strategies and are hard to measure.
But they are believed by the “hidden persuaders,” to use Vance Packard’s famous phrase, to be very effective, precisely because they are emotional rather than rational. And never before has the technology of inducing these emotions – with visuals, colors, sounds and their synergies – been more hypnotic. It isn’t for nothing that trademarked slogans and names are expensively valued.
Recently however, it was General Motors, of all companies, that said very publically what many companies have been thinking for a long time. In May, stunning the advertising and internet industry, the world’s largest vehicle manufacturer announced that it would pull $10 million in ads from Facebook because they are not effective. A few days later, GM pulled out of the Super Bowl advertising frenzy – commercials for Super Bowl XVII are now going for $4 million per 30 seconds – on the grounds that it “simply could not justify the expense.” This is another way of saying the ads didn’t sell enough cars.
The mass media, which carries such exorbitant commercial messages, plays large corporate competitors, as in the auto and computer industries, against one another. “You don’t want to be left out of the Super Bowl, with its 111 million viewers, do you?” Of course, given the multiple distractions of family, dogs, cats, bathrooms, opening beer bottles, laughing at each other’s remarks, far fewer millions actually see the hyper-kinetic ads that bleed into one another before viewers even catch a logo.
Those managers arguing for ever larger ad budgets convey a “you gotta believe” mentality. It takes lots of myth, hope, gambling and reliance on the artistry and cleverness of the copywriters and ad designers to bring about the blockbuster breakthrough ad that arouses its beleaguered, saturated audience, enmeshed in a blizzard of sequential ads, and makes a memorable recollection of the product or service offered.
Most telling, of course, and most ignored in the experts’ evaluation of an ad’s excellence, is the prevailing absence of useful information for the consumer, including comparative information or information describing function, quality, reliable price, performance, safety and the like. Granted, on television and radio there is little time for a litany, but how about just one fact relating to usage or repair or disposal. Nah, say the faithful copywriters, that would break the emotional flow.
Some fifteen years ago, I discussed comparative pricing of auto insurance with my Princeton classmate, Progressive Insurance’s CEO, Peter Lewis. It wasn’t long before decisive Peter instituted the pioneering television ad that invited customers to submit their specifications to get the comparative price of equivalent policies by Progressive and its three or four competitors in a region. It seemed to work well for Progressive and certainly got people’s attention and generated word of mouth.
There is one organization that doesn’t lose any sleep over the question: “do advertising dollars work or are they largely wasted?” Consumers Union, through its monthly magazine Consumer Reports and its website services (www.consumerreports.org), gives you just the facts derived from its wide ranging honest testing programs. With over five million magazine print subscribers and three million online subscribers, more and more Americans are getting it the rational way.
By the way, Consumer Reports has never carried advertising in its seventy-five year history.
What About Some Corporate Patriotism!
June 21,2012
By Ralph Nader
What would happen if we asked the executives of the giant U.S. corporations, whose products constantly surround us, to show some corporate patriotism?
After all, General Electric, DuPont, Citigroup, Pfizer and others demand that they be treated as “persons” under our Constitution and our laws. And, they expect unfiltered loyalty from American workers even to the point of blocking the organization of unions so workers can band together for collective bargaining.
Moreover, many of these corporations expect to be bailed out by American taxpayers when they are in trouble, and they regularly receive a covey of direct and indirect government subsidies, giveaways and complex handouts.
Some of them pay no federal income taxes year after year, and a few game the tax laws to receive additional money back from the U.S. Treasury. Historically, the U.S. Marines and other U.S. armed forces have risked their lives to protect or protect these corporations’ overseas interests by invading or menacing numerous countries.
So it is reasonable for the American people to expect some reciprocity from these immense corporate entities that were born in the U.S. and rose to their economic prowess on the backs of American workers. The bosses of these companies believe they can have it both ways – getting all the benefits of their native country while shipping whole industries and jobs to communist and fascist regimes abroad that keep their workers in serf-like conditions.
The first test as to whether these U.S. companies have any allegiance to the U.S. and its communities is to demand that CEOs stand up at their annual shareholders meetings and pledge allegiance in the name of their corporation, not their boards of directors, “to the flag of the United States of America,” ending with that ringing phrase, voiced by millions of Americans daily, “with liberty and justice for all.”
More than seventy years ago, a famous Marine general, the double Congressional Medal of Honor awardee Smedly Butler, said his Marines were ordered to make sure the flag followed U.S. companies from Central America to Asia. In the past, the lack of allegiance was shockingly callous. DuPont and General Motors worked openly with fascist Germany and its companies before World War II and did not sever all dealings when hostilities started.
About fifteen years ago, I sent letters to the CEOs of the top 100 largest U.S. chartered corporations asking that they pledge allegiance to our country in the name of their company at their annual shareholders meetings. Their responses were instructive. Many said they would review the request; others turned it down, while some were ambiguous, misconstruing the request as being directed to their boards of directors instead of their U.S. chartered corporate entity.
Walmart replied that they would “give it every consideration.” Federated Department Stores expressly thought it was a good suggestion. Citicorp (now Citigroup) wrote that it is “not our practice to respond.”
Time for an update. I’ve just sent letters to twenty of the largest U.S. chartered companies renewing the request for the pledge. They include Exxon Mobil, Walmart, Chevron, General Motors, General Electric, Ford Motor, AT&T, Bank of America, Verizon Communications, J.P. Morgan Chase, Apple, CVS Caremark, IBM, Citigroup and Cardinal Health.
Imagine the CEOs of General Motors (or Exxon Mobil, Citigroup, Bank of America, etc.) pledging allegiance “to the Flag of the United States of America and the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
You may wish to contact these companies and urge their CEOs to take the pledge. This effort needs your participation as consumers, workers, taxpayers or shareholders. It opens up a long-overdue discussion about corporate patriotism and what it all should mean.
As conservative author Patrick Buchanan wrote some years ago: “If they [large U.S. corporations] are not loyal to us, why should we be loyal to them?”
- end-
Mr. Romney wants Mr. Obama to cut spending. Yet he accuses Mr. Obama of under-funding the bloated, massive military budget. Mr. Romney, moreover, never spotlights the hundreds of billions of dollars in corporate subsidies, handouts, giveaways and outrageous tax loopholes to Mr. Romney’s campaign paymasters.
The former “private equity” capitalist touts his experience in creating jobs as the reason for voters to choose him. Read “The Buyout of America” by John Kosman to really understand how these corporate strip miners arrange leveraged buyouts, load their acquisitions with large debt, drain off their borrowed dividends, lay off workers and often bury firms in bankruptcies after they have been sucked dry.
Stage Stores, Damon Corporation, Ampad, GS Technologies, Dade Behring, DDi and KB Toys all filed for bankruptcy after being acquired by Mr. Romney’s Bain Capital.
Too bad there are not dozens of presidential debates this fall where people in every region of the country could host the nominees for really substantive exchanges. Inane soundbytes may be good for Madison Avenue, but they are bad for our election campaigns.
End.
Thirty million American workers arise, you have nothing to lose but some of your debt!
Wednesday morning, Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr. (D-Ill.) introduced the “Catching Up to 1968 Act of 2012” (H.R. 5901) – legislation to raise the federal minimum wage to $10 per hour. The present minimum wage is $7.25, way below the unrealistically low federal poverty definition of $18,123 per year for a family of three. Adjusted for inflation, the 1968 minimum wage today would be a little above $10 per hour.
Together with Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) and Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, I was pleased to be with Rep. Jackson at a news conference to explain this long-overdue necessity for millions of hard-pressed, working Americans of all political persuasions.
The policy behind the minimum wage, first enacted in 1938 under President Franklin Roosevelt, was to provide a minimally livable wage. This implied at least keeping up with inflation, if not with new living expenses not envisioned seventy-five years ago. While businesses like Walmart and McDonalds have been raising their prices and executive compensation since 1968, these companies have received a windfall from a diminishing real minimum wage paid to their workers.
The economics behind the Jackson bill are strongly supportive of moral and equitable arguments. Most economists agree that what our ailing economy needs is more consumer demand for goods and services which will create jobs. Tens of billions of dollars flowing from a $10 minimum wage will be spent by poor families and workers almost immediately.
Historically, polls have registered around 70 percent of Americans favoring a minimum wage keeping up with inflation. That number includes many Republican workers who can be consoled by learning that both Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum, during their political careers, have supported adjusting the minimum wage.
Were the Democrats in Congress to make this a banner issue for election year 2012, their adversaries, Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Senator Mitch O’Connell (R-Ky.), would not be able to hold 100 percent of their Republicans on this popular issue. That means the bill’s backers could override these two rigid ideologues – so-called public servants – who make nearly $200 per hour plus luscious pension, health insurance, life insurance and other benefits.
President Obama, who has turned his back on many worker issues, can champion his promise in 2008 to press for a minimum wage of $9.50 by 2011 as well as benefit his campaign by helping people who have lost trust in government and their enthusiasm over Obama’s “hope and change.” Getting the attention of 30 million potential voters can change the dynamics of a tediously repetitive Obama-Romney campaign.
A debate over the minimum wage throws a more acute spotlight on the gigantic pay of the big corporate bosses who make $11,000 to $20,000 per hour! Their average pay was up another 6 percent in 2011 along with record profits for their companies.
If the Democrats want intellectual heft to rebut the carping, craven objections of the corporatist think tanks and trade associations, headed by bosses making big time pay themselves, they cannot do better than to refer to Alan Krueger, the former Princeton professor and now chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers to President Obama, who is the leading scholar behind inflation-adjusted minimum wages producing net job growth.
Moreover, there is no need to offset an inflation-adjusted minimum wage with lower taxes on smaller business. Since Obama took office there have been 17 tax cuts enacted for small businesses.
Many organizations with millions of members around the country are on the record, if not on the ramparts, as favoring an inflation-adjusted increase in the federal minimum wage. They include the AFL-CIO and member unions, especially the nurses union, the NAACP and La Raza, and the leading social service and social justice nonprofits.
In 2007 at the “Take Back America” conference, then Senator Obama delivered a ringing oration making “the minimum wage a living wage (tied) to the cost of living so we don’t have to wait another 10 years to see it rise.” Even Ontario, Canada’s minimum wage is $10.25 per hour.
So why aren’t all these supporters of the minimum wage inside and outside of Congress making something happen? Because they’re either out of gas and need to be replaced, or they are waiting on each other to make the first move.
The nonprofits and the labor unions are waiting on a signal from senior legislator, Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.). Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and the House Democratic Caucus are also waiting for Miller, who has not introduced a bill increasing the minimum wage since Obama took office (the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2007 was the last, with increases to $7.25 ending in July 2009). Of course, in turn, Obama is waiting on the Democratic leadership in Congress who, though firmly behind the increase, is waiting on Obama and, of course, Miller, who hails not from Dallas, Texas, but from the progressive San Francisco Bay area of California. Go figure.
Someday, people will ask – where were the lawyers?
END.
While recycling efforts in cities like San Francisco, Vancouver and Los Angeles rise above 50 percent, New York City has been slipping behind its own 2002 level and is still struggling to reach 20 percent. New York City has been a leader in improving air quality and reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but it still has dreaded incinerators producing toxic air and toxic residues.
In the early 90s, pragmatic environmental scientist, Professor Barry Commoner demonstrated in two operational pilot projects that the city could reach a residential recycling level of nearly 100 percent. Unfortunately, New York City missed a chance to become a world leader in recycling when its leaders, beginning with Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, declined to establish a city-wide recycling program based on Professor Commoner’s model.
The New York City recycling challenge still hasn’t recovered from that devastatingly wrongheaded decision. Politicians and corporations cannot stop an even superior environmental cycle, presently driven by charitable associations, in Mr. Rose’s words, “nimbly accepting, exchanging and distributing thousands of tons of reusable material each year”, as they have done for generations, “all the while contributing to the social, economic and environmental fabric of New York City.” Over the decades, the recipients have been communities in need, such as homeless shelters and poor populations.
Pompous Prevaricators of Power
May 15,2012
By Ralph Nader
A friend who works in Congress and actually reads the Congressional Record suggested that a collection of excerpted falsehoods by Republicans on the floor of the House of Representatives and Senate would make compelling evidence for the truth of economist Albert Hirschman’s book, "The Rhetoric of Reaction" (1991).
Professor Hirschman, a very original political economist, found throughout American history the following three propositions were commonly used to counter social justice efforts:
The Perversity Thesis states government action only serves to exacerbate the problem being addressed;
The Futility Thesis holds that attempts at social policy will simply fail to solve the problem;
The Jeopardy Thesis argues that the cost of the proposed change or reform is too high and will lead to disaster.
The only people who know more about this sequential rhetoric than Mr. Hirschman are corporate lawyers and their corporate clients’ publicists. For over two hundred years they and their corporations have opposed virtually every advance for better and fairer lives of the American people using propaganda which fits into Hirschman’s frameworks. Whether it was the abolition of slavery, child labor, and the 70 hour week, or women’s right to vote, trade union rights, the progressive income tax, unemployment compensation, social security and, of course, the various regulatory standards protecting consumers, worker safety and the environment, the arguments against them have been pretty much the same.
As the fascinating “Cry Wolf Project” (http://crywolfproject.org/) staff observed: “We’ve heard these all before. Perversity: if you raise the minimum wage, you’ll increase unemployment. Futility: tobacco warning labels won’t stop people from smoking. And Jeopardy: it’s a ‘job killer.’”
The “Cry Wolf Project” presents verbatim quotations from the corporate bosses from years past and then lets their words speak for themselves. Here is a sample:
Henry Ford II, in 1966, on long-overdue safety standards such as laminated windshields, dual-braking systems, collapsible steering wheels and seat belts: “Many of the temporary standards are unreasonable, arbitrary and technically unfeasible… If we can’t meet them when they are published we’ll have to close down.” To his credit, ten years later on national television, Mr. Ford recognized that due to federal regulations, cars were safer, more efficient and less polluting.
His fiery vice-president, Lee Iacocca, said in 1970 that The Clean Air Act “could prevent continued production of automobiles… and is a threat to the entire American economy and to every person in America.” Mr. Iacocca did recant his opposition to air bags as head of Chrysler in a full page ad headlined “Who Says You Can’t Teach an Old Dog New Tricks?”
Other corporate barons were more intransigent. Reacting to a law that established the federal minimum wage and ended child labor, a spokesman for the manufacturing industry in 1938 unleashed this volley: “The Fair Labor Standards Act constitutes a step in the direction of communism, bolshevism, fascism and Nazism.”
Social Security received a broadside from the Chairman of the Board of Chase National Bank. In 1936, top brass banker, Winthrop W. Aldrich, called it a “grave menace to the future security of the country as whole and to the security of the very people it is designed to protect.”
His down the line executive successor, the haughty James Dimon has been spouting cataclysmic claims about the Dodd-Frank reforms that are modestly designed to avoid another multi-trillion dollar Wall Street bailout by Washington. Haughty, that is, until last week when Mr. Dimon, CEO of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. revealed at least a two billion dollar gambling bet that his company lost in the high-flying business of complex derivatives trading linked to corporate debt.
What a cruel irony. Mr. Dimon’s bank and half a dozen other giant banks are now corporate welfare kings deemed “too big to fail” (as well as too big to be taxed fairly). Unfortunately, social security recipients and other tax payers are still the ones who will pay for any future bailouts. This is what America has been reduced to by the multinational casino capitalists who long ago abandoned any allegiance or patriotism toward the country that bred them into present day giants.
June 21,2012
By Ralph Nader
What would happen if we asked the executives of the giant U.S. corporations, whose products constantly surround us, to show some corporate patriotism?
After all, General Electric, DuPont, Citigroup, Pfizer and others demand that they be treated as “persons” under our Constitution and our laws. And, they expect unfiltered loyalty from American workers even to the point of blocking the organization of unions so workers can band together for collective bargaining.
Moreover, many of these corporations expect to be bailed out by American taxpayers when they are in trouble, and they regularly receive a covey of direct and indirect government subsidies, giveaways and complex handouts.
Some of them pay no federal income taxes year after year, and a few game the tax laws to receive additional money back from the U.S. Treasury. Historically, the U.S. Marines and other U.S. armed forces have risked their lives to protect or protect these corporations’ overseas interests by invading or menacing numerous countries.
So it is reasonable for the American people to expect some reciprocity from these immense corporate entities that were born in the U.S. and rose to their economic prowess on the backs of American workers. The bosses of these companies believe they can have it both ways – getting all the benefits of their native country while shipping whole industries and jobs to communist and fascist regimes abroad that keep their workers in serf-like conditions.
The first test as to whether these U.S. companies have any allegiance to the U.S. and its communities is to demand that CEOs stand up at their annual shareholders meetings and pledge allegiance in the name of their corporation, not their boards of directors, “to the flag of the United States of America,” ending with that ringing phrase, voiced by millions of Americans daily, “with liberty and justice for all.”
More than seventy years ago, a famous Marine general, the double Congressional Medal of Honor awardee Smedly Butler, said his Marines were ordered to make sure the flag followed U.S. companies from Central America to Asia. In the past, the lack of allegiance was shockingly callous. DuPont and General Motors worked openly with fascist Germany and its companies before World War II and did not sever all dealings when hostilities started.
About fifteen years ago, I sent letters to the CEOs of the top 100 largest U.S. chartered corporations asking that they pledge allegiance to our country in the name of their company at their annual shareholders meetings. Their responses were instructive. Many said they would review the request; others turned it down, while some were ambiguous, misconstruing the request as being directed to their boards of directors instead of their U.S. chartered corporate entity.
Walmart replied that they would “give it every consideration.” Federated Department Stores expressly thought it was a good suggestion. Citicorp (now Citigroup) wrote that it is “not our practice to respond.”
Time for an update. I’ve just sent letters to twenty of the largest U.S. chartered companies renewing the request for the pledge. They include Exxon Mobil, Walmart, Chevron, General Motors, General Electric, Ford Motor, AT&T, Bank of America, Verizon Communications, J.P. Morgan Chase, Apple, CVS Caremark, IBM, Citigroup and Cardinal Health.
Imagine the CEOs of General Motors (or Exxon Mobil, Citigroup, Bank of America, etc.) pledging allegiance “to the Flag of the United States of America and the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
You may wish to contact these companies and urge their CEOs to take the pledge. This effort needs your participation as consumers, workers, taxpayers or shareholders. It opens up a long-overdue discussion about corporate patriotism and what it all should mean.
As conservative author Patrick Buchanan wrote some years ago: “If they [large U.S. corporations] are not loyal to us, why should we be loyal to them?”
- end-
Romney’s Campaign of Inanity
By Ralph Nader
June 14, 2012
Mitt Romney’s daily dittohead assertions make one wonder what he got out of the law and business degrees he received from Harvard University. One of his regular blasts blames Barack Obama for the daily reports of bad economic indicators. Unemployment increases – blame Obama. Retail sales decline – blame Obama. Profits not rising – blame Obama. Housing crisis continues– blame Obama.
At the same time, Mr. Romney will be the first to tell you that government doesn’t create jobs. In the same breath he’ll brag about creating thousands of jobs as a one-term governor of Massachusetts.
Are there contradictions here?
Welcome to the land of “Republican-speak” and the media dutifully headlining every absurd charge or claim made by the foregone Republican nominee for president in 2012.
First, government can both create jobs and cost jobs. Public works programs by state and federal government have created jobs in America for over 200 years. So do long-overdue safety and health regulations such as those requiring seat belts and air bags and smoke stack scrubbers, which can all be manufactured by American workers.
On the other hand, the “government – global corporate alliance” that created one-sided tax and trade policies like those advanced under NAFTA and through the World Trade Organization have cost millions of net American jobs. After all, the massive annual trade deficits recorded by the United States over the last thirty years have meant a net export of both blue and white collar jobs.
By Ralph Nader
June 14, 2012
Mitt Romney’s daily dittohead assertions make one wonder what he got out of the law and business degrees he received from Harvard University. One of his regular blasts blames Barack Obama for the daily reports of bad economic indicators. Unemployment increases – blame Obama. Retail sales decline – blame Obama. Profits not rising – blame Obama. Housing crisis continues– blame Obama.
At the same time, Mr. Romney will be the first to tell you that government doesn’t create jobs. In the same breath he’ll brag about creating thousands of jobs as a one-term governor of Massachusetts.
Are there contradictions here?
Welcome to the land of “Republican-speak” and the media dutifully headlining every absurd charge or claim made by the foregone Republican nominee for president in 2012.
First, government can both create jobs and cost jobs. Public works programs by state and federal government have created jobs in America for over 200 years. So do long-overdue safety and health regulations such as those requiring seat belts and air bags and smoke stack scrubbers, which can all be manufactured by American workers.
On the other hand, the “government – global corporate alliance” that created one-sided tax and trade policies like those advanced under NAFTA and through the World Trade Organization have cost millions of net American jobs. After all, the massive annual trade deficits recorded by the United States over the last thirty years have meant a net export of both blue and white collar jobs.
Mr. Romney correctly scoffed at then rival candidate Newt Gingrich last January when the latter claimed that he (as Speaker of the House of Representatives) and Bill Clinton created 11 million jobs. Mr. Gingrich and, in his day, Mr. Clinton took credit for this job surge which really was the result of the tech boom out of Silicon Valley and Seattle which lunched off past government research and development programs.
In the 24-hour news cycle, Mr. Romney is everywhere and nowhere. Even his argument that government can only create jobs by getting out of the way of the business world rings false. He wants more tax reductions for the rich and their companies. But business is already taxed far less as a percentage of profits than was the case in the more prosperous 1960s. Not since the 1950s have taxes overall been lower as a percentage of the GDP than they are today. This is a major reason for the growing federal deficits.
Next Mr. Romney trumpets fewer regulations as having a freeing effect on companies allowing them to create jobs. As always he is very vague about specifics. Since 2000, diminished or no bank regulations have been a major cause for the spiral of reckless speculation and the growth of the complex, abstract derivatives monster which brought down large companies and cost so many millions of people their jobs.
The truth is that most federal regulations on the books are weak and obsolete. Many safety rules and standards are in that category.
Our country is dominated by large corporations. Their lobbyists and their PAC contributions shape how Congress spends large chunks of the federal operating budget to enrich the giant military-industrial complex and expand corporate welfare programs. These same corporate pleaders oppose an inflation-adjusted minimum wage. In fact, corporate lobbies have tied the hands of presidents from Dwight Eisenhower to Barack Obama.
To blame Mr. Obama so completely for the state of the economy is more than Mr. Romney trying to drape amnesia on the public about the role of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. It is to assume Mr. Obama has the power to control the Federal Reserve and the stubborn, corporate indentured members of Congress who constitute most members of Mr. Romney’s party.
Blocking the repairing of America’s public works has been the priority of John Boehner, Eric Cantor and Mitch McConnell – the Republican leaders. Mr. Obama’s failure is not to take them head on for these community upgrades all over the country.
In the 24-hour news cycle, Mr. Romney is everywhere and nowhere. Even his argument that government can only create jobs by getting out of the way of the business world rings false. He wants more tax reductions for the rich and their companies. But business is already taxed far less as a percentage of profits than was the case in the more prosperous 1960s. Not since the 1950s have taxes overall been lower as a percentage of the GDP than they are today. This is a major reason for the growing federal deficits.
Next Mr. Romney trumpets fewer regulations as having a freeing effect on companies allowing them to create jobs. As always he is very vague about specifics. Since 2000, diminished or no bank regulations have been a major cause for the spiral of reckless speculation and the growth of the complex, abstract derivatives monster which brought down large companies and cost so many millions of people their jobs.
The truth is that most federal regulations on the books are weak and obsolete. Many safety rules and standards are in that category.
Our country is dominated by large corporations. Their lobbyists and their PAC contributions shape how Congress spends large chunks of the federal operating budget to enrich the giant military-industrial complex and expand corporate welfare programs. These same corporate pleaders oppose an inflation-adjusted minimum wage. In fact, corporate lobbies have tied the hands of presidents from Dwight Eisenhower to Barack Obama.
To blame Mr. Obama so completely for the state of the economy is more than Mr. Romney trying to drape amnesia on the public about the role of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. It is to assume Mr. Obama has the power to control the Federal Reserve and the stubborn, corporate indentured members of Congress who constitute most members of Mr. Romney’s party.
Blocking the repairing of America’s public works has been the priority of John Boehner, Eric Cantor and Mitch McConnell – the Republican leaders. Mr. Obama’s failure is not to take them head on for these community upgrades all over the country.
Mr. Romney wants Mr. Obama to cut spending. Yet he accuses Mr. Obama of under-funding the bloated, massive military budget. Mr. Romney, moreover, never spotlights the hundreds of billions of dollars in corporate subsidies, handouts, giveaways and outrageous tax loopholes to Mr. Romney’s campaign paymasters.
The former “private equity” capitalist touts his experience in creating jobs as the reason for voters to choose him. Read “The Buyout of America” by John Kosman to really understand how these corporate strip miners arrange leveraged buyouts, load their acquisitions with large debt, drain off their borrowed dividends, lay off workers and often bury firms in bankruptcies after they have been sucked dry.
Stage Stores, Damon Corporation, Ampad, GS Technologies, Dade Behring, DDi and KB Toys all filed for bankruptcy after being acquired by Mr. Romney’s Bain Capital.
Too bad there are not dozens of presidential debates this fall where people in every region of the country could host the nominees for really substantive exchanges. Inane soundbytes may be good for Madison Avenue, but they are bad for our election campaigns.
End.
Don’t 30 Million Workers Deserve 1968 Wages?
Jun 7, 2012
Jun 7, 2012
By Ralph Nader
Thirty million American workers arise, you have nothing to lose but some of your debt!
Wednesday morning, Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr. (D-Ill.) introduced the “Catching Up to 1968 Act of 2012” (H.R. 5901) – legislation to raise the federal minimum wage to $10 per hour. The present minimum wage is $7.25, way below the unrealistically low federal poverty definition of $18,123 per year for a family of three. Adjusted for inflation, the 1968 minimum wage today would be a little above $10 per hour.
Together with Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) and Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, I was pleased to be with Rep. Jackson at a news conference to explain this long-overdue necessity for millions of hard-pressed, working Americans of all political persuasions.
The policy behind the minimum wage, first enacted in 1938 under President Franklin Roosevelt, was to provide a minimally livable wage. This implied at least keeping up with inflation, if not with new living expenses not envisioned seventy-five years ago. While businesses like Walmart and McDonalds have been raising their prices and executive compensation since 1968, these companies have received a windfall from a diminishing real minimum wage paid to their workers.
The economics behind the Jackson bill are strongly supportive of moral and equitable arguments. Most economists agree that what our ailing economy needs is more consumer demand for goods and services which will create jobs. Tens of billions of dollars flowing from a $10 minimum wage will be spent by poor families and workers almost immediately.
Historically, polls have registered around 70 percent of Americans favoring a minimum wage keeping up with inflation. That number includes many Republican workers who can be consoled by learning that both Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum, during their political careers, have supported adjusting the minimum wage.
Were the Democrats in Congress to make this a banner issue for election year 2012, their adversaries, Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Senator Mitch O’Connell (R-Ky.), would not be able to hold 100 percent of their Republicans on this popular issue. That means the bill’s backers could override these two rigid ideologues – so-called public servants – who make nearly $200 per hour plus luscious pension, health insurance, life insurance and other benefits.
President Obama, who has turned his back on many worker issues, can champion his promise in 2008 to press for a minimum wage of $9.50 by 2011 as well as benefit his campaign by helping people who have lost trust in government and their enthusiasm over Obama’s “hope and change.” Getting the attention of 30 million potential voters can change the dynamics of a tediously repetitive Obama-Romney campaign.
A debate over the minimum wage throws a more acute spotlight on the gigantic pay of the big corporate bosses who make $11,000 to $20,000 per hour! Their average pay was up another 6 percent in 2011 along with record profits for their companies.
If the Democrats want intellectual heft to rebut the carping, craven objections of the corporatist think tanks and trade associations, headed by bosses making big time pay themselves, they cannot do better than to refer to Alan Krueger, the former Princeton professor and now chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers to President Obama, who is the leading scholar behind inflation-adjusted minimum wages producing net job growth.
Moreover, there is no need to offset an inflation-adjusted minimum wage with lower taxes on smaller business. Since Obama took office there have been 17 tax cuts enacted for small businesses.
Many organizations with millions of members around the country are on the record, if not on the ramparts, as favoring an inflation-adjusted increase in the federal minimum wage. They include the AFL-CIO and member unions, especially the nurses union, the NAACP and La Raza, and the leading social service and social justice nonprofits.
In 2007 at the “Take Back America” conference, then Senator Obama delivered a ringing oration making “the minimum wage a living wage (tied) to the cost of living so we don’t have to wait another 10 years to see it rise.” Even Ontario, Canada’s minimum wage is $10.25 per hour.
So why aren’t all these supporters of the minimum wage inside and outside of Congress making something happen? Because they’re either out of gas and need to be replaced, or they are waiting on each other to make the first move.
The nonprofits and the labor unions are waiting on a signal from senior legislator, Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.). Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and the House Democratic Caucus are also waiting for Miller, who has not introduced a bill increasing the minimum wage since Obama took office (the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2007 was the last, with increases to $7.25 ending in July 2009). Of course, in turn, Obama is waiting on the Democratic leadership in Congress who, though firmly behind the increase, is waiting on Obama and, of course, Miller, who hails not from Dallas, Texas, but from the progressive San Francisco Bay area of California. Go figure.
So maybe this cycle of insensitive lethargy by the Democratic Party can be broken by the congressional stalwarts who have joined with Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr. in supporting his proposal (H.R. 5901) for a modest increase in the minimum wage to help tens of millions of downtrodden workers catch up with 1968!
For more information on efforts to raise the federal minimum wage, see: http://www.timeforaraise.org/.
For more information on efforts to raise the federal minimum wage, see: http://www.timeforaraise.org/.
Obama At Large: Where Are The Lawyers?
May 31,2012
By Ralph Nader
The rule of law is rapidly breaking down at the top levels of our government. As officers of the court, we have sworn to “support the Constitution,” which clearly implies an affirmative commitment on our part.
Take the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The conservative American Bar Association sent three white papers to President Bush describing his continual unconstitutional policies. Then and now civil liberties groups and a few law professors, such as the stalwart David Cole of Georgetown University and Jonathan Turley of George Washington University, have distinguished themselves in calling out both presidents for such violations and the necessity for enforcing the rule of law.
Sadly, the bulk of our profession, as individuals and through their bar associations, has remained quietly on the sidelines. They have turned away from their role as “first-responders” to protect the Constitution from its official violators.
As a youngster in Hawaii, basketball player Barack Obama was nicknamed by his schoolboy chums as “Barry O’Bomber,” according to the Washington Post. Tuesday’s (May 29) New York Times published a massive page-one feature article by Jo Becker and Scott Shane, that demonstrated just how inadvertently prescient was this moniker. This was not an adversarial, leaked newspaper scoop. The article had all the signs of cooperation by the three dozen, interviewed current and former advisers to President Obama and his administration. The reporters wrote that a weekly role of the president is to personally select and order a “kill list” of suspected terrorists or militants via drone strikes or other means. The reporters wrote that this personal role of Obama’s is “without precedent in presidential history.” Adversaries are pulling him into more and more countries – Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and other territories.
May 31,2012
By Ralph Nader
The rule of law is rapidly breaking down at the top levels of our government. As officers of the court, we have sworn to “support the Constitution,” which clearly implies an affirmative commitment on our part.
Take the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The conservative American Bar Association sent three white papers to President Bush describing his continual unconstitutional policies. Then and now civil liberties groups and a few law professors, such as the stalwart David Cole of Georgetown University and Jonathan Turley of George Washington University, have distinguished themselves in calling out both presidents for such violations and the necessity for enforcing the rule of law.
Sadly, the bulk of our profession, as individuals and through their bar associations, has remained quietly on the sidelines. They have turned away from their role as “first-responders” to protect the Constitution from its official violators.
As a youngster in Hawaii, basketball player Barack Obama was nicknamed by his schoolboy chums as “Barry O’Bomber,” according to the Washington Post. Tuesday’s (May 29) New York Times published a massive page-one feature article by Jo Becker and Scott Shane, that demonstrated just how inadvertently prescient was this moniker. This was not an adversarial, leaked newspaper scoop. The article had all the signs of cooperation by the three dozen, interviewed current and former advisers to President Obama and his administration. The reporters wrote that a weekly role of the president is to personally select and order a “kill list” of suspected terrorists or militants via drone strikes or other means. The reporters wrote that this personal role of Obama’s is “without precedent in presidential history.” Adversaries are pulling him into more and more countries – Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and other territories.
The drones have killed civilians, families with small children, and even allied soldiers in this undeclared war based on secret “facts” and grudges (getting even). These attacks are justified by secret legal memos claiming that the president, without any Congressional authorization, can without any limitations other that his say-so, target far and wide assassinations of any “suspected terrorist,” including American citizens.
The bombings by Mr. Obama, as secret prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner, trample proper constitutional authority, separation of powers, and checks and balances and constitute repeated impeachable offenses. That is, if a pathetic Congress ever decided to uphold its constitutional responsibility, including and beyond Article I, section 8’s war-declaring powers.
As if lawyers needed any reminding, the Constitution is the foundation of our legal system and is based on declared, open boundaries of permissible government actions. That is what a government of law, not of men, means. Further our system is clearly demarked by independent review of executive branch decisions – by our courts and Congress.
What happens if Congress becomes, in constitutional lawyer Bruce Fein’s words, “an ink blot,” and the courts beg off with their wholesale dismissals of Constitutional matters based on claims and issue involves a “political question” or that parties have “no-standing-to-sue.” What happens is what is happening. The situation worsens every year, deepening dictatorial secretive decisions by the White House, and not just regarding foreign and military policies.
The value of The New York Times article is that it added ascribed commentary on what was reported. Here is a sample:
- The U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan, Cameron P. Munter, quoted by a colleague as complaining about the CIA’s strikes driving American policy commenting that he: “didn’t realize his main job was to kill people.” Imagine what the sidelined Foreign Service is thinking about greater longer-range risks to our national security.
- Dennis Blair, former Director of National Intelligence, calls the strike campaign “dangerously seductive.” He said that Obama’s obsession with targeted killings is “the politically advantageous thing to do — low cost, no US casualties, gives the appearance of toughness. It plays well domestically, and it is unpopular only in other countries. Any damage it does to the national interest only shows up over the long term.” Blair, a retired admiral, has often noted that intense focus on strikes sidelines any long-term strategy against al-Qaeda which spreads wider with each drone that vaporizes civilians.
The bombings by Mr. Obama, as secret prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner, trample proper constitutional authority, separation of powers, and checks and balances and constitute repeated impeachable offenses. That is, if a pathetic Congress ever decided to uphold its constitutional responsibility, including and beyond Article I, section 8’s war-declaring powers.
As if lawyers needed any reminding, the Constitution is the foundation of our legal system and is based on declared, open boundaries of permissible government actions. That is what a government of law, not of men, means. Further our system is clearly demarked by independent review of executive branch decisions – by our courts and Congress.
What happens if Congress becomes, in constitutional lawyer Bruce Fein’s words, “an ink blot,” and the courts beg off with their wholesale dismissals of Constitutional matters based on claims and issue involves a “political question” or that parties have “no-standing-to-sue.” What happens is what is happening. The situation worsens every year, deepening dictatorial secretive decisions by the White House, and not just regarding foreign and military policies.
The value of The New York Times article is that it added ascribed commentary on what was reported. Here is a sample:
- The U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan, Cameron P. Munter, quoted by a colleague as complaining about the CIA’s strikes driving American policy commenting that he: “didn’t realize his main job was to kill people.” Imagine what the sidelined Foreign Service is thinking about greater longer-range risks to our national security.
- Dennis Blair, former Director of National Intelligence, calls the strike campaign “dangerously seductive.” He said that Obama’s obsession with targeted killings is “the politically advantageous thing to do — low cost, no US casualties, gives the appearance of toughness. It plays well domestically, and it is unpopular only in other countries. Any damage it does to the national interest only shows up over the long term.” Blair, a retired admiral, has often noted that intense focus on strikes sidelines any long-term strategy against al-Qaeda which spreads wider with each drone that vaporizes civilians.
Former CIA director Michael Hayden decries the secrecy: “This program rests on the personal legitimacy of the president and that’s not sustainable,” he told the Times. “Democracies do not make war on the basis of legal memos locked in a D.O.J. [Department of Justice] safe.”
Consider this: an allegedly liberal former constitutional law lecturer is being cautioned about blowback, the erosion of democracy and the national security by former heads of super-secret spy agencies!
Secrecy-driven violence in government breeds fear and surrender of conscience. When Mr. Obama was campaigning for president in 2007, he was reviled by Hillary Clinton, Joseph Biden Jr. and Mitt Romney – then presidential candidates – for declaring that even if Pakistan leaders objected, he would go after terrorist bases in Pakistan. Romney said he had “become Dr. Strangelove,” according to the Times. Today all three of candidate Obama’s critics have decided to go along with egregious violations of our Constitution.
The Times made the telling point that Obama’s orders now “can target suspects in Yemen whose names they do not know.” Such is the drift to one-man rule, consuming so much of his time in this way at the expense of addressing hundreds of thousands of preventable fatalities yearly here in the U.S. from occupational disease, environmental pollution, hospital infections and other documented dangerous conditions.
Based on deep reporting, Becker and Shane allowed that “both Pakistan and Yemen are arguably less stable and more hostile to the United States than when Obama became president.”
In a world of lawlessness, force will beget force, which is what the CIA means by “blowback.” Our country has the most to lose when we abandon the rule of law and embrace lawless violence that is banking future revenge throughout the world.
The people in the countries we target know what we must remember. We are their occupiers, their invaders, the powerful supporters for decades of their own brutal tyrants. We’re in their backyard, which more than any other impetus spawned al-Qaeda in the first place.
So lawyers of America, apart from a few stalwarts among you, what is your breaking point? When will you uphold your oath of office and work to restore constitutional authorities and boundaries?
Consider this: an allegedly liberal former constitutional law lecturer is being cautioned about blowback, the erosion of democracy and the national security by former heads of super-secret spy agencies!
Secrecy-driven violence in government breeds fear and surrender of conscience. When Mr. Obama was campaigning for president in 2007, he was reviled by Hillary Clinton, Joseph Biden Jr. and Mitt Romney – then presidential candidates – for declaring that even if Pakistan leaders objected, he would go after terrorist bases in Pakistan. Romney said he had “become Dr. Strangelove,” according to the Times. Today all three of candidate Obama’s critics have decided to go along with egregious violations of our Constitution.
The Times made the telling point that Obama’s orders now “can target suspects in Yemen whose names they do not know.” Such is the drift to one-man rule, consuming so much of his time in this way at the expense of addressing hundreds of thousands of preventable fatalities yearly here in the U.S. from occupational disease, environmental pollution, hospital infections and other documented dangerous conditions.
Based on deep reporting, Becker and Shane allowed that “both Pakistan and Yemen are arguably less stable and more hostile to the United States than when Obama became president.”
In a world of lawlessness, force will beget force, which is what the CIA means by “blowback.” Our country has the most to lose when we abandon the rule of law and embrace lawless violence that is banking future revenge throughout the world.
The people in the countries we target know what we must remember. We are their occupiers, their invaders, the powerful supporters for decades of their own brutal tyrants. We’re in their backyard, which more than any other impetus spawned al-Qaeda in the first place.
So lawyers of America, apart from a few stalwarts among you, what is your breaking point? When will you uphold your oath of office and work to restore constitutional authorities and boundaries?
Someday, people will ask – where were the lawyers?
END.
The Rise of Re-Use
May 22, 2012
By Ralph Nader
Last week I read that the glitzy world of virtual reality created instant multi-millionaires and several billionaires when Facebook went public selling shares.
Last week I also noted the important real world problem of some 250 million tons of solid waste a year in our country alone.
Guess which “world” gets the most investment, status, fame, klieg lights, and attention of the skilled classes and the power structure?
Guess which world is more important for our wellbeing and that of the planet?
You’ve heard of CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook’s 900 users exchanging gossip and other personal pleasantries or worries through a medium that inflates narcissism.
You’ve probably not heard of Ben Rose of the New York City Materials Exchange Development Program (NYC MEDP) or the equivalent organizations in your communities providing services to thousands of charitable non-profit groups which promote the donating and reusing of materials to avoid incineration, landfilling and recycling.
To grasp the enormity of modern society’s waste products, Ann Leonard created a sparkling website, visited by millions of people (www.storyofstuff.org). She also published a recent popular book titled "The Story of Stuff" that details every aspect of your environment and physical being. Air, water, food, soil and even your genes absorb the byproducts of processing mountains of stuff. The results are not pretty.
May 22, 2012
By Ralph Nader
Last week I read that the glitzy world of virtual reality created instant multi-millionaires and several billionaires when Facebook went public selling shares.
Last week I also noted the important real world problem of some 250 million tons of solid waste a year in our country alone.
Guess which “world” gets the most investment, status, fame, klieg lights, and attention of the skilled classes and the power structure?
Guess which world is more important for our wellbeing and that of the planet?
You’ve heard of CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook’s 900 users exchanging gossip and other personal pleasantries or worries through a medium that inflates narcissism.
You’ve probably not heard of Ben Rose of the New York City Materials Exchange Development Program (NYC MEDP) or the equivalent organizations in your communities providing services to thousands of charitable non-profit groups which promote the donating and reusing of materials to avoid incineration, landfilling and recycling.
To grasp the enormity of modern society’s waste products, Ann Leonard created a sparkling website, visited by millions of people (www.storyofstuff.org). She also published a recent popular book titled "The Story of Stuff" that details every aspect of your environment and physical being. Air, water, food, soil and even your genes absorb the byproducts of processing mountains of stuff. The results are not pretty.
While recycling efforts in cities like San Francisco, Vancouver and Los Angeles rise above 50 percent, New York City has been slipping behind its own 2002 level and is still struggling to reach 20 percent. New York City has been a leader in improving air quality and reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but it still has dreaded incinerators producing toxic air and toxic residues.
In the early 90s, pragmatic environmental scientist, Professor Barry Commoner demonstrated in two operational pilot projects that the city could reach a residential recycling level of nearly 100 percent. Unfortunately, New York City missed a chance to become a world leader in recycling when its leaders, beginning with Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, declined to establish a city-wide recycling program based on Professor Commoner’s model.
The New York City recycling challenge still hasn’t recovered from that devastatingly wrongheaded decision. Politicians and corporations cannot stop an even superior environmental cycle, presently driven by charitable associations, in Mr. Rose’s words, “nimbly accepting, exchanging and distributing thousands of tons of reusable material each year”, as they have done for generations, “all the while contributing to the social, economic and environmental fabric of New York City.” Over the decades, the recipients have been communities in need, such as homeless shelters and poor populations.
The NYC Materials Exchange Development Program now sees a great potential to “organize, grow and advocate for the practice of donating and reusing materials for the benefit of all New Yorkers,” creating local jobs and adding productivity without any tax dollars. They are rediscovering the past of a thrifty culture and expanding it mightily to contribute to the neighborhood and economic landscape.
Donating materials instead of trashing or recycling them enlarges the gifting culture and the beneficial human interactions that follow. As Ben Rose notes: “In contrast to recycling, where used materials are broken down into their raw elements to make new items, reuse takes useful products and exchanges them without reprocessing, thus saving time, money, energy and valuable resources.”
The obstacles are obvious. First a throwaway economy of waste is profitable for sellers who want you to keep throwing away and buying. They plan product obsolescence and lure consumers with the convenience of disposable products. So we have to change habits: become more cunning about what manufacturers and vendors are up to and expand second hand, reuse and material exchange programs.
What are reusable materials? Just about everything you purchase that doesn’t spoil or perish. Clothing, furniture, books, bicycles, containers, computers, tools, surplus construction materials and things you buy or grow that you do not use. Reuse outlets include Goodwill or Thrift stores, charitable book and clothing drives, ecology centers and creative arts programs.
Nothing less than a “New Age” for a burgeoning sub-economy of reusable products and materials is being envisioned by the collaborative likes of the New York City Sanitation Department and the City College of New York’s Department of Civil Engineering. Collecting data which shows how much energy is saved, how many jobs can be created, how much better pricing systems can be, and how much solid waste can be prevented will elevate this subject and its social status within the “zero waste” movement. We should aspire to using resources, in the worlds of Paul Hawkins, “10 to 100 times more productively.”
Other countries are advancing in the reuse sector in ways we can learn from immediately. Holland is starting numerous “Repair Cafes,” that are attracting increasing interest in “fixing” rather than dumping. These used to be called “Fix-It Shops” in the U.S. before the advent of our throw away corporate culture.
Donating materials instead of trashing or recycling them enlarges the gifting culture and the beneficial human interactions that follow. As Ben Rose notes: “In contrast to recycling, where used materials are broken down into their raw elements to make new items, reuse takes useful products and exchanges them without reprocessing, thus saving time, money, energy and valuable resources.”
The obstacles are obvious. First a throwaway economy of waste is profitable for sellers who want you to keep throwing away and buying. They plan product obsolescence and lure consumers with the convenience of disposable products. So we have to change habits: become more cunning about what manufacturers and vendors are up to and expand second hand, reuse and material exchange programs.
What are reusable materials? Just about everything you purchase that doesn’t spoil or perish. Clothing, furniture, books, bicycles, containers, computers, tools, surplus construction materials and things you buy or grow that you do not use. Reuse outlets include Goodwill or Thrift stores, charitable book and clothing drives, ecology centers and creative arts programs.
Nothing less than a “New Age” for a burgeoning sub-economy of reusable products and materials is being envisioned by the collaborative likes of the New York City Sanitation Department and the City College of New York’s Department of Civil Engineering. Collecting data which shows how much energy is saved, how many jobs can be created, how much better pricing systems can be, and how much solid waste can be prevented will elevate this subject and its social status within the “zero waste” movement. We should aspire to using resources, in the worlds of Paul Hawkins, “10 to 100 times more productively.”
Other countries are advancing in the reuse sector in ways we can learn from immediately. Holland is starting numerous “Repair Cafes,” that are attracting increasing interest in “fixing” rather than dumping. These used to be called “Fix-It Shops” in the U.S. before the advent of our throw away corporate culture.
Pompous Prevaricators of Power
May 15,2012
By Ralph Nader
A friend who works in Congress and actually reads the Congressional Record suggested that a collection of excerpted falsehoods by Republicans on the floor of the House of Representatives and Senate would make compelling evidence for the truth of economist Albert Hirschman’s book, "The Rhetoric of Reaction" (1991).
Professor Hirschman, a very original political economist, found throughout American history the following three propositions were commonly used to counter social justice efforts:
The Perversity Thesis states government action only serves to exacerbate the problem being addressed;
The Futility Thesis holds that attempts at social policy will simply fail to solve the problem;
The Jeopardy Thesis argues that the cost of the proposed change or reform is too high and will lead to disaster.
The only people who know more about this sequential rhetoric than Mr. Hirschman are corporate lawyers and their corporate clients’ publicists. For over two hundred years they and their corporations have opposed virtually every advance for better and fairer lives of the American people using propaganda which fits into Hirschman’s frameworks. Whether it was the abolition of slavery, child labor, and the 70 hour week, or women’s right to vote, trade union rights, the progressive income tax, unemployment compensation, social security and, of course, the various regulatory standards protecting consumers, worker safety and the environment, the arguments against them have been pretty much the same.
As the fascinating “Cry Wolf Project” (http://crywolfproject.org/) staff observed: “We’ve heard these all before. Perversity: if you raise the minimum wage, you’ll increase unemployment. Futility: tobacco warning labels won’t stop people from smoking. And Jeopardy: it’s a ‘job killer.’”
The “Cry Wolf Project” presents verbatim quotations from the corporate bosses from years past and then lets their words speak for themselves. Here is a sample:
Henry Ford II, in 1966, on long-overdue safety standards such as laminated windshields, dual-braking systems, collapsible steering wheels and seat belts: “Many of the temporary standards are unreasonable, arbitrary and technically unfeasible… If we can’t meet them when they are published we’ll have to close down.” To his credit, ten years later on national television, Mr. Ford recognized that due to federal regulations, cars were safer, more efficient and less polluting.
His fiery vice-president, Lee Iacocca, said in 1970 that The Clean Air Act “could prevent continued production of automobiles… and is a threat to the entire American economy and to every person in America.” Mr. Iacocca did recant his opposition to air bags as head of Chrysler in a full page ad headlined “Who Says You Can’t Teach an Old Dog New Tricks?”
Other corporate barons were more intransigent. Reacting to a law that established the federal minimum wage and ended child labor, a spokesman for the manufacturing industry in 1938 unleashed this volley: “The Fair Labor Standards Act constitutes a step in the direction of communism, bolshevism, fascism and Nazism.”
Social Security received a broadside from the Chairman of the Board of Chase National Bank. In 1936, top brass banker, Winthrop W. Aldrich, called it a “grave menace to the future security of the country as whole and to the security of the very people it is designed to protect.”
His down the line executive successor, the haughty James Dimon has been spouting cataclysmic claims about the Dodd-Frank reforms that are modestly designed to avoid another multi-trillion dollar Wall Street bailout by Washington. Haughty, that is, until last week when Mr. Dimon, CEO of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. revealed at least a two billion dollar gambling bet that his company lost in the high-flying business of complex derivatives trading linked to corporate debt.
What a cruel irony. Mr. Dimon’s bank and half a dozen other giant banks are now corporate welfare kings deemed “too big to fail” (as well as too big to be taxed fairly). Unfortunately, social security recipients and other tax payers are still the ones who will pay for any future bailouts. This is what America has been reduced to by the multinational casino capitalists who long ago abandoned any allegiance or patriotism toward the country that bred them into present day giants.
Outlandish assertions are not restricted to members of Congress or the corporate world. Ronald Reagan was a jovial-genius at nutty declarations. As when he told reporters that submarine launched nuclear missiles can be recalled or that approximately 80% of our air pollution stems from vegetation. So prolific was the former Hollywood actor that Mark Green collected Reagan’s pronouncements in a classic 173 page paperback titled “Reagan’s Reign of Error” (1987).
With the velocity of modern communications, media and the Internet, who can keep up with the separation of facts and truth from lies, propaganda and what is now called “magical thinking?” Far more people have become rich and famous for telling lies and falsehoods than people who have a habit of telling the truth and reciting facts. The former get promoted, host radio shows, get large advances on books and get elected to office.
In 2002, the ultra-corporatist Senator Saxby Chambliss defeated incumbent Georgia Senator Max Cleland, whose legs were amputated as a result of injuries he suffered in the Vietnam War, with ads showing a photo of Cleland along with photos of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, by way of questioning Cleland’s patriotism. Fellow Republican, Senator John McCain, called Saxby’s ads in 2002 “worse than disgraceful, reprehensible.” In 2008, Saxby was re-elected.
The forces of accountability for what public personages exclaim have to come from a more demanding citizenry. People have to punish these charlatans, who think they can distract, degrade or fool the public. Don’t buy their garbage or let the prevaricators garner your votes.
A handy question people can always ask is “What’s your evidence?” That starts an entirely new dialogue, doesn’t it?
END.
With the velocity of modern communications, media and the Internet, who can keep up with the separation of facts and truth from lies, propaganda and what is now called “magical thinking?” Far more people have become rich and famous for telling lies and falsehoods than people who have a habit of telling the truth and reciting facts. The former get promoted, host radio shows, get large advances on books and get elected to office.
In 2002, the ultra-corporatist Senator Saxby Chambliss defeated incumbent Georgia Senator Max Cleland, whose legs were amputated as a result of injuries he suffered in the Vietnam War, with ads showing a photo of Cleland along with photos of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, by way of questioning Cleland’s patriotism. Fellow Republican, Senator John McCain, called Saxby’s ads in 2002 “worse than disgraceful, reprehensible.” In 2008, Saxby was re-elected.
The forces of accountability for what public personages exclaim have to come from a more demanding citizenry. People have to punish these charlatans, who think they can distract, degrade or fool the public. Don’t buy their garbage or let the prevaricators garner your votes.
A handy question people can always ask is “What’s your evidence?” That starts an entirely new dialogue, doesn’t it?
END.
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