Blog
By Ralph Nader June 23, 2023 Most heads of giant corporations are drunk with their own power. These corporate CEOs push the envelope in ways that harm defenseless people. They believe they can get away with anything, and they do, with few exceptions. The few corporate crime prosecutions keep declining from Obama to Trump to…
By Ralph Nader June 16, 2023 Rick Claypool is a level-headed policy analyst and number-cruncher for Public Citizen, who is known for reporting the decline in corporate crime enforcement with each succeeding Presidency. (Biden less than Trump). His latest report (with Cheyenne Hunt) clearly shows him in an unusually agitated state. Its title is “Sorry…
By Ralph Nader June 9, 2023 The pace of for-profit technological innovations is accelerating, but to what end beyond corporate sales? The gap between marketing new high-tech products and assessing their intended and unintended consequences has never been greater. Let’s start with the ballooning of augmented reality inside virtual reality. Facebook’s Oculus Rift escapism has…
By Ralph Nader June 2, 2023 The Military Budget, which devours over half of the entire federal government’s operational expenditures, has been exempted by Biden and the Congressional Republicans from any reductions in the debt limit deal just reached. Also exempted are hundreds of billions of dollars in yearly diverse corporate subsidies to big business…
By Ralph Nader May 26, 2023 It is the season of annual shareholder meetings for giant corporations when CEOs go through the motions of elections for their Board of Directors and approval of other resolutions. People who own stock in General Motors (GM) receive the “GM Meeting Information” in an envelope emblazoned with this disingenuous…
By Ralph Nader May 19, 2023 I have co-authored, with Mark Green, two books on Donald J. Trump, and I’ve thought a lot about the toll his presidency has taken on our country. Trump’s legacy goes beyond him being a toady of Wall Street interests or an inflator of massive, wasteful military budgets, or his…
This is the full letter I wrote to the New York Times responding to Gail Collins fact-deprived diatribe. Unfortunately, due to space limitations by the Times, the letter had to be cut in half. I have urged the Times over the years to expand their letters to the editors space from the current two column…
By Ralph Nader May 10, 2023 Raising the federal debt limit over the years has secured unconditional routine Congressional passage and was endorsed by presidents Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump. After all, it allows the U.S. Treasury to pay past and existing bills, not expand future spending. Routine, that is, until the recent arrival of…
Update: May 8, 2023 The amount of time spent on the line with customer service as of the announcement of the contest was 3 hours. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, it would have taken less than 10 minutes max—no bureaucratic switchings to other staff, no demand for drivers’ license, identification, etc. no voicemail, no…
By Ralph Nader April 28, 2023 Here is a letter that Steve Clifford and I sent to the CEO Tim Cook of Apple corporation, whose percentage of charitable giving relative to its taxable income is astoundingly low as compared to other corporations noted below. Apple should increase its charitable giving. April 24, 2023 Tim Cook,…