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Dear President Obama: All the daily decisions and crises you have to confront must not preclude occasional addresses to the country that rise to the level of statesmanship, transcending the hurly-burly of politics and executive branch administration. There are three areas where the people need the views and vision of their President. 1. A major…
On January 14, 2014, Ralph Nader sent letters to the CEOs of the top 10 institutional shareholders of Sirius XM Radio regarding the recent purchase of a majority of shares by John Malone’s Liberty Media Corporation. In this letter, Mr. Nader notes that as a growing company, Sirius has a 4 star rating by S&P…
You’ve heard the refrain “we live in the information age.” We have fingertip access to the Internet, providing us with massive amounts of information. There are no longer any excuses for us to say we don’t have the information; it is there, but up to us to act on the information. The above is all…
January 2, 2014 George W. Bush George W. Bush Presidential Center PO Box 560887 Dallas, Texas, 57356 Dear Mr. Bush: A few days ago I received a personalized letter from your Presidential Center which included a solicitation card for donations that actually provided words for my reply. They included “I’m honored to help tell the…
1. Think Like a Commoner: A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons by David Bollier (New Society Publishers) David Bollier is a leading writer and advocate for all those real-life commons – what we own, from the public lands, public airwaves, online information and local civic assets. He calls the commons a…
December 26, 2013 Jim McNerney, CEO The Boeing Company 100 North Riverside Chicago, IL 60606 Dear Mr. McNerney: The squeeze that you and Boeing are putting on your machinist workers’ pensions, pay scales and your stance on other labor issues regarding the assembling of the new 777X airliners is unseemly for several reasons. First, consider…
Two distinctly different Americans with distinctly similar, independent thinking and progressive values passed away last week. The great accounting professor Abraham Briloff (age 96) who relentlessly and brilliantly took apart the failures of his profession to insist on honest and ethical corporate accounting, and Tom Laughlin (age 82), the jolting producer and star of the…
The word “inequality” is much in vogue these days. We hear almost daily about the inequality of wealth, income and wages between the richest top 2 or 3 percent of people and the majority of the country’s wage earners. But not much attention is given and not many marches and other protests are addressing the…
Shareholders are the majority owners of many of the world’s largest, most powerful corporations. Despite this fact, the muscle of shareholder ownership is often far too soft to affect the actions of greedy corporate decision-makers. Shareholders are relatively powerless to protect their share values from decline under questionable or outright poor corporate management. This is…
By Ralph Nader and Lori Wallach The standards ensuring the safety of our food, medicines and cars, the energy and climate policies needed to save our planet, and the financial regulations designed to prevent banks from creating another crisis all involve decisions that should be made in open, democratic venues. Yet the Obama administration is…