Cutting Corporate Welfare

Ralph Nader has intelligence, convictions, heart, and character. More of what I can say of Bush and Gore, not sending any sublinibabalbal messages of course. It would sure be nice to see a modern American political have the guts and courage Nader has to STAND UP TO SPECIAL INTERESTS! What a concept! In his book, Nader brilliantly writes about corporate greed and welfare and who suffers??? We do! The working man, the people. Wonder why only 49% of the American people vote? Leaving mostly the poor and lower classes left behind? Could it be that the Republicans and Democrats don't respond to their issues? These book is useful for those of us that love our nation but don't want to see it become the corporate welfare state it is oh so quickly becoming. An excellent read.

I guess you'd have to call this a campaign book, since Nader was running for president when it was published. But if we had more campaign books like this, presidential campaigns would be much better indeed, because it's a substantive book with real convictions and real recommendations. Nader coined the term "corporate welfare" in 1956, before he became famous for attacking General Motors, and it's been a pet topic of his ever since. It means, basically, government spending of any kind whatsoever that has the effect of benefiting corporations. Some government give-aways are obvious, like the $70 billion in lost revenue from the 1996 Telecommunications Act, when the feds gave big broadcasters a new broadcast spectrum for free, instead of auctioning it off. Nader says this is because broadcasters contribute heavily to political campaigns; and that's the essence of his view, that all corporate welfare is based on campaign kickbacks. But some government give-aways are a lot less obvious. It's impressive how Nader can apply that specific a concept to such a wide array of policy issues. (He can do this successfully because he has spent the last 45 years thinking about little else. When an interviewer asked him what he likes to do with his free time, he responded, "I like to visit a meat-processing plant. Or a coal mine.)The problem, as Nader sees it, is that government giveaways to corporations are repaid by campaign donations, so the politicians who support the corporate welfare get corporate support back for their re-election, and the cycle continues indefinitely. This is what Nader meant when he called Gore & Bush "tweedledum and tweedledee", with no substantive differences between them. When pressed, Nader conceded that Gore & Bush DID differ on the issues, but he says that the only REAL difference is which corporations support Gore versus which support Bush. They both kowtow equally, says Nader, and that's the source of inherent corruption. This book is never going to have the impact of Nader's 1960s classic "Unsafe at Any Speed," which basically gave bith to the consumer safety industry. But it DOES address a resonant chord in the American electorate, as we saw with John McCain's immense popularity. McCain addressed the same basic issues of campaign finance problems (and in fact was one of the few Senate opponents of that 1996 Telecomm Act), but without the deeper underpinning that Nader presents. Some examples of Nader's applications of misuse of government resources on corporate welfare:* Subsidizing defense industry mergers* Pork-barrel highway projects* "Export assistance" to big companies* Tax holidays for sports stadiums* Corporate tax loopholes....