Ralph Nader was the Green Party presidential candidate in 1996 and 2000 and an independent presidential candidate in 2004 and 2008.
Nader has published this commentary at his website, www.nader.org:
How Big Corporations Are Unpatriotic
Posted March 28, 2013
By Ralph Nader
Many giant profitable U.S. corporations are increasingly abandoning America while draining it at the same time.
General Electric, for example, has paid no federal income taxes for a decade while becoming a net job exporter and fighting its hard-pressed workers who want collective bargaining through unions like the United Electrical Workers Union (UE). GE’s boss, Jeffrey Immelt, makes about $12,400 an hour on an 8-hour day, plus benefits and perks, presiding over this global corporate empire.
Telling by their behavior, these big companies think patriotism toward the country where they were created and prospered is for chumps. Their antennae point to places where taxes are very low, labor is wage slavery, independent unions are non-existent, governments have their hands out, and equal justice under the rule of law does not exist. China, for example, has fit that description for over 25 years.
Other than profiteering from selling Washington very expensive weapons of mass destruction, many multinational firms have little sense of true national security…
Read the rest at nader.org: here.
(above quotes were from the article)
Nader packs alot of hard truths into this column. Corporations are built to maximize profits. Stuff like values or patriotism go on the backburner.
Nader says there is no sense of patriotism to hold the corporations back. But more than that there is a lack of civic virtue. Or ‘political morality’ if you will.
Technically, the people have the power to protest corporate domination via their consumer dollars and via organizing politically. But for a variety of reasons they lack the will, impetus, and organization to do so.
“Did you know that about 80 percent of the ingredients in medicines Americans take now come from China and India where visits by FDA inspectors are infrequent and inadequate?
The lucrative U.S. drug industry – coddled with tax credits, free transfer of almost-ready-to-market drugs developed with U.S. taxpayer dollars via the National Institutes of Health – charges Americans the highest prices for drugs in the world and still wants more profits. Drug companies no longer produce many necessary medicines like penicillin in the U.S., preferring to pay slave wages abroad to import drugs back into the U.S.
Absence of patriotism has exposed our country to dependency on foreign suppliers for crucial medicines, and these foreign suppliers may not be so friendly in the future.
Giant U.S. companies are strip-mining America in numerous ways, starting with the corporate tax base. By shifting more of their profits abroad to “tax-haven” countries (like the Cayman Islands) through transfer pricing and other gimmicks, and by lobbying many other tax escapes through Congress, they can report record profits in the U.S. with diminishing tax payments. Yet they are benefitting from the public services, special privileges, and protection by our armed forces because they are U.S. corporations.