Told You So: The Big Book of Weekly Columns

Open Preview See a Problem? Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. The Big Book of Ralph Nader Columns presents a panoramic portrait of the problems confronting our society and provides examples of the many actions an organized citizenry could and should take to create a more just and environmentally sustainable world.

Drawing on decades of experience, Nader's columns document the consequences of concentrated corporate power; threats to our food, water and air; the corrosive effect of commercialism on our children; the dismantling of worker rights; and the attacks on our civil rights and civil liberties. Nader also offers concrete suggestions to spark citizen action and achieve social change.

Paperback , pages. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about Told You So , please sign up. Lists with This Book. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Nov 21, Eric rated it really liked it Shelves: The guy is a legend for a reason. The only thing with this collection is that there was no editor, this book should have been half the size it was, the articles really start to repeat themselves. I never actually finished it because it all started to seem the same.

Amy Goodman Interviews Ralph Nader About His Book: "Told You So: The Big Book of Weekly Columns”

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Most studies show that job numbers overall go up.

The landmark study rebutting claims of lost jobs was conducted by professors David Card and Alan Krueger in Many organizations with millions of members are on the record as favoring an inflation-adjusted increase in the federal minimum wage. They need to move from being on the record to being on the ramparts. With some Republicans supporting a higher minimum wage, even under Trump, a push in Congress would split the iron unity of the Republicans.

This issue may also encourage Trump voters to vote for Democrats. Looking back, calls by grassroots organizations and others for a raise in the minimum wage during the Obama years left Democrats unmoved.

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However, to his credit, Rep. Jackson at a news conference to explain this long-overdue necessity for millions of hard-pressed, working Americans of all political persuasions. The purpose of the minimum wage, first enacted in under President Franklin Roosevelt, was to provide a minimally livable salary. This implied at least keeping up with inflation, if not with new living expenses not yet envisioned seventy-five years ago.

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Since the minimum wage has not been raised, these arguments are still totally valid today. 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 higher minimum wage will be spent by poor families and workers almost immediately.

If Trump is to be defeated, the Democrats have to get out of bed with the fat cats. While these big-bucks characters are upping their pay every year, they often seem to be more circus proprietors than businesspeople because they pay their workers so little. 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 the work done by the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, DC.

More income for the poor means less child and family poverty, which means less reliance on federal outlays for the poor to survive. The big companies—for example, Walmart—take advantage of federal aid, steering some of their employees to food stamps, Medicaid, and housing assistance programs.

As Terrance Heath noted in an op-ed in Nation of Change: Talk about the corrosive effects of inequality: Enlightened business leaders are ready to support the Democrats on this minimum wage increase initiative. Years ago in Jeff Long, a senior vice president of Costco, gave the obvious reasons that the retrograde corporatists ignore: Our employees are a big reason why our sales per square foot is almost double that of our nearest competitor.

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Those in the corporate oligarchy who oppose a higher minimum wage have no moral standing whatsoever. It is hard for companies making record profits, paying executives record pay, and spending billions of dollars on stock buybacks to enhance their own compensation packages to have any credibility on this subject.

Told You So: The Big Book of Weekly Columns by Ralph Nader

Going backward into the future. Well, one Walmart worker today does the work of two Walmart workers in That is called a doubling of worker productivity. We noted that one million Walmart workers were making far less, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than what Walmart workers made in In Walmart was run by its founder, the legendary Sam Walton, who started with one store in Rogers, Arkansas. Sam had to pay his workers wages that were worth much more than wages today because the law required him to do so. Low wages paid by stores that service poorer people eventually translate into less money spent in those stores, since the consumers are strapped.

A few years ago, feeling the heat from environmentalists, high-level Walmart managers visited the late Ray Anderson, the pioneering CEO of Interface Corporation in Atlanta, the largest carpet tile manufacturer in the country. Anderson was the corporate leader in taking recycling and reduction in pollution to unsurpassed levels, while regularly cutting costs.

Doing well by doing good! The cutting costs part attracted their attention.

Amy Goodman Interviews Ralph Nader About His Book: "Told You So: The Big Book of Weekly Columns”

These managers are now among the executives running Walmart, and the changes they have made—reducing excessive packaging materials, saving on water and energy, and increasing recycling—have brought Walmart lower costs and public praise. Walmart security guards are stiffer than Army MPs. They are programmed to be the private police, keeping away peaceful demonstrators in so-called private shopping malls that were built on tax preferences and abatements. June 25 marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of the federal minimum wage law in the United States, known as the Fair Labor Standards Act.

More than seventy-five years later, there are 3. More extensively, 30 million low-wage workers are making less today, adjusted for inflation, than they did forty-five years ago in They are working for a wage that does not even reach the federal poverty line for a family of three, and they cannot afford basic necessities like food, housing, transportation, and healthcare. Each year that the federal minimum wage is not increased, you and Congress are effectively telling low-wage workers that they are not worth as much as they were the year before, and each dollar they earn gets stretched even further due to the effects of inflation.

This is disgraceful; the federal government should be providing a shining example of fair and just treatment of their contracted workers for other employers to follow. Famed management guru Peter Drucker believed in this range as prudent corporate practice, and legendary investor Warren Buffett has been critical of excessive executive compensation.