Friday, August 08, 2008

Nader calls for crackdown on corporate crime, reversal of so-called war on drugs

Posted by Media Release

*WASHINGTON*, Aug. 8--At a news conference today Presidential Candidate Ralph Nader outlined his plan to empty prisons of non-violent drug offenders and fill them up with corporate criminals. “Non-violent drug offenses are being over prosecuted and corporate crime is being under prosecuted,” Nader said. “The Justice Department must begin to reverse course, crank up the crackdown on corporate crime, and end the cruel and inhumane war on non-violent drug possession.”

"The criminal justice system is broken--so badly that one hardly knows where to begin describing the breakdown,” Nader said. “Let’s start with the war on drugs, since commentators across the political spectrum recognize its lunacy. We pour almost endless resources--roughly $50 billion every year--into catching, trying, and incarcerating people who primarily harm themselves. This insane war on drugs damages communities and drains crucial resources from the police, courts, and prisons. These resources could be better used to combat serious street and corporate crime that directly violates the public’s liberty, health, safety, trust, and financial well-being. As with alcoholics and nicotine addicts, the approach to drug addicts should be rehabilitation, not incarceration.”

“The current drug policy has consumed tens of billions of dollars and wrecked countless lives,” Nader said. “The costs of this policy include the increasing breakdown of families and neighborhoods, endangerment of children, widespread violation of civil liberties, escalating rates of incarceration, political corruption, and the imposition of United States policy abroad. In practice, the drug war disproportionately targets people of color and people who are poverty-stricken. Coercive measures have not reduced drug use, but they have clogged our criminal justice system with non-violent offenders. It is time to explore alternative approaches and to end this costly war.”

In 2004, Ralph Nader wrote President Bush urging that he grant clemency to 30,000 non-violent drug offenders. Nader’s letter highlighted the three-decade-long failed, and unjust, drug war. His call for clemency highlighted a similar request made by 400 clergy members to President Bill Clinton in 2000.

Nader’s letter recalled President Bush’s substance abuse problems and noted that if Bush had been incarcerated for cocaine use he “probably would not have gone on to have the career you have had.”

The letter also highlighted the rapid expansion of the prison system in the United States which now houses more than 2.1 million people--one-quarter of the world’s prison population.

Clemency for non-violent drug offenders would save billions of dollars annually.

“It is urgent that the U.S. reverse the incarceration binge. The U.S. Department of Justice estimates that if incarceration rates remain unchanged an estimated one of every 20 Americans and greater than one in four African Americans can be expected to serve time in prison during their lifetime,” Nader said. “It is time to make the failed war on drugs a central issue in the American political dialogue. For too long we have let this injustice continue to grow unhindered. Taking action on clemency at the federal level will set an example for the states and begin the process of reversing this failed policy.”

The Nader/Gonzalez campaign also calls for an immediate end to the criminal prosecution of patients for medical marijuana.

“The current cruel, unjust policy perpetuated and enforced by the Bush Administration prevents Americans who suffer from debilitating illnesses from experiencing the relief of medicinal cannabis,” Nader said. “While substantial scientific and anecdotal evidence exists to validate marijuana’s usefulness in treating disease, a deluge of rhetoric from Washington claims that marijuana has no medicinal value.”

At the same time, the Nader/Gonzalez campaign supports industrial hemp as a renewable resource with many important fuel, fiber, food, paper, energy and other uses.

Industrial hemp is a commercial crop grown for its seed and fiber and the products made from them. Industrial hemp is one of the longest and strongest fibers in the plant kingdom, and it has had thousands of uses over the centuries.

“In need of alternative crops and aware of the growing market for industrial hemp--particularly for bio-composite products such as automobile parts, farmers in the United States are forced to watch from the sidelines while Canadian, French and Chinese farmers grow the crop and American manufacturers import it from them,” Nader said.

Federal legislators--except for Congressman Ron Paul and a few others--continue to ignore the issue of removing it from the DEA list. It is time to allow hemp agriculture, production and manufacturing in the United States.

Nader would shift the billions saved from the war on drugs to a war on corporate crime.

Corporate crime costs Americans hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Tens of thousands of Americans are killed each year and hundreds of thousands of Americans injured and sickened each year by preventable corporate-bred violence.

From pollution, medical negligence, procurement fraud, product defects, and financial fraud, to antitrust, public corruption, foreign bribery and occupational homicide, corporate crime enforcement is widely ignored by politicians--yet acutely felt by all Americans.

The FBI estimates, for example, that burglary and robbery--street crimes--costs the nation $3.8 billion a year.

The losses from a handful of major corporate frauds--Tyco, Adelphia, Worldcom, Enron--swamp the losses from all street robberies and burglaries combined.

Health care fraud alone costs Americans $100 billion to $400 billion a year.

The FBI estimates that, 16,000 Americans are murdered every year.

Compare this to the 56,000 Americans who die every year on the job or from occupational diseases such as black lung and asbestosis and the tens of thousands of other Americans who fall victim to the silent violence of pollution, contaminated foods, hazardous consumer products, and hospital malpractice.

These deaths are often the result of criminal recklessness. Yet, they are rarely prosecuted as homicides or as criminal violations of federal laws.

Prosecutors, defense attorneys and other criminal justice experts concur that corporate crime is under prosecuted.

The decline of criminal prosecution of cartel enforcement is exemplary of the demise of corporate crime enforcement as a whole.

A recent report from the American Antitrust Institute found that the number of criminal cartel cases brought by the Division has dropped 49 percent from 1995-99 to 2004-06.

And the number of corporations charged annually dropped continuously from 1995 to 2007.

“There now is a significant and growing backlog of criminal investigations and unresolved matters,” the report found.

Part of the problem lies with the fact that the Antitrust Division is underfunded and understaffed.

The report calls for a doubling of the Antitrust Division’s budget.

Nader/Gonzalez would crack down on corporate crime and violence with a 12-point program:

1.  Increase Corporate Crime Prosecution Budgets: The Department of Justice’s corporate crime division and the Securities and Exchange Commission have been chronically and pitifully underfunded and therefore do not have sufficient resources to combat the massive often reported corporate crime wave in the United States. This results in inadequate investigation, settlement of cases for weak fines and ignoring many corporate crime violators completely. There needs to be a strong corporate law-and-order will in the White House.

2.  Ban Corporate Criminals from Government Contracts: The US should enact a tough, serious debarment statute that would deny federal business to serious and/or repeat corporate lawbreakers. The federal government spends $265 billion annually on goods and services. These contracts should not support corporate criminals. These standards should also apply to procurement contracts in Iraq.

3.  Crack Down on Corporate Tax Avoidance: The US should punish corporate tax escapees by closing the offshore reincorporation loophole and banning government contracts and subsidies for companies that relocate their headquarters to an offshore tax haven. The IRS should be given more power and more budgetary resources to go after corporate tax avoiders. Publicly-traded corporations should be required to make their tax returns public.

4.  Democratize Corporate Governance: Shareholders should be granted the right to democratically nominate and elect the corporate board of directors by opening up proxy access to minority shareholders and introducing cumulative voting and competitive elections. Shareholders should be given the power to approve all major business decisions, including top executive compensation. Shareholders should be treated as the owners of the corporation--since, in fact, that is what they are.

5.  Expand Corporate Disclosure: Corporate sunshine laws should be enacted that require corporations to provide better information about their records on the environment, human rights, worker safety, and taxes, as well as their criminal and civil litigation records.

6.  Rein in Excessive Executive Pay: Shareholder authorization should be required for top executive compensation packages at each annual shareholder meeting. Stock options, which now account for about half of the executive compensation, should be counted on financial statements as an expense (which they are). Tax deductions for compensation 25 times above the compensation received by the lowest paid worker in a corporation should be eliminated, as recommended by the famous business guru Peter Drucker. Insiders like Warren Buffett say excessive corporate executive pay is associated with inflated profits and other accounting deceptions.

7.  Fix the Pension System: Corporations must be held more responsible for the retirement security of their employees. At a minimum we need to give workers a voice on the pension board; not require workers to stuff their 401(k) plans with company stock; and give workers the right to control their 401(k) plans. In addition, an Office of Participant Advocacy should be created in the Department of Labor to monitor pension plans.

8.  Restore the Rights of Defrauded Investors: Repeal the self-styled securities reform laws that block defrauded investors from seeking private restitution, such as the private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, which allowed the aiders and abettors of massive corporate crime (e.g., accountants, lawyers, and bankers) to escape civil liability.

9.  Regulate Derivatives Trading: All over-the-counter financial instruments, including derivatives, should be subjected to the same or equivalent audit and reporting requirements as other financial instruments traded on stock exchanges. Rules should be enacted regarding collateral-margin, reporting and dealer licensing in order to maintain regulatory parity and ensure that markets are transparent and problems can be detected before they become a crisis.

10.  End Conflicts of Interest on Wall Street: Enact structural reforms that separate commercial and investment banking services and prevent other costly, documented conflicts of interest among financial entities, such as those that have dominated big banks and security firms in recent years.

11.  Track the Extent and Cost of Corporate Crime: The Department of Justice should establish an online corporate crime database. Also, just as the FBI issues an annual street crime report, “Crime in the United States,” it should also publish an annual report on corporate and white collar crime with recommendations.

12.  Foster a National Discussion on Corporate Power: Establish a Congressional Commission on Corporate Power to explore various legal and economic proposals that would rein in unaccountable giant corporations. The Commission should seek ways to improve upon the current state corporate chartering system in a world of global corporations and propose ways to correct the inequitable legal status of corporations as “persons.” The Commission would be led by congressionally-appointed experts on corporate and constitutional law, and should hold citizen hearings in at least ten cities followed by a public report and recommendations.

In 1938, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in a message to Congress calling for a similar inquiry--The Temporary National Economic Commission--said that a government controlled by private economic power “is fascism.”

(Disclaimer:  Justin Jeffre is a paid member of the Nader-Gonzalez campaign.)

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anon says:
09 Aug 2008  at  12:16 am | #

Here - all the reasons we should vote for Nader.

Realty - it’s the main reason we can’t, he won’t get elected.

Nader is right, completely right.  But, so many people, many of them like Bush, who think they are proper exceptions to the law applied to everyone else, will not support Nader. 

We have to realize that neither candidate can endorse the end to the war on drugs without sacrificing the election.  Isn’t there some way for the Nader camp to present these policy positions without it costing Obama the election?  Maybe Nader should seek a position in the Obama cabinet in exchange for his endorsement?

And, one thing left out here was that with the legalization of drugs should be a mechanism to create revenues to replace the loss of jobs in the prison industry

White Male says:
09 Aug 2008  at  10:49 am | #

7.  Fix the Pension System: Corporations must be held more responsible for the retirement security of their employees. At a minimum we need to give workers a voice on the pension board; not require workers to stuff their 401(k) plans with company stock; and give workers the right to control their 401(k) plans. In addition, an Office of Participant Advocacy should be created in the Department of Labor to monitor pension plans.

Has not that been accomplished?

After Enron I thought leglislation was passed allowing workers to disefity the investments in their portfolio.  Many P & G folks found themselves in a pile of poop when the stock tumbled from about $120 down to $50 about 6-7 years.  Thankfully, A.G. came along and within a few years had things back on track.

Many of those same P & G folks have now diversified their investments.

The thing we should be concerned with is that Obama has a chance to win the Presidency and possibly have a 60 seat Senate. That is scary.

Obama is most likely to resurrect the Clinton plan to tap into the pension system in many different ways.  Secretary of Labor Robert Reich gave the following testimony to Congress in 1994:

Now remember guys, Reich wanted to interfere with all private pension plans AFTER Clinton got his hefty tax increase in 1993.  Imagine the Ohio P.E.R.S. or State Teacher’s Retirement system forking over 10% of its portfolio.

Reich Testimony:
http://www.dol.gov/oasam/programs/history/reich/congress/062294rr.htm

Can you believe Reich concluded his testimony with the following remark:

I encourage plans to consider such investments when they make their investment decisions. America’s pension funds—$4.6 trillion and still growing—are the stewards of our economic future.

I think the 2008 Presidential election is a given- - - - VOTE McCain.

says:
10 Aug 2008  at  08:20 am | #

White Male!

I don’t know has it been accomplished? If it has how was it done? And do you know how and why quotation marks are used?

It is nice that A.G. got things back on track; who or what is A.G.?

Why are you afraid to have Obama with a 60 seat senate? Do you not trust our system and what should we do to change it? The senate doesn’t introduce legislation anyway.  If there is to be change should not the executive have the authority to effect change? It does not appear that the present and near past makeup of the Senate has produced great things for this country.

Nowhere in the Reich Testimony do I see that he is asking for 10% of any portfolio. I think you need to reread the testimony without a jaundiced eye.

White Male says:
10 Aug 2008  at  11:15 am | #

From dieterschmid:

1. I don’t know has it been accomplished? If it has how was it done? And do you know how and why quotation marks are used?

I meant that I thought that employees did not have to have their 401k entirely in company stock.  I was stating that I was under the impression that a law was passed after Enron.

2.  It is nice that A.G. got things back on track; who or what is A.G.?

Are you a Cincinnatian?  A.G. Lafley.
http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2007/fortune/0711/gallery.power_25.fortune/10.html

A.G. Lafley
Chairman and CEO, Procter & Gamble

Since taking charge in 2000, when Procter & Gamble was sinking under the weight of too many new products and organizational changes, Lafley has refocused on consumers and rejuvenated core businesses. P&G now boasts 23 billion-dollar brands, including Tide, Crest, Pampers, Gillette, Olay, Pantene, and the latest addition, Gain laundry detergent.

By denouncing insularity and demanding innovation in everything that P&G does, this company lifer has pushed P&G toward higher-margin areas like health, beauty, and personal care. The payback: Profits have tripled on his watch, to more than $10 billion on $76.5 billion in revenues.

Of course, Lafley has bought some of that growth; the acquisition of Gillette for $54 billion in 2005 was the largest in company history. But it is the record of organic growth - an average of 6% a year - that has made P&G a stock market standout and Lafley a role model for other CEOs. --Patricia Sellers

I would be shocked to learn that you do not own P & G stock.  I have always assumed that all Cincinnatians own at least a few shares of P&G.  I have 4 grandkids.  At birth each has been given 5 shares of P & G. 
3.  Re the 60 seat senate.  Obama would be able to ram through the most vicious of liberal types for the U.S. Supreme Court and/or the federal bench with no objection from Republicans.

Remember this Dieterschmied - The Clinton nominations to the U.S. Supreme Court were passed by majorities of someting like 97-3 (Ginsburb, Bryer).

But, but, but, when George H.W. Bush nominated Clarence Thomas - there was opposition from the Democrats.  Then the current Bush makes his two nominations - the same thing. 

Kind of a double standard.  Agree?

4. Nowhere in the Reich Testimony do I see that he is asking for 10% of any portfolio. I think you need to reread the testimony without a jaundiced eye.

I’m glad you took the time to read the testimony.

The point is that President Clinton raised taxes in 1993 and this was among the largest tax increases in U.S.history.

Then...after that - he was attempting to get even more.

The mere fact that the federal government would look into ways to tap into or interfere with the private pension system is well beyond my understanding.

Robert Reich was sent out and about the country to promote this idea.

He was interviewed by WLW’s Mike McConnell on the issue of the E.T.I.s - the plan that would require all pension funds to invest in government or social programs.  This Reich guy was unbelievable in that he wouldn’t listen to McConnell when McConnell attempted to explain that it was not and has never been the role of the federal government to tap into the Ohio P.E.R.S. or S.T.E.R.S.  and have them take up to 10% of their portfolio out of investments and put it into social programs.

THAT IS MY ENTIRE POINT DIETERSCHEID - ONCE THE FEDERAL GOVERNEMNT TAPS INTO THESE PRIVATE PENSIONS - THEY WILL COME BACK FOR MORE.  SOME THINGS ARE BEST SERVED BY LEAVING THEM ALONE.  UNDERSTAND?

And........what do you think when Secty. of Labor Reich refered to the $4.9 trillion in pension funds as being the stewards of our economic future?

I think Robert Reich thinks of the $4.9 trillion (back in ‘94) as being available to redistribute wealth, you known, take from one and give to another.  While he did not use those words - - it is what he (and Clinton) meant.

says:
10 Aug 2008  at  06:37 pm | #

We have to realize that neither candidate can endorse the end to the war on drugs without sacrificing the election.

anon, what makes you say that? The War on Drugs has been a complete failure. There are many in law enforcement that have come out and said as much. Did it cost people the election when they came out against the prohibition of alcohol? Capone supported the prohibition of alcohol. Why are the good guys (meaning law enforcement) on the same side of the issue as bad guys, like Pablo Escabar?

Isn’t there some way for the Nader camp to present these policy positions without it costing Obama the election?

Why should Nader worry about costing Obama the election. Obama’s policies are very different from what Nader proposes. Nader’s positions are progressive and Obama’s aren’t. This is a major issue that is taken off of the table because Obama (like Kerry, Clinton and Gore before him) protectively immitate the Republican’s position on this. Obama won’t bring any “change” on this issue.

Why are independent candidates expected to stand aside and support the corporate party candidates? Do you think that McCain and Obama are entitled to our votes? Shouldn’t they have to earn our votes by supporting better public policies? Don’t you see the political bigotry you’re engaging in?

Independent candidates aren’t second class citizens, they are our best hope for new ideas and innovations. Polls show 81% of the country thinks we’re heading in the wrong direction and tens of millions of people don’t vote because they don’t think it makes a difference.

Maybe Nader should seek a position in the Obama cabinet in exchange for his endorsement?

Nader always tries to meet with the candidates and get them to take on at least a few of his issues, but they never do. Progressive Democrats should put pressure on their candidates to take better positions. You could at least play hard to get instead of making no demands at all and being completely taken for granted. The corporations and Republicans are constantly pulling Obama to thr right, why won’t progressives try to pull him to the left (which is the center). This is an issue where the Libertarians agree with the Greens and progressive Democrats.

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