Toward Economic Justice by Ralph Nader

Dear Friend,


I was riding in a car last week with an old friend.

We were talking about New Orleans.

And his snap observation?

Those people in New Orleans should have gotten out when they were told to evacuate.

Many did, but what if some 100,000 couldn’t, I asked?

If it were me, I would have crawled out, he said.

What if there was no way out – no car, sickness, caring for ailing relatives, no seats on public transportation, streets blocked, nowhere to go, fear of the unknown?

There always is a way, he said.

And this from a highly educated and accomplished “liberal.”

Many in America are in denial.

Especially “highly educated” America is in denial.

They know, but still are in denial, about the deep poverty of tens of millions in our midst.

Ancient Chinese proverb – To know and not to act is not to know.

Even after television showed the poor – day after day – being left behind in New Orleans, many in America remained in denial.

How else to explain the poverty of response from both the Democrats and Republicans?

Watching the disaster in New Orleans made me think back over 80 years to Huey Long, the former Governor and Senator from Louisiana.


Long’s mission – defend the people against the avarice of corporate America.

He taxed the oil companies to pay for text books for the children of Louisiana.

His response to poverty?

Share the wealth – with those who worked to create it.

Long’s was a detailed program – during the 1930s Depression – which would impose a capital tax that would prevent any family from owning a fortune of more than $5 million or more 350 times that of the average family.

And it would have imposed an income tax that would prohibit a family from earning more than one million dollars a year, or more than 300 times the income of the average family.

The income from these taxes would provide every family in the country with a home valued at not less than $5,000.

The government would further guarantee that every family would receive an annual income of $2,000 to $3,000.

He knew that defending the people meant a showdown with the greed of corporations and their super-rich bosses.

His expected run for the Presidency on a wave of popular support for his Share the Wealth platform pushed Franklin Roosevelt and the Democrats to enact more of the New Deal.

With his dramatic proposals, Long got people thinking about the concentration of wealth.

That was then.

Now, Katrina has exposed to all the mass poverty in our midst.

A quarter of America’s working families are living in poverty.

And yet, the ratio of average annual large company CEO pay (now $11.8 million) to average worker pay (now $27,460) spiked up last year from 301-to-1 in 2003 to 431-to-1 in 2004.

If the minimum wage had risen as fast as CEO pay since 1990, the lowest paid workers in the US would be earning $23.03 an hour today, not $5.15 an hour.

Some of the nation’s most enlightened wealthy are fearful of what these numbers portend.

Led by William Gates Sr. and Chuck Collins, more than 1,000 of these wealthy Americans have organized to defend taxes on the super wealthy.

Gates and Collins argue that individual wealth is a product not only of hard work and smart choices but of the society that provides the fertile soil for success.

They don’t subscribe to the “Great Man” theory of wealth creation but contend that society’s investments – such as public works, government research, economic development, education, and health care – all contribute to any individual’s good fortune.


They have written a blockbuster book – Wealth and Our Commonwealth – Why America Should Tax Accumulated Fortunes.

In response to New Orleans, will the Democratic Party stand up with William Gates Sr. and say out loud – tax accumulated fortunes, defend the estate tax, and defend our progressive income tax structure?

Will the Democratic Party stand against the massive redistribution of wealth and income upward over the past twenty years from the many to the few?

The corporate Democrats fear opening up this topic of fair return for hard work done – staying silent on a living wage demand.

They want the business campaign money too much.

This despite the falling median household income, now in its fifth straight year, and the widening gap between rich and poor.

And so, the issue of the rising poverty rate and the widening gap between rich and poor will remain untouched.

The wealth gap, the income gap and mass poverty are too hot to handle by the corporate Democrats and Republicans alike.