November 18, 2022 The passing of health and safety champion, Michael Pertschuk concludes a life offering many lessons for members of Congress and their staff. Pertschuk, a Yale Law graduate, was the key staffer for the powerful Chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, Warren Magnuson (D-WA), for fifteen years. In 1977 President Carter appointed him … Read more
Ralph Nader and his colleagues this week are celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Congress Project, which published 20 to 40 page profiles of every member of Congress seeking re-election in 1972, including their voting records. “No citizen group has ever done this before or since,” Nader said. The release of the Congress Project profiles … Read more
By Ralph Nader October 14, 2022 A few weeks ago, I wrote a column on the imbalance of communications success between callers and callees. The latter have all kinds of ways not to return calls, emails and other portals of the so-called communications technological revolution. I noted that getting through to your callee is so … Read more
By Ralph Nader September 23, 2022 Long before the Covid pandemic, it was important to ask, where are the mass movements to enact in Congress majoritarian-supported changes and reforms? Another question: Whatever happened to the mass rallies that used to command the attention of our 535 members of Congress to whom we have given our … Read more
By Ralph Nader September 17, 2022 Consider the harmful, grasping tentacles by corporations around the bodies and minds of youngsters through relentless direct marketing that bypasses parental authority. Now comes my sister Claire Nader’s new book You Are Your Own Best Teacher! Sparking the Curiosity, Imagination and Intellect of Tweens. The corporate creep started out … Read more
September 1, 2022 The most perceptive ancient historians and philosophers could not have foreseen a time when a certain type of mass convenience and abundance becomes a threat to democracy, justice and dispersed power. Welcome to the incarcerations of the credit card payment systems Gulag and the corporate state’s drive to stop consumers from paying … Read more
By Ralph Nader August 26, 2022 Its failings and subservience to corporatism are historic in scope. This is the 50th anniversary of our Congress Project that profiled in detail members of Congress. No citizen group has ever done this before or since. Our 1972 Congress Project provides a context for measuring the decline of Congress, … Read more
By Ralph Nader August 12, 2022 Norms, in a society or culture, are the accepted ways of behavior we grow up observing and learning in our everyday lives. Norms are rarely backed up by laws, though when norms are grossly violated, calls for legislation may ensue. In our country, voluntarily recognized fundamental norms have been … Read more
August 10, 2022 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Tesla’s major deployment of so-called Full Self-Driving (FSD) technology is one of the most dangerous and irresponsible actions by a car company in decades. Tesla should never have put this technology in its vehicles. Now over 100,000 Tesla owners are currently using technology that research shows malfunctions every eight … Read more
By Ralph Nader August 5, 2022 In 1980 we produced a report titled How to Appraise and Improve Your Daily Newspaper: A Manual for Readers, authored by David Bollier, one of our precocious interns, who had just graduated from Amherst and went on to become an expert on the Commons (See, bollier.org). I thought about … Read more