Fighting Corporate Corruption At the Ballot Box
From Gerald W. McEntee, President
NOTE: This article has been edited to comply with FEC regulations.
Election time — when working Americans have to make their voices heard. This is the moment when we can let America know that it must elect pro-worker candidates and fight back against those who would rob working families.
Leveraging large campaign contributions, Corporate America is deregulating industries. Business interests are unduly influencing how our government is run. That is no surprise, since two former corporate executives head the nation.
Recently, America discovered that General Electric's former CEO has the sweetest retirement package in corporate American history. John (Jack) E Welch no longer works his day job, but he flies on a corporate jet, has one of his six residences paid for by GE and enjoys using computers at his office and five of his homes — also compliments of GE! Working just five days a year as a consultant, he makes $86,000 on top of a $9-million annual pension.
Jack Grubman, forced to resign from Citigroup, gets a $32-million severance package for advising people to buy companies that plummeted into bankruptcy. Other companies' elite executives sold stocks at big profits while small investors, pension fund holders and employees lost everything.
The dirty two dozen
Fortune magazine found that 25 companies had greedy top executives who made approximately $24 billion from the sale of their companies' stock while almost 115,000 of their employees lost their money, jobs and pensions.
For example, Philip Anschutz of Qwest Communications made $2.26 billion on the sale of his stock; 18,000 workers were laid off. Steve Case of AOL Time Warner netted $1.79 billion from his stock sales, while 4,940 workers lost their jobs. Enron's Lou Pai took $994 million, and 5,200 workers got "sacked," as the British say.
Meanwhile, our $281-billion federal surplus under Clinton/Gore became a $165-billion federal deficit under Bush/Cheney and their corporate supporters. And some 9.8 million people who want to work can't find jobs.
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Reversing our gains
It's time to elect candidates who stand with the working people of this great nation, not against them. The Bush administration has reversed gains of the last eight years: Social Security is at risk of privatization; 401(k)s have been looted and drained by unprecedented bankruptcies; ergonomic regulations were discarded because employers don't want to fund the needed changes.
We can refocus America by getting out the vote. Your vote. Your family's vote. Your neighbor's vote. Your co-worker's vote.
Whoever said one vote doesn't count hasn't been reading history. One vote made Texas a state. One vote upheld the draft before Pearl Harbor. One vote in the U.S. Supreme Court made George W. Bush President.
Justice Louis Brandeis once said, "We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few. But we can't have both." Read our "Congressional Scorecards ". Then go to the polls Nov. 5 and vote for economic fairness and democracy.
