From Tom Paine
By Ralph Nader

Back in the 1930s, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt went on national radio and declared what the basic necessities were for the American people–a wage that can support a family, decent housing, the right to health care, a good education and future economic security.

Sound familiar today? It certainly would sound familiar to a majority of the American people. The struggle for livelihood, the struggles to escape poverty, calamitous health care bills, mounting debt, gouging rents and failing, crumbling schools continues year after year.

What’s that French saying? The more things change, the more they remain the same.

Things have changed for the rich and corporate, though. The rich have gotten richer. The talk now is about the super-rich and the hyper-rich. The richest 1 percent of people in this country has financial wealth equal to the combined financial wealth of the bottom 95 percent.

The big corporations are more avaricious than ever. The past decade’s corporate crime wave, dutifully reported in the major business media–newspapers and magazines–demonstrates how trillions of dollars were looted, or drained away, from tens of millions of small investors, pensioners and workers.

In FDR’s time, the CEOs of the top 300 corporations paid themselves about 12 times the average wage in their company. Now the top greed registers 400 to 500 times what the average workers eke out in a full year. Wal-Mart is an example of that sheer self-serving power at the top.

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