Unstoppable by Ralph Nader

vulnerable to sheer pressure politics from the corporatists.
    Here’s a perfect place for an LR coalition. Why wouldn’t liberals and conservatives band together to stop these scandalous raids on the taxpayers? Many would, except those who are too occupied fighting battles over social issues and dialing for campaign dollars to take on corporate welfare reform that would lead to convergence.
    3. Restore efficiency in government procurement.
    At this point, government purchasing, a multitrillion dollar business—annually at the federal, state, and local levels—is overripe for huge savings and for obtaining better products and services. For too long, the full text of many procurement contracts has not been made public, too many are left without competitive bidding, and more often they are not even monitored during and after their completion. A bipartisan move passed Congress in 2004 requiring all agencies to put summaries of these contracts online. Similar bipartisan support exists for putting the entire texts online, as Indiana and Texas have done, but there has been no vigorous push to get this enacted as a result of the quiet opposition of the vendor industry, which does not like the sunlight. With entire texts online, more competitors are likely, taxpayer groups and the media can regularly monitor them for adherence or improvement in the terms on the next round, and scholars can delve deeply into this enormous, often sweetheart, contract state.
    In 1988, the Center for Study of Responsive Law held a conference in Washington, DC, on government procurement to stimulate innovation, stressing how a fine-tuning of such contracts can create larger civilian markets. Earlier in this book, I noted the example of auto safety, in which air bags were introduced to cars via purchases by the government. One example in which procurements stimulated positive directions was the use of generic drugs by US Army purchase practices around World War II. And for years the navy, for economic reasons, was buying solar photovoltaics forremote locations. Solar energy advocates have used this fact in their activism.
    Feelers for convergence have appeared in Congress (with Republican senator Tom Coburn teaming with Democrats), at the state level, in the literature, and in concrete examples, enough to suggest it is time to move to a larger stage. It is to be expected that objections will come from strict libertarians, who will say the true change would be to get the government out of most of these activities. That is another discussion, which will have to be gone through category by category. Here the convergent focus should be on the best and most honest use of the taxpayer dollar now.
    4. Link the minimum wage with inflation.
    A bottom-up convergence effort will be needed here to give the 70 percent plus support this measure has with the public a cutting edge in Congress. Over thirty million workers—hailing from varying political persuasions—are laboring at between the current $7.25 an hour (by far the lowest rate among the Western world’s large countries) and the $10.50 per hour they would be getting if the 1968 minimum wage had been adjusted for inflation. This demand is going to get across-the-board support because a conservative worker at Walmart or McDonald’s is not going to put any (perceived) antigovernment ideology ahead of his or her desire to put bread on the family table. And properly so.
    Leading traditional conservative thinkers, with few exceptions, believed we needed to have a minimum, mandatory level of worker well-being. The exceptions do not believe in any minimum wage whatsoever, arguing, among other things, that it reduces the number of jobs that will be available. This is a stance that has been decisively rebutted by knowledgeable, published scholars, including Robert Pollin and other prominent economists. 5
    At least 70 percent of the population is behind an adjusted minimum wage, including Rick