I'm passing Nader's original statement, declaring his candidacy, on the
folks on the list. I know this is a busy list, but it's worth reading
if you have the time... By the way, the Green's convention is on CSpan
this weekend.
Ted
==================================================
Subject: Ralph Nader's statement of candidacy
February 21, 2000
Washington, D.C.
Statement of Ralph Nader, Announcing His Candidacy for the Green Party's
Nomination for President
Today I wish to explain why, after working for years as a citizen
advocate for consumers, workers, taxpayers and the environment, I am
seeking the Green Party's nomination for President. A crisis of
democracy in our country convinces me to take this action. Over the past
twenty years, big business has increasingly dominated our political
economy. This control by the corporate government over our political
government is creating a widening "democracy gap." Active citizens are
left shouting their concerns over a deep chasm between them and their
government. This state of affairs is a world away from the legislative
milestones in civil rights, the environment, and health and safety of
workers and consumers seen in the sixties and seventies. At that time,
informed and dedicated citizens powered their concerns through the
channels of government to produce laws that bettered the lives of
millions of Americans.
Today we face grave and growing societal problems in health care,
education, labor, energy and the environment. These are problems for
which active citizens have solutions, yet their voices are not carrying
across the democracy gap. Citizen groups and individual thinkers have
generated a tremendous capital of ideas, information, and solutions to
the point of surplus, while our government has been drawn away from us
by a corporate government. Our political leadership has been hijacked.
Citizen advocates have no other choice but to close the democracy gap by
direct political means. Only effective national political leadership
will restore the responsiveness of government to its citizenry. Truly
progressive political movements do not just produce more good results;
they enable a flowering of progressive citizen movements to effectively
advance the quality of our neighborhoods and communities outside of
politics.
I have a personal distaste for the trappings of modern politics, in
which incumbents and candidates daily extol their own inflated virtues,
paint complex issues with trivial brush strokes, and propose plans
quickly generated by campaign consultants. But I can no longer stomach
the systemic political decay that has weakened our democracy. I can no
longer watch people dedicate themselves to improving their country while
their government leaders turn their backs, or worse, actively block fair
treatment for citizens. It is necessary to launch a sustained effort to
wrest control of our democracy from the corporate government and restore
it to the political government under the control of citizens.
This campaign will challenge all Americans who are concerned with
systemic imbalances of power and the undermining of our democracy,
whether they consider themselves progressives, liberals, conservatives,
or others. Presidential elections should be a time for deep discussions
among the citizenry regarding the down-to-earth problems and injustices
that are not addressed because of the gross power mismatch between the
narrow vested interests and the public or common good.
The unconstrained behavior of big business is subordinating our
democracy to the control of a corporate plutocracy that knows few
self-imposed limits to the spread of its power to all sectors of our
society. Moving on all fronts to advance narrow profit motives at the
expense of civic values, large corporate lobbies and their law firms
have produced a commanding, multi-faceted and powerful juggernaut. They
flood public elections with cash, and they use their media conglomerates
to exclude, divert, or propagandize. They brandish their willingness to
close factories here and open them abroad if workers do not bend to
their demands. By their control in Congress, they keep the federal cops
off the corporate crime, fraud, and abuse beats. They imperiously demand
and get a wide array of privileges and immunities: tax escapes, enormous
corporate welfare subsidies, federal giveaways, and bailouts. They
weaken the common law of torts in order to avoid their responsibility
for injurious wrongdoing to innocent children, women and men.
Abuses of economic power are nothing new. Every major religion in the
world has warned about societies allowing excessive influences of
mercantile or commercial values. The profiteering motive is driven and
single-minded. When unconstrained, it can override or erode community,
health, safety, parental nurturing, due process, clean politics, and
many other basic social values that hold together a society. Abraham
Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Supreme Court Justices
Louis Brandeis and William Douglas, among others, eloquently warned
about what Thomas Jefferson called "the excesses of the monied
interests" dominating people and their governments. The struggle
between the forces of democracy and plutocracy has ebbed and flowed
throughout our history. Each time the cycle of power has favored more
democracy, our country has prospered ("a rising tide lifts all boats").
Each time the cycle of corporate plutocracy has lengthened, injustices
and shortcomings proliferate.
In the sixties and seventies, for example, when the civil rights,
consumer, environmental, and women's rights movements were in their
ascendancy, there finally was a constructive responsiveness by
government. Corporations, such as auto manufacturers, had to share more
decision making with affected constituencies, both directly and through
their public representatives and civil servants. Overall, our country
has come out better, more tolerant, safer, and with greater
opportunities. The earlier nineteenth century democratic struggles by
abolitionists against slavery, by farmers against large oppressive
railroads and banks, and later by new trade unionists against the brutal
workplace conditions of the early industrial and mining era helped
mightily to make America and its middle class what it is today. They
demanded that economic power subside or be shared.
Democracy works, and a stronger democracy works better for reputable,
competitive markets, equal opportunity and higher standards of living
and justice. Generally, it brings out the best performances from people
and from businesses.
A plutocracy -- rule by the rich and powerful -- on the other hand,
obscures our historical quests for justice. Harnessing political power
to corporate greed leaves us with a country that has far more problems
than it deserves, while blocking ready solutions or improvements from
being applied.
It is truly remarkable that for almost every widespread need or
injustice in our country, there are citizens, civic groups, small and
medium-sized businesses and farms that have shown how to meet these
needs or end these injustices. However, all the innovative solutions in
the world will accomplish little if the injustices they address or the
problems they solve have been shoved aside because plutocracy reigns and
democracy wanes. For all optimistic Americans, when their issues are
thus swept from the table, it becomes civic mobilization time.
Consider the economy, which business commentators say could scarcely be
better. If, instead of corporate yardsticks, we use human yardsticks to
measure the performance of the economy and go beyond the quantitative
indices of annual economic growth, structural deficiencies become
readily evident. The complete dominion of traditional yardsticks for
measuring economic prosperity masks not only these failures but also the
inability of a weakened democracy to address how and why a majority of
Americans are not benefitting from this prosperity in their daily lives.
Despite record economic growth, corporate profits, and stock market
highs year after year, a stunning array of deplorable conditions still
prevails year after year. For example:
. A majority of workers are making less now, inflation adjusted, than in
1979
. Over 20% of children were growing up in poverty during the past
decade, by far the highest percentage among comparable western countries
. The minimum wage is lower today, inflation-adjusted, than in 1979
. American workers are working longer and longer hours -- on average a
additional 163 hours per year, compared to 20 years ago -- with less
time for family and community
. Many full-time family farms cannot make a living in a market of giant
buyer concentration and industrial agriculture
. The public works (infrastructure) are crumbling, with decrepit
schools and clinics, library closings, antiquated mass transit and more
. Corporate welfare programs, paid for largely by middle-class taxpayers
and amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars per year, continue to
rise along with government giveaways of taxpayer assets such as public
forests, minerals and new medicines
. Affordable housing needs are at record levels while secondary mortgage
market companies show record profits
. The number of Americans without health insurance grows every year
. There have been twenty-five straight years of growing foreign trade
deficits ($270 billion in 1999)
. Consumer debt is at an all time high, totaling over $ 6 trillion
. Personal bankruptcies are at a record level
. Personal savings are dropping to record lows and personal assets are
so low that Bill Gates' net worth is equal to that of the net assets of
the poorest 120 million Americans combined
. The tiny federal budgets for the public's health and safety continue
to be grossly inadequate
. Motor vehicle fuel efficiency averages are actually declining and,
overall, energy conservation efforts have slowed, while renewable energy
takes a back seat to fossil fuel and atomic power subsidies
. Wealth inequality is greater than at any time since WWII. The top one
percent of the wealthiest people have more financial wealth than the
bottom 90% of Americans combined, the worst inequality among large
western nations
. Despite annual declines in total business liability costs, business
lobbyists drive for more privileges and immunities for their wrongdoing
It is permissible to ask, in the light of these astonishing shortcomings
during a period of touted prosperity, what the state of our country
would be should a recession or depression occur? One import of these
contrasts is clear: economic growth has been decoupled from economic
progress for many Americans. In the early 1970s, our economy split into
two tiers. Whereas once economic growth broadly benefitted the majority,
now the economy has become one wherein "a rising tide lifts all yachts,"
in the words of Jeff Gates, author of The Ownership Solution. Returns on
capital outpaced returns on labor, and job insecurity increased for
millions of seasoned workers. In the seventies, the top 300 CEOs paid
themselves 40 times the entry-level wage in their companies. Now the
average is over 400 times.
This in an economy where impoverished assembly line workers suffering
from carpal tunnel syndrome frantically process chickens which pass them
in a continuous flow, where downsized white and blue collar employees
are hired at lesser compensation, if they are lucky, where the focus of
top business executives is no longer to provide a service that attracts
customers, but rather to acquire customers through mergers and
acquisitions. How long can the paper economy of speculation ignore its
effects on the real economy of working families? Pluralistic democracy
has enlarged markets and created the middle class. Yet the short-term
monetized minds of the corporatists are
bent on weakening, defeating, diluting, diminishing, circumventing,
coopting, or corrupting all traditional countervailing forces that have
saved American corporate capitalism from itself.
Regulation of food, automobiles, banks and securities, for example,
strengthened these markets along with protecting consumers and
investors. Antitrust enforcement helped protect our country from
monopoly capitalism and stimulated competition. Trade unions
enfranchised workers and helped mightily to build the middle class for
themselves, benefiting also non-union laborers. Producer and consumer
cooperatives helped save the family farm, electrified rural areas, and
offered another model of economic activity. Civil litigation -- the
right to have your day in court -- helped deter producers of harmful
products and brought them to some measure of justice. At the same time,
the public learned about these hazards.
Public investment -- from naval shipyards to Pentagon drug discoveries
against infectious disease to public power authorities provided
yardsticks to measure the unwillingness of big business to change and
respond to needs. Even under a rigged system, shareholder pressures on
management sometimes have shaken complacency, wrongdoing, and
mismanagement. Direct consumer remedies, including class actions, have
given pause to crooked businesses and have stopped much of this unfair
competition against honest businesses. Big business lobbies opposed all
of this progress strenuously, but they lost and America gained.
Ultimately, so did a chastened but myopic business community.
Now, these checkpoints face a relentless barrage from rampaging
corporate titans assuming more control over elected officials, the
workplace, the marketplace, technology, capital pools (including
workers' pension trusts) and educational institutions. One clear sign of
the reign of corporations over our government is that the key laws
passed in the 60s and 70s that we use to curb corporate misbehavior
would not even pass through Congressional committees today. Planning
ahead, multinational corporations shaped the World Trade Organization's
autocratic and secretive governing procedures so as to undermine
non-trade health, safety, and other living standard laws and proposals
in member countries.
Up against the corporate government, voters find themselves asked to
choose between look-a-like candidates from two partiies vying to see who
takes th marching orders from their campaign paymasters and their future
employers. The money of vested interests nullifies genuine voter choice
and trust. Our elections have been put out for auction to the highest
bidder. Public elections must be publicly financed and it can be done
with well-promoted voluntary checkoffs and free TV and Radio time for
ballot-qualified candidates.
Workers are disenfranchised more than any time since the 1920s. Many
unions stagger under stagnant leadership and discouraged rank and file.
Furthermore, weak labor laws actually obstruct new trade union
organization and leave the economy with the lowest percentage of workers
unionized in more than 60 years. Giant multinationals are pitting
countries against one another and escaping national jurisdictions more
and more. Under these circumstances, workers are entitled to stronger
labor organizing laws and rights for their own protection in order to
deal with highly organized corporations.
At a very low cost, government can help democratic solution building for
a host of problems that citizens face, from consumer abuses, to
environmental degradation. Government research and development generated
whole new industries and company startups and created the Internet. At
the least, our government can facilitate the voluntary banding together
of interested citizens into democratic civic institutions. Such civic
organizations can create more level playing fields in the banking,
insurance, real estate, transportation, energy, health care, cable TV,
educational, public services, and other sectors. Let's call this the
flowering of a deep-rooted democratic society. A government that funnels
your tax dollars to corporate welfare kings in the form of subsidies,
bailouts, guarantees, and giveaways of valuable public assets can at
least invest in promoting healthy democracy.
Taxpayers have very little legal standing in the federal courts and
little indirect voice in the assembling and disposition of taxpayer
revenues. Closer scrutiny of these matters between elections is
necessary. Facilities can be established to accomplish a closer
oversight of taxpayer assets and how tax dollars (apart from social
insurance) are allocated. This is an arena which is, at present, shaped
heavily by corporations that, despite record profits, pay far less in
taxes as a percent of the federal budget than in the 1950s and 60s.
The "democracy gap" in our politics and elections spells a deep sense of
powerlessness by people who drop out, do not vote or listlessly vote for
the "least-worst" every four years and then wonder why after another
cycle the "least-worst" gets worse. It is time to redress fundamentally
these imbalances of power. We need a deep initiatory democracy in the
embrace of its citizens, a usable brace of democratic tools that brings
the best out of people, highlights the humane ideas and practical ways
to raise and meet our expectations and resolve our society's
deficiencies and injustices.
A few illustrative questions can begin to raise our expectations and
suggest what can be lost when the few and powerful hijack our democracy:
Why can't the wealthiest nation in the world abolish the chronic poverty
of millions of working and non-working Americans, including our
children?
Are we reversing the disinvestment in our distressed inner cities and
rural areas and using creatively some of the huge capital pools in the
economy to make these areas more livable, productive and safe?
Are we able to end homelessness and wretched housing conditions with
modern materials, designs, and financing mechanisms, without bank and
insurance company redlining, to meet the affordable housing needs of
millions of Americans?
Are we getting the best out of known ways to spread renewable, efficient
energy throughout the land to save consumers money and to head off
global warming and other land-based environmental damage from fossil
fuels and atomic energy?
Are we getting the best out of the many bright and public-spirited civil
servants who know how to improve governments but are rarely asked by
their politically-appointed superiors or members of Congress?
Are we able to provide wide access to justice for all aggrieved people
so that we apply rigorously the admonition of Judge Learned Hand, "If we
are to keep our democracy, there must be one commandment: Thou Shall Not
Ration Justice"?
Can we extend overseas the best examples of our country's democratic
processes and achievements instead of annually using billions in tax
dollars to subsidize corporate munitions exports, as Republican Senator
Mark Hatfield always used to decry?
Can we stop the giveaways of our vast commonwealth assets and become
better stewards of the public lands, better investors of trillions of
dollars in worker pension monies, and allow broader access to the public
airwaves and other assets now owned by the people but controlled by
corporations?
Can we counter the coarse and brazen commercial culture, including
television which daily highlights depravity and ignores the quiet civic
heroisms in its communities, a commercialism that insidiously exploits
childhood and plasters its logos everywhere?
Can we plan ahead as a society so we know our priorities and where we
wish to go? Or do we continue to let global corporations remain astride
the planet, corporatizing everything, from genes to education to the
Internet to public institutions, in short planning our futures in their
image? If a robust civic culture does not shape the future, corporatism
surely will.
To address these and other compelling challenges, we must build a
powerful, self-renewing civil society that focuses on ample justice so
we do not have to desperately bestow limited charity. Such a culture
strengthens existing civic associations and facilitates the creation of
others to watch the complexities and technologies of a new century.
Building the future also means providing the youngest of citizens with
citizen skills that they can use to improve their communities. This is
the foundation of our campaign, to focus on active citizenship, to
create fresh political movements that will displace the control of the
Democratic and Republican Parties, two apparently distinct political
entities that feed at the same corporate trough. They are in fact simply
the two heads of one political duopoly, the DemRep Party. This duopoly
does everything it can to obstruct the beginnings of new parties
including raising ballot access barriers, entrenching winner-take-all
voting systems, and thwarting participation in debates at election
times.
As befits its name, the Green Party, whose nomination I seek, stands for
the regeneration of American politics. The new populism which the Green
Party represents, involves motivated, informed voters who comprehend
that "freedom is participation in power," to quote the ancient Roman
orator, Cicero. When citizen participation flourishes, as this campaign
will encourage it to do, human values can tame runaway commercial
imperatives. The myopia of the short-term bottom line so often debases
our democratic processes and our public and private domains. Putting
human values first helps to make business responsible and to put
government on the right track.
It is easy and true to say that this deep democracy campaign will be an
uphill one. However, it is also true that widespread reform will not
flourish without a fairer distribution of power for the key roles of
voter, citizen, worker, taxpayer, and consumer. Comprehensive reform
proposals from the corporate suites to the nation's streets, from the
schools to the hospitals, from the preservation of small farm economies
to the protection of privacies, from livable wages to sustainable
environments, from more time for children to less time for
commercialism, from waging peace and health to averting war and
violence, from foreseeing and forestalling future troubles to journeying
toward brighter horizons, will wither while power inequalities loom over
us.
Why are campaigns just for candidates? I would like the American people
to hear from individuals such as Edgar Cahn (Time Dollars for
neighborhoods), Nicholas Johnson (television and telecommunications),
Paul Hawken, Amory and Hunter Lovins (energy and resource conservation),
Dee Hock (on chaordic organizations), James MacGregor Burns and John
Gardner (on leadership), Richard Grossman (on the American history of
corporate charters and personhood), Jeff Gates (on capital sharing),
Robert Monks (on corporate accountability), Ray Anderson (on his
company's pollution and recycling conversions), Johnnetta Cole, Troy
Duster and Yolanda Moses (on race relations), Richard Duran (minority
education), Lois Gibbs (on community mobilization against toxics),
Robert McIntyre (on tax justice), Hazel
Henderson (on redefining economic development), Barry Commoner and David
Brower (on fundamental environmental regeneration), Wendell Berry (on
the quality of living), Tony Mazzocchi (on a new agenda for labor), and
Law Professor Richard Parker (on a constitutional popular manifesto).
These individuals are a small sampling of many who have so much to say,
but seldom get through the evermore entertainment-focused media. (Note:
mention of these persons does not imply their support for this
campaign.)
Our political campaign will highlight active and productive citizens who
practice democracy often in the most difficult of situations. I intend
to do this in the District of Columbia whose citizens have no
full-voting representation in Congress or other rights accorded to
states. The scope of this campaign is also to engage as many volunteers
as possible to help overcome ballot barriers and to get the vote out. In
addition it is designed to leave a momentum after election day for the
various causes that committed people have worked so hard to further. For
the Greens know that political parties need also to work between
elections to make elections meaningful. The focus on fundamentals of
broader distribution of power is the touchstone of this campaign. As
Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis declared for the ages, "We can have
a democratic society or we can have great concentrated wealth in the
hands of a few. We cannot have both."
Thank you. Nader 2000, P.O. Box 18002, Washington, D.C. 20036 website:
www.votenader.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Jun 23 2000 - 23:45:42 CUT