>February 21 , 2000
>
>Statement of Ralph Nader, Announcing His Candidacy for the Green Party's
>Nomination for President
>
>by Ralph Nader
>
>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 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 an
>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
>nation
>
>
>
>* 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 benefited 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 aquire 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 parties vying to see who takes the
>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
**************************************************
* Brian McAndrews, Practicum Coordinator *
* Faculty of Education, Queen's University *
* Kingston, Ontario K7L 3N6 *
* FAX:(613) 533-6307 Phone (613) 533-6000x74937*
* e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *
* "Education is not the filling of a pail, *
* but the lighting of a fire. *
* W.B.Yeats *
* *
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