Another Front Against Political Corruption Why I'm Running for President By RALPH NADER
The following is the text of a news conference with Ralph Nader at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., as transcribed by Federal News Service Inc.
Today I enter the 2004 elections as an independent candidate for the presidency of the United States, to join with all Americans who wish to declare their independence from corporate rule and its domination. The exercised sovereignty of the people in our history has brought forth solutions to the people, the justice they created and the futures they desired for their children.
In times past, the naysayers were organized commercial powers, whose unbridled greed and authoritarian structures were denounced by Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt in quite memorable statements.
It took a strengthened populace against the malefactors of great wealth to overcome these corporate naysayers and abolish slavery, open the vote to women, the unions to workers, the cooperatives to farmers,
to temper the large mine owners, industrialists, railroads and bankers. In this manner, American history surged forward and upward.
Today there is a compelling necessity for a new strengthening of the people to reform and recover their public elections from the grip of private financing, to rescue our public authorities from the corporate government of big business that prevails today in Washington, D.C.
These mass concentrations of power, privilege, wealth, technology and corporate immunity have placed their rampaging global quest for maximum profits in the way of progress, justice and opportunity for the very millions of American workers who made possible these corporate profits but who are falling behind, both excluded and expendable. Their labors have gone unrequited as these unpatriotic corporations abandon our country and shift industries abroad -- along with what is left of their allegiance to our country and our community.
The dreaded supremacy of corporatism over civil institutions, stomping both conservative and liberal values alike, has broken through any remaining barriers by the two major political parties, the two-party duopolies.
Corporatism has turned federal and state departments and agencies into indentured servants for taxpayer funded subsidies, budget-busting contracts of great lucrative scope, and dwindling law and order against the widely publicized corporate crime wave. This resistant corporate crime wave has looted and drained trillions of dollars from millions of workers, their pensions, and from small investors. There has been ample media publicity and documentation of such crimes, abuses and frauds of these unprecedented self-enrichments of top executives at the expense of their fiduciary duties to both their own companies and their shareholder owners. Has the president supplied the required law enforcement resources for action? Scarcely. He has, as in so many other domestic matters, otherwise preoccupied -- very few of these corporate bosses have been brought to justice and jailed.
Lincoln's new birth of freedom and government of the people by the people for the people, in his memorable Gettysburg Address, must indeed not perish from this land. Only an organized, self-confident people lifting their expectation levels and applying their time, energy and talent can achieve Lincoln's foreshadowed horizons, where freedom from fear, shift of power and just solutions can become realities in everyday life for Americans. Comparing the Republican Lincoln's assurance in a period of great peril and daily destruction in those years in the 1860s -- contrast with the costly politics of fear peddled daily by the obsessive Republican incumbent of today, George W. Bush, playing politics with national security.
Elections should place aspirations in motion.
Only in this way will they have meaning for people's lives. Movements for change come from more voices and choices, more debates and proposals, more organizing and more respect for the voters in the electoral arena, so they have a broader opportunity to vote for whom they choose to vote for.
At the same time, there ought to be higher levels of responsibility by voters themselves for their own governments. The civil liberties and their exercise by a pluralistic, not a duopolistic, system of political parties and candidates, regenerate, reanimate a passive electorate accustomed to betrayal and in large numbers not even voting.
Movements for change also come from the perceived neglected necessities of the American people in a land of skewed plenty, where the rich have so much and the rest of America is denied the just rewards for their labors.
These movements embrace the long overdue abolition of cruel poverty in America; the provision of genuine, efficient, honest health care; the illumination of civically inspired education; and the shift in the burden and uses of taxes away from corporate plunder, corporate tax havens and cost transfers to individual taxpayers. Taxpayers always end up with the bill for this corporate plunder and corporate tax escapes.
These initiatives for change embrace the conversion as well to breathable air and clean water; renewable energy; detoxified agriculture; decongesting transportation technologies on the highway and in plans -- and in public transit; the affordability of decent shelter; and the enabling of workers, consumers and communities to organize and shape their own political economy. We need more organization among these constituencies.
Presently, global corporations are bent on strategically planning our future, our politics, our economy, our military expenditures, our education, our environment, our culture, even our genetic inheritance. They're all subject to corporate strategic planning. Is it not our responsibility together, as individuals, as real people, to shape our futures within our own deliberative democratic process?
The unceasing enlightenment of humankind requires sensitive humans to enlist in a marathon, not a sprint. May there be a decent tolerance for the release of these creative individual and community entities inside an electoral system sadly known more for its straitjackets than for its wings, more for its routines than its aspirations.
The focus on the fundamental requirement for broader distribution of power, initiative and opportunity to forge a resourceful society should be the touchstone of this election year and its campaigns. We owe at least the prospect of possibilities to the generations that follow us. We owe the same to the young people of America as they ponder and prepare for their leadership obligations. This campaign will reach out to the young people and to all people who wish to volunteer for our efforts in 50 states, who wish to contribute to our efforts in 50 states, who wish to highlight their own creative solutions in community after community, that are almost never highlighted by political campaigns; who wish to communicate to us at our website, <votenader.org>.
full: http://www.counterpunch.org/nader02242004.html
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