Crashing the Party, by Ralph Nader

When I was 14 years old, I heard Ralph Nader say that box cereal was less nutritious than the box it came in, and you'd get more nutrition out of tearing up the box and pouring sugar and milk over it, and eating that for breakfast. That's the kind of genius that Ralph Nader produces constantly, and why his ideas changed the world for Americans more than perhaps any political thinker of the late 20th century. He remains more relevant than virtually every other political thinker currently on the scene.

Re: Crashing the Party, by Ralph Nader

Postby admin » Mon Aug 10, 2015 7:41 am

Fifteen: Conceit and Confusion

Following the November 7 deadlock came a torrent of recriminations and "what ifs." Amid all the arguments there emerged one consensus: The election machinery is a mess -- and not just in Florida. It is prone to confusion by the voters, mistakes by the counters, manipulation by the parties, and outright violations of civil rights of voters who just happen to be poor, minorities, or disabled.

Europeans are amazed that we have our own parties in charge of state and county election commissions. Brazil, having recently modernized its voting mechanisms, offered to send observers and advisers to the United States. Our neighbor to the north shook its collective head. In Canada, no precincts cover more than 350 voters. Every eligible voter is already registered to vote. Voting is by writing an X on a paper ballot, and the nation finishes its counting by eleven P.M. on Election Night. Former President Jimmy Carter, who often is invited by foreign nations to serve as an election observer, says that the Carter Center in Atlanta requires three criteria to be met before he agrees. One is that voters are able to understand the ballot procedures and the ballots themselves. Two, voters have equal rights to have their votes counted. And three, there is a central commission in the country to resolve election disputes. Carter says that none of these conditions prevail throughout the United States and that Florida violated all three.

The test of any democracy is whether after a national trauma significant reform follows. The Democrats believed that not all the votes were counted in Florida and that the election was stolen from them even before the starkly partisan Supreme Court decision ended their misery. The Republicans know that the administration of the elections is a mess in other states as well and has and will haunt them in future elections. Even in 2000, Republicans were making similar allegations in New Mexico to those the Democrats were making in Florida. Chicago was in its usual questionable mode, where over 120,000 votes were not counted and would have been challenged had Illinois been close. From obstacles to registration to incomplete or erroneous voting lists (note the miscues regarding ex-felons in Florida),. to machine errors, to confusing ballot designs, to poorly publicized changes of precinct locations, and on and on, millions of voters are not having their votes counted or counted accurately.

State laws and rules differ over what constitutes a valid vote or recount. Federal elections should call for federal uniform standards. Adequate funds need to be allocated to upgrade and modernize existing antiquities.

So what has occurred since the debacle of November? Florida passed a law that its backers claim will avoid similar failures in the future. That remains to be tested, however. The federal Civil Rights Commission report seems to indicate that Florida's problems are deep and resistant. But for the most part, despite two formal commission reports -- one headed by Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford and the other composed of state and local election administrators -- and some congressional hearings, there have been no enactments of any reforms. Nor are any near the top of the agenda for either party. Should we be surprised? Probably not. But we should be outraged. A deep democracy with strong citizen organizations would not have tolerated such abuses in the first place. The responsibility for an enduring democracy starts with its everyday citizens, while the accountability for overriding and damaging our democratic processes starts with the concentrated controllers of power and wealth. Thus, elections should always embody a vigilant concern with the nature and distribution of power structures, as they affect serious necessities and injustices by their course and impact.

The very purpose of elections has been debased by both parties. Voting is supposed to be about the citizenry expressing its will with wide-angled hopes, views, proposals, revisions, and energetic participation in shaping the future through the robustly contested choice of delegated local, state, and national representatives. It is time for people to ask themselves how badly they want a democracy in which they actually have this deliberative power that is so critical to their well-being. Is it worth a few hours or a few days of their time in an election year? Can they be bothered to take time out from powerless routines with which they are so often displeased? The sins of politicians are in blurring, blunting, and blocking such encouragements and opportunities. They accomplish this largely by tightly connecting their reelection with the commercialization of the process. Accepting vast monies from corporate interests in return for granting plenary power to giant business is a deeply embedded political institution in our country.

Given the sources of their financial nourishment, neither Al Gore nor George W. Bush strayed from the blurring tunnel that they knowingly entered and remained in for the entire campaign. With the practical potential range of the stands they could have taken, they appeared to me to be very eager to tread the same ground in order to minimize any risks of being distinct. After the closest election in more than a century, I was by no means a unique observer of this "protective imitation" phenomenon. Consider the conclusions on this point by commentators who are not of common political background. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan told the New York Times on November 12: "There is no great ideological chasm dividing the candidates -- each one has his prescription drugs plan, each one has his tax cut program -- and the country obviously thinks one would do about as well as the other." From the far right a few days later wrote columnist Holmes Jenkins in the Wall Street Journal: "... in a duopoly market the competitors gravitate toward strategies of 'minimal differentiation.' When the vote splits 50-50, it tells you voters didn't see any large reasons to distinguish between the candidates, only small reasons (mostly cultural).... On the 'role of government,' an issue beloved by ideologues but of more situational interest to voters, the candidates agree to disagree, slightly."

On December 1, the African-American independent columnist for the Washington Post William Raspberry expressed his view: "Even this incredible mess of an election we are still trying to sort out is, at bottom, over fairly minor differences.... There just wasn't that much difference between them -- which may be why half the American people voted for one and half the other."

Roger Simon has written two perceptive eyewitness accounts of the 1996 and 2000 presidential elections. In his book on Gore and Bush, Divided We Stand, he wrote, "Why was this the closest election in American history? Not because the candidates were so different, but because they were so similar." He cited exit polls showing that 55 percent of voters said they had reservations about the vote they had just cast.

Writing in the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani thought that "Citizen Clinton's tenure in the Oval Office helped shape the tone of the 2000 presidential campaign -- a campaign uncommonly focused on personalities and character flaws, on sighs and smirks and spousal kisses." Clinton's own pollster, Stan Greenberg, said that in the end, almost half the electorate threw up its hands, unable to differentiate the proposals of the two candidates." Even though Gore won the popular vote, his own campaign chairman, Bill Daley, still managed to tell Simon, "To tell you the truth, I think they [the people1never really liked either one of them."

Clearly, powerful adherents of either party thought this similarity analysis to be nonsense. Some pro-choice leaders believed that a Republican administration surely would take away the reproductive rights of women. And as Jenkins noted, the "NRA hears the midnight knock on the door every time a liberal gets elected."

Forty years ago, the Harriman doctrine (named after W. Averell Harriman, the very wealthy Democratic governor of New York) held that when liberals have no place to go, they do nothing. This was not true when it came to our Green Party candidacy. Some liberals in influential positions decided to shout, curse, boycott, blame, and retaliate against any groups, projects, or well-known people closely or remotely related to my campaign. Bill Maher, Susan Sarandon, Phil Donahue, Tim Robbins (see Appendix J), Ani DeFranco, and Michael Moore, among others, took real heat. Jim Musselman, a Pennsylvania music producer of folksingers whose proceeds are given to civic causes, was told explicitly by people in the industry that memories of his helping our Madison Square Garden rally will remain fresh. Public Citizen and the Center for Auto Safety, which I founded thirty years ago but do not run, lost contributions from rattled Democrats who believed that collective punishment was more important than helping the lifesaving causes in which they still believed.

Collective punishment reached a new low when pioneer New York aviation trial attorney Lee Kreindler, about whom I wrote articles in the 1950s, withdrew his pledge of ten thousand dollars to the Aviation Consumer Action Project (ACAP), which I founded in 1970. ACAP is the only consumer group in Washington, D.C., pressing the Federal Aviation Administration to advance safety, security, and service for air passengers. Paul Hudson lost his daughter in the Pan Am 103 crash over Lockerbie. He gave up his small real-estate law practice in Albany to devote his time to heading ACAP in memory of the loss of his child. Kreindler is the senior partner in a wealthy law firm that has dozens of Pan Am 103 cases. Even this tragic connection meant nothing to that firm when it came to helping a small, hard-pressed aviation safety advocacy organization.

Bob Cooper, when he headed HBO films, commissioned a made-for-television movie on my struggle with General Motors, later dropped by his successors, but wanted to take another look at getting it produced now that he had his own production company. In mid- 2001, he sadly returned the screenplay to my colleague Wesley Smith, saying that people in Hollywood no longer liked me and he couldn't get it financed. Another Los Angeles production company that had been very interested in the movie told Wesley the same thing.

An idealistic, youngish CEO of a computer company visited the Washington Post in early 2001 to interest the paper in covering a conference the next day on Internet privacy -- problems and solutions -- where I was to be the keynote speaker. A consumer reporter heard him out, then she irrelevantly said: "People around here don't like Ralph Nader now." There was, one might expect, little chance of any coverage the next day.

Just as there were other loyalists in Congress and around the country unwilling to declare any conditions under which a progressive third party should ever challenge the Democrats, there was a large number of leading liberals who admired our efforts, even if they could not also support them. Sniffing the personal question, many reporters asked me how "did I feel" being rejected or ostracized as persona non grata. In a variety of verbal modes, my answer in essence was "my cup runneth over with pity" over the limitless tolerance these liberal Democrats have for their party's dominant swing away from its roots. I recalled an article written in the July 1970 issue of Harper's magazine by John Kenneth Galbraith titled "Who Needs Democrats? And What It Takes to Be Needed." He was wrestling with a question that today's Democrats should return to their frontal consciousness to ponder. Galbraith's words are worth recounting:

The function of the Democratic Party, in this century at least, has, in fact, been to embrace its solutions even when, as in the case of Wilson's New Freedom, Roosevelt's New Deal, or the Kennedy-Johnson civil rights legislation, it outraged not only Republicans but the Democratic establishment as well. And if the Democratic Party does not render this function, at whatever cost in reputable outrage and respectable heart disease, it has no purpose at all. The play will pass to those who do espouse solutions.... The system is not working.... The only answer lies in political action to get a system that does work. To this conclusion, if only because there is no alternative conclusion, people will be forced to come. Such is the Democratic opportunity. Oddly, I do not think the prospect entirely bleak.


Not "entirely" but only interminably bleaker, it can be said thirty-one years later. There are today Galbraithian voices within the Democratic Party. They frequently write for The Nation, The American Prospect, or The Progressive. But their words are not listened to by the congealed powers that hold decisive sway over the party's downward drift. In an early June 2001 appearance before the National Press Club, I suggested some questions that Democrats should put to their party.

1. Are your differences with the Republicans tweaking at twigs or going to the trunk or roots of the issues? The Citigroup banking legislation of 1999 comes to mind. So do the so-called Freedom to Farm Act and the notorious Telecommunications Act of 1996.

2. Are your basic differences In position papers or party planks backed up by an intensity of advocacy, an expenditure of political capital, a willingness to turn off funders? Here the widely reported tepid efforts by Clinton on behalf of campaign finance reform for eight years comes to mind. Similarly, Congressional Democrats bewailed what they believed to be the horrendous consequences of Bush's tax bill -- future deficits, undermining Social Security, Medicare, and the environment -- yet declined to use their voting power to stop it.

3. Does the party work to strengthen its presumed constituencies? For twenty years, party leaders have declined to introduce the Consumer Protection Agency (CPA) bill. This was a major priority of President Jimmy Carter but was narrowly defeated by an extraordinary business lobbying effort in the House of Representatives in 1978. A CPA challenging misbehaving or inert regulatory agencies may well have anticipated and reduced the size of the savings and loan fiasco by exposing early the federal bank regulatory agencies' derelictions. The Democratic Party has not been serious about reforming anti-worker labor laws. Even in the ghettos, whose residents vote overwhelmingly Democratic, the party has never launched a major drive to deal with the street-level economic and higher-level corporate crimes that eat away low incomes and damage health and safety. The party has no counter to this daily erosion of people's lives, this daily mockery of the rule of law in those tormented neighborhoods. The Democrats know they cannot win without the votes of organized labor and the minorities. Still, the Democrats made corporate power ever more dominant during Clinton's eight years in office.

4. Can the party defend the country against the extreme wing of the Republican Party? The events of the 1990s would seem to answer a resounding no, as Robert Reich and other Democrats have shown to be the case at the local, state, and federal level.

5. Does the party have a clear commitment, by its actions, to a pro-democracy agenda? Beyond the very modest McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill, it has nothing in action, very little in rhetoric. Even the Progressive Caucus of some fifty members of the House cannot organize itself around this agenda, cannot introduce the legislation around which people throughout the country could rally.

6. How does the party react to its own progressive wing? The Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) still believes Gore lost because of his progressive rhetoric. It could be that Mark Russell, the political comedian, had the best reason why Gore lost when, in one of his acts, Russell urged Gore to stop vacillating and "pick one of yourselves." The DLC's idea of recovering the House of Representatives has been to run right-wing Democrats against right-wing incumbent Republicans. The Washington Post on October 16, 2000, highlighted its page-one story with "Party Energetically Aids Conservative Candidates." Dana Milbank asked in the June 15, 1998, New Republic: "What Differentiates the Newest Democratic Candidates from Their Republican Rivals? Not Much." Milbank quotes the political director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Paul Frick, as saying, "The only real litmus test we have is 'Who are you going to vote for for speaker?' " Milbank then adds: "And so, to pick up the eleven seats, separating them from majority status, they have embraced a group of. conservative Democrats who are, to varying degrees, prolife, pro-gun, pro-death penalty, pro-term limits, pro-school prayers -- and, in everything but party affiliation, pro-Republican." One might expand the list to include pro-corporate, anti-consumer, anti-environmental, anti-labor, and pro-larger military contracts for more weapons systems. In short, more corporatist than conservative.

The conservative strategy failed for the Democrats in 1998 and 2000. Harry Truman observed long ago that faced with a choice between two conservatives, the voters will always opt for the real thing. Suppose it had won -- the party would not have had a governing majority. Its right wing would have unseemly leverage over the party, joining Republicans on many votes, and hinting that it could switch to the Republicans if unduly provoked, as several blue-dog Democrats have done already. Without a well-formed philosophy of its historic role and roots, the party will always be giving the backhand to its progressive members, without whom, one must stress again, it cannot win national elections and not a few state ones.

7. How does the Democratic Party as a whole react to a challenge from the Green Party or other progressive third parties? With pouting animosity, visceral indignation, and petty retaliation. Notice what is left out -- adopting long-overdue progressive agendas and taking away these issues, not in rhetoric but in deed, from these parties. Well, no more. The Democrats will have to start earning those progressive votes, instead of taking them for granted.

For a while, the Green Party spillover vote should help some Democrats on Election Day, where there are no Green Party candidates on the ballot line. Greens bring out new voters as well. Senator Maria Cantwell is one of several elected Democrats who is well aware of what many of the 103,000 Green spillover votes meant to her 2,300-vote victory over Senator Slade Gorton in 2000.


Because both the Republican and Democratic parties are delivering our elections and our government to the highest bidders at the expense of our democratic processes, the trend toward independent candidates and third parties is likely to continue, as predicted in an August 2001 report by the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate. This will occur in spite of the formidable barriers erected by the DemReps in state legislatures and debate commissions. There is just too much to be accomplished, too many new horizons to be reached by the United States domestically and around the world. More voters will conclude in the future that both parties are unworthy, that both parties flunk, that the dwindling differences between the two parties are not different enough, and that the similarities between them are increasing to exclude real people and surrender to artificial persons (called corporations) the authority in which they are invested under our Constitution.

The transition from the Clinton-Gore to the Bush-Cheney administration agitated the D.C. real estate market more than the permanent corporate government that so pervasively controls the departments and agencies. The munitions industry and its consultants spent the intervening weeks trying to figure out which of their executives would journey to Washington, walk through the Pentagon's revolving doors, and take up their positions. The new regime will declare that bureaucratic waste reduction and military reform are coming, and what President Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex will yawn once again. They know that the game of exaggerating foreign perils (pointed out by General Douglas MacArthur in 1957) and exploiting the desire of the armed services each to have their own distinct overlapping weapons systems will relentlessly expand growth of the customary military budget in a post-Soviet Union era.

Meanwhile, the bankers barely looked up from their perch over the Treasury Department, Federal Reserve, and cosmetic bank regulatory agencies. Executives at Cargill, ADM, Monsanto, and Novartis fixed the names -- not the numbers -- on their Rolodexes of people at the top of the U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Commerce. This was basically the adjustment of the food and drug industry, the auto, railroad, and aviation companies, and all the rest of the many trade associations, law firms, and public relations firms. For them it meant new names about the same routines -- get the government contracts, get the government giveaways, subsidies, and bailouts, and keep the government's cops off our backs. After a while, these routines become so automatic as to be tedious. So the more exciting frontier for companies and their lobbyists is breaking new ground in actively turning the government against its own people. That way, they can get the pliant John Stossels of the global media world to report to ordinary citizens on how rotten, wasteful, and corrupt the federal government is.

But there was one unique wrinkle in the transition. Along with his controversial last-minute pardons, Clinton cleverly issued a flurry of regulations designed to advance environmental, consumer, and worker interests. Most of them could have been issued in the first half of Clinton's second term. The celebrated arsenic in drinking water standard and the ergonomics standard were ready to be issued years ago. Western Europe had its arsenic standard in place long ago. Actually, the carpal tunnel syndrome proposal was ready for OSHA to issue in 1995 and when it was not, the principal physician working on it resigned.

Clinton wanted to both burnish his historical image and lay a political trap for the incoming Bush administration. So in the last hours of his term, Clinton had these regulations issued, though knowing that it makes them seem vulnerable to expedient Republican charges of being prepared in an unsound, hasty manner. But, by waiting until after the election, he avoided jeopardizing campaign contributions flowing to the Democrats, and other uncertainties associated with taking explicit stands against powerful commercial interests, such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers with their own well-endowed media propaganda machines. Had Gore become president, it is not likely that Clinton would have released these rules. In all likelihood, he would have let Gore continue their administration's policy of putting off such decisions. Bush fell into Clinton's trap and started suspending some of these rules with the approval of the vocal pack of corporate lobbyists. This callousness about arsenic and other safety precautions became the stuff of ridicule by cartoonists, editorial writers, and television reporters. It surely was not an auspicious start for a self-styled "compassionate conservative."

Bush made other bad moves. He shelved the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, which Clinton had sat on inside the White House rather than send to a hostile Senate for ratification. Bush explained his jettison of this essentially modest expression of goals by saying it was far too costly for the .S. economy. In reality, energy efficiencies that reduce greenhouse gases mean a more efficient economy, less health-damaging pollution, and more energy per dollar for the family budget. Clinton-Gore mildly lauded Kyoto but consigned it to a limbo as so much parchment, when they could have used it as an instrument of leadership to transform the global warming debate to focus on one demonstrating greater energy savings to a safer global environment. In any event, environmental groups escalated their clamoring for Bush to come out with his own promised reduction policy. They were inhibited from such vociferous demands during the Clinton era, even when the Democrats were indicating that counting tree cover and restarting nuclear power missions would be ways to comply with Kyoto's modest schedules. After all, Clinton and Gore, who refused to campaign for lower carbon dioxide levels, did favor Kyoto. Bush: acts of commission. Clinton-Gore: acts of omission. Result: continued technological and policy stagnation in Detroit, Houston, and Washington.

By midsummer, Bush was backtracking on many of his remaining challenges to Clinton's last-hour rules, treating them as faits accompli, and relatively harmless at that. As for arsenic, carbon dioxide, and ergonomics, the White House has promised some decisions shortly -- a public recognition that it is unwise politically to reject outright. these widely supported issues. Some benefits may emerge from the interplay between Clinton's political trap and Bush's fumbles, but it's hardly a way to enact critical government functions. But that is what passes for action by commonly, if unevenly, indentured politicians.

During a meeting I had with House Democratic leader Congressman Dick Gephardt in February 2001, the Missourian observed that he has not seen the party's key constituencies -- labor, minorities, and environmentalists -- so mobilized in years. Maybe that is an indirect and consequential difference between Clinton-Gore and Bush-Cheney. So often the former did nothing but said the right things, while the latter do nothing and say the wrong things. The former anesthetized progressive civic forces. The latter make them indignant and more tenacious. That energy could represent an important shift in the balance of power, with longer-term benefits. This is by no means the entire comparative landscape, though. There are many critical policy areas where both parties are saying and doing the same thing -- a type of ditto political discourse where corporations shape much domestic and foreign, military and economic policy.

Progressive Democrats who are deeply critical of their party during off-election years and then march to the drumbeat of the party's rulers in a campaign because of the Republican specter are subjects of manipulation, narrow perspectives, or diminished expectation levels. They would do well to embrace the whole continuum of party performance, direction, and concession, not just their favorite issue or admired incumbents. If your party does not have the votes to be in charge, then it should use its many votes to stop the Republicans' agenda -- what William Greider calls demonstrating an "intensity of purpose."

Demanding more of our alleged political representatives means demanding more of ourselves. This is fundamental. Consider a few unlikely actions taken by Bush early in his administration. He backed down on continuing the decades-long practice bombing on Vieques Island in Puerto Rico by the navy. He reduced offshore oil drilling near Florida from Clinton's proposed 6 million acres to 1.5 million acres. He scrapped a proposed survey of offshore oil prospects off the coast of New Jersey. His EPA administrator Christine Todd Whitman surprised New York's environmentalists when she decided to take action to require General Electric to pay for the dredging of the upper Hudson River contaminated for years by GE's dumping of PCBs.

All this activity went against Bush's ideology, his corporate supporters, and the powerful oil and gas industry, whence he came. How come? He and his advisers heard the growing rumble of the people. Enough people became vocal, wrote letters, sent e-mails and petitions, attended rallies, passed group resolutions, and promised marches and lawsuits. They turned George W.'s words back on him that "actions should have consequences."

When Bush came into the White House swearing that his government would not restrain gouging, monopolistic wholesale electric prices in California (up to ten times the usual price without any increased costs of production), the rumble became louder, and the promise of a statewide referendum by Harvey Rosenfield's consumer rights group on electricity prices in 2002 was becoming more likely. So Bush's Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) did what it refused to do under Clinton -- it established the beginning of a regulatory regime for wholesale prices.

Of course, these are only a few pullbacks by an administration that continues and expands Clinton's corporate supremacy just as Clinton expanded it after Reagan-Bush.

Both parties are locked into a deep trend of contributing to the imbalance of power between corporate systems and civic systems, which shortchanges the nation, drains revenues, resources, and control from the many to the few, and, most important, renders people ever more defenseless to fight back. So the more election campaigns become about us as a people -- both individually and as a community -- and less about the candidates and their monied patrons, the more our elected officials will run in our direction and away from the corporate maw of temptation and surrender.

The challenge is clear and urgent.

***

Several months after the election, we formed a new group called Democracy Rising to organize super-rallies in cities around the country to bring together a large variety of local and national social justice associations to focus on building a deeper democracy, with new synergies and civic engagements. Also established at the same time was 'Citizen Works, whose purpose is to expand public participation in arenas of power by providing the materials, training, and tools for such endeavors. Democracy is always under assault by the forces of plutocracy and needs regular renewal not just with ideas and strategies but also with greater numbers of participants of all ages and backgrounds, but especially the younger generation. This is why an important event, flowing out of our Green Party campaign, was the Campus Greens' Founding Convention of more than two thousand students in Chicago on August 10, 2001.

Three of our college undergraduate interns -- Tom Adkins of Carleton College, Corey Eastwood of New York University, and Shelly Fite of New College (Florida) -- and Duke University graduate Jacob Harold started working on the Campus Greens project right after the November election. The effort moved to Madison, Wisconsin, in early 2001, where Ben Manski, a local organizer, joined them. By the time of their founding convention in Chicago, they and others who volunteered had chartered nearly one hundred Campus Green chapters at colleges and universities, with the hope of reaching up to one thousand chapters by the end of the 20012002 academic year within sight.

Campus Greens are organized independently of the Green Party but share most of the same platforms for change and reform. This is the future. This is one answer to my call for a new generation of astute leaders putting their arms to the wheel of global justice as did their predecessors on whose shoulders they are standing.

The night of their convention, at the Classic Congress Theater, I had the privilege of giving the first keynote address. Winona LaDuke, Medea Benjamin, and Professor Cornel West were among the speakers who sharpened the resolve and robust spirits of the assemblage. Patti Smith and Ani DeFranco thrilled the gathering with their songs and their support. For the better part 'of the next two days, the students attended rigorous workshops on how to proceed from discussion to decision to action. I advised them to study the successes and failures of prior student movements to understand both what worked and what produced the ups and downs that eventually withered away these initiatives. This promising endeavor must be stable, yet it must adjust, change, grow, and put, down deep roots for renewal and sustainability, just like the sustainable economies and democracies it strives to help build into the future.
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Re: Crashing the Party, by Ralph Nader

Postby admin » Mon Aug 10, 2015 7:42 am

Sixteen: Looking Ahead

So where does that leave us? The revered principle of government of, by, and for the people requires more citizen involvement and, for those able to do so, assigning a certain amount of time, talent, and tenacity to our civic responsibilities. We have to believe that, should we make the effort, our convictions will count for something. This is where a reading of American history becomes so energizing in forming a personal political philosophy. For, in our past, when our democracy has been overridden or too weak, an aroused citizenry took our democracy and nation to a higher level of humanity. Although these struggles were often intense and painful for the most part, great advances were achieved with remarkably few active people making it happen for women, minorities, workers, farmers, consumers, debtors, the physically disabled, and many others. Too many people mistakenly believe either that it is not possible for any degree of civic energy to affect the powers that be, or that it takes multitudes and a great disruption of regular living practices to do so.

Still, an appreciation of our greatly achieving forebears provides only some of our motivation. There are also our contemporary issues and empathies, and the ethical and religious principles that Americans live by. Moreover, the personal experiences of tragedy and mistreatment drive our civic self-respect to engage the necessities of corrective action and not stand by idly rationalizing our futility. As a university student one summer, I had occasion to see and feel a little of what migrant farm workers endure every day. I never forgot that those who do the backbreaking work to harvest our foods are paid the least, treated the worst, and harmed the most. That motivated me to speak, write, and act on behalf of these laborers.

Almost everyone sees, hears, or experiences zones of gross unfairness, violence, or grievous displays of short-term thinking, but they need ever more refined tools to help them communicate, mobilize, and act together without losing their civil rights and civil liberties. In this way, they can stem the erosion of our democracy by the perpetrators and holders of excessive power over government or indirectly by adversaries abroad.

What Justice Louis Brandeis called control over "other people's money" -- and one might add "other people's wealth and commonwealth" -- remains one of the more important ways that large business firms allow the symbols of representative politics and the reality of legal ownership by the people to remain intact while taking over the show. As I have already noted, the public airwaves, the public lands, the giant pension funds, the public's research and development assets, and the public works are all reflections on this clever separation between ownership and control. For it is control, not ownership, that companies see as more flexible, less risky, and therefore far more profitable.

Were we the people to control what we already own -- that enormous portion of our overall wealth that authors Jonathan Rowe and David Bollier have re-called (from early American history) the "commons"-- then we as shareholders, investors (directly and through workers' pension trusts), taxpayers, and voters would give reality to ownership. Authors Peter Drucker, Jeff Gates, and other advocates of grassroots capitalism have, written volumes about ways and means to achieve what Gates calls "The Ownership Solution." He says the trouble with corporate capitalism in the United States is that there is a lot of capital but very few capitalists, by which he means that very few Americans reap any significant returns from capital that for years has reaped higher returns compared with returns for labor.

A shift of economic power is critical for the workings of any political reforms. But enough people have to be willing to spend the time and energy. Oscar Wilde once said that socialism could never work because it requires too many meetings. Perhaps to a lesser degree the same can be said of economic democracy or a people's capitalism, or cooperatively owned economic institutions such as food co-ops. Complex, changing societies need more public or citizen time for a more just society if our private time is to be enjoyable, peaceful, safe, and productive. Each person has a contribution to make. It is sometimes useful to evoke a metaphor from the natural world. The great natural asset of our country which is the Mississippi River starts with a drop of water in northern Minnesota. One drop joins with other drops to form a tiny rivulet that joins with other rivulets to form a brook, which together with other brooks makes a stream that with other streams makes a river, which together with other rivers swells the mighty Mississippi. So, too, is the case with millions of citizens, watering the life-expanding potential of a functioning democracy open to fresh ideas and replenishing initiatives.

Fifty-two years ago, Harvard anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn wrote some words of wisdom in his book Mirror for Man. America's chief claim to greatness, he observed, is not in its illustrious writers or in its outstanding scientists or thinkers. It is in being the "first country to dedicate itself to the conception of a society where the lot of the common man would be made easier, where the same opportunities would be available to all, where the lives of all men and women would be enriched and ennobled. This was something new under the sun." He went on to a deep insight: "Ideals of flourishing freshness that adapt to changed conditions and to what is sound and creative in the distinctive American Way are the only sure antidote for our social ills. Only those ideals will spread and be accepted which correspond to the culturally created emotional needs of the people." He believed that "visions" must offer men and women that "common nobility of purpose, which is the vitalizing energy of any significant culture." While "ventures," he added, will "be proved only if diminished anxiety and greater gusto in day-to-day living transform the lives of us all."

It is simply not possible to convey these sensibilities over the mass electronic media, even assuming the media barons agreed to program them. What Kluckhohn was suggesting to us is that we can be informed from a distance about these opportunities, but we can incorporate them only by the intangible he calls our "total philosophic attitude" rooted in the commitment that "the basis of social life is the sensitivity of human beings to the behavior of other human beings." The function of democratic politics is to put forth the forms of societal action that arise from a sense of common pursuits concerning matters of common concern. In a phrase, people to people, all of us pulling our oars in the boat of life where we all find ourselves. The task of an authentic democracy is to make sure that these journeys are accomplished with the informed consent of the governed in a vibrant civil society.

***

Our country's independence was declared in 1776 by patriots, many of whom would be considered very young by contemporary standards. Thomas Jefferson was thirty-two, James Madison was thirty-five, John Hancock was thirty-nine, and John Adams was forty- one. Their leader, George Washington, was only forty-four. Today our society is borrowing heavily from future generations, and debts of all kinds are mounting. As history conveys to us, it is again up to the young to give new character to their times, to forge the civic personalities that will bring old wisdoms, new thinking, and new democratic institutions to bear upon the torments of our world.

It is always the young who can give the people and their collective judgments that "new birth of freedom," in Lincoln's words, who can constrain greed and power -- those classical Molochs -- by civil society's motivation and action. It is always the young who break through the shams and frauds and raise our expectation levels beyond our eroded horizons. It is always the young who see the "impractical and the impossible" as entrenched excuses by the established interests to avoid realizable caring futures. When three hundred of the richest people on Earth have wealth equal to the bottom three billion people on Earth, extreme affluence is built on the backs of extreme mass poverty.

In the forward march of history, it will always be the young who look at the conventional "can't be dones" and demand that "they can be done, they must be done, and they will be done." The questions remain: Are our younger generations in America up for establishing the democratic sovereignty of the people? Or will they continue to grow up corporate and let ever larger global corporations increasingly plan our futures -- economically, culturally, politically, militarily, environmentally, and genetically right into their obedient brave new world?

The civic personality, in contrast, sees through the politically dominant ideology of commercial supremacy and evaluates what it is doing by the measure of civic values. The tobacco industry works ceaselessly to addict kids and sell its products to ever more people. That millions die every year around the world from tobacco-related diseases does not deter this industry. The processed-food companies want to sell ever more fat and sugar to a population, young and older, suffering serious diseases and disabilities from such diets. The drug companies then push their pills onto children and adults with ever less restraint and ever more overwrought marketing mania. A serious published study in the American Medical Association's journal estimated that more than one hundred 'thousand hospitalized patients die from adverse drug reactions each year. The military weapons companies search the world to sell, with taxpayer subsidies, more and more of their lethal armaments to whoever can pay, regardless of their customers' intent or uses. When companies commercialize childhood, accelerate sprawl, imperil the environment with contaminating fuels and chemicals (the EPA estimates that sixty-five thousand Americans die each year from air pollution), block sustainable technologies, encourage more debt, own politicians, skew public tax dollars in their favor, oppress labor, and gouge defenseless consumers, they are simply following their commercial imperative without limits. Civilization as if people are first is not just about opportunities; it is about limits and boundaries around antisocial, criminogenic behavior whose limitless logic eventually would spell omnicide for this very limited home we call Mother Earth.

The British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once wrote that a society is great when its businessmen think greatly of their calling. The young are very adept at searching out or creating such models, and a good place to start is the Social Venture Network, which consciously strives to inject civic values as the framework for their successful midsize businesses. Reading, learning, and thinking in a time of megamedia obfuscation and confusion are a prerequisite for the civic personality. Just what are the proper functions of an accountable government that is not paid to play favorites and forfeit its trust and integrity? What is meant by the commons or commonwealth of public property and public assets that the American people own together but do not control? How did our forebears motivate their fellow citizens to organize person to person, reaching levels that organizers today, with all their communications technology, view with unalloyed awe? Just how did the power of creeping corporatism over the past two hundred years take an artificial legal entity chartered by the state, called the corporation, and have it endowed with the rights of real human beings plus privileges and immunities denied human beings?

There are also distinct elements of courage to the civic personality. Thousands of men and women each year in our country blow the whistle on abuses in business and government, universities, unions, and other institutions to the detriment of their jobs, careers, and livelihood. Civic values drive them to expose avarice and wrongdoing. Keeping an open mind to revisit positions and policies is part of the way civic personalities maintain touch with reality and other people's wishes. When I held a news conference with New Mexico's Republican governor, Gary Johnson, a former businessman, during the campaign, he again spoke out, urging a rethinking of the self-defeating and cruel war on drugs. Johnson is the only sitting governor to open such a taboo subject, even though he told me that other governors privately agree with what he says but think it too politically delicate to raise similar questions in their states.

A civic personality possesses a keen awareness of how large corporations have institutionalized the shifting of their avoidable costs to police, soldiers, taxpayers, consumers, workers, and the environment, and how governments waste or redirect tax dollars to wealthy recipients who make up the corporate government. Being sensitive to how some other democratic nations essentially abolished poverty, as we know it, years ago and provided other safeguards and services for workers, children, and needy citizens informs the civic personality to be more insistent. Similarly, such a commitment is strengthened by an expanding grasp of available solutions or achievable ones shelved not because of any technical objections but because of the resistance of the entrenched powers that be. Solar energy in all its historic and modern active and passive forms remains a prominent illustration of the penalties society pays for not democratizing technology.

During the nineties when a new generation came of age, the United States exhibited a dominance that Clinton and Gore called "peace and prosperity." Apart from the sweeping veneer over real conditions that this phrase obscured domestically and internationally, it does raise the central question: What did we do with all this peace and prosperity? Did we regenerate our culture, strengthen our democracy, and launch a drive to abolish poverty? Did our rulers keep a majority of workers and families from falling behind? Did we meet long-delayed public needs? Did we improve industrial efficiencies that reduce environmental degradation and enhance the productivity of natural resource inputs? Did we strive for world stability by reasonably demobilizing following the demise of our traditional adversaries and instead vigorously waging peace and justice to help humanity and the genius of other societies to join in common efforts for sustainable living standards? Did we move to a new way of thinking and acting apropos of William James's notion of "the moral equivalent of war" back in the late nineteenth century? Why didn't we ever wonder about what we missed? Are we a society stuck in traffic?

What does this decade-long respite from the conventional excuses and red herrings tell us about our political economy's unwillingness to rise to such wonderful occasions and beckoning opportunities? It tells us what happens when power is too concentrated and when the dreams of avarice supplant the dreams of justice -- the great work, as Daniel Webster put it, of human beings on Earth. The remarkable persistence of these human frailties throughout centuries and millennia, despite dramatic secular changes, technologies, and pretensions, is one reason why people can relate to ancient plays from Euripides to Shakespeare. It is why the sayings of the ancients remain so relevant today in an otherwise dramatically different world. It is why the civic personality -- to be true, resilient, productive, and respectful of itself -- cannot ignore these personal failings and insecurities that can remain apart from but dominant over intellect, knowledge, or one's desired contribution to higher priorities in our world and community.

Five hundred years before the birth of Christ, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus said that "character is destiny." One might add that "personality is decisive" for the capability of people building civic cultures. It is character and personality that spell the steady sense of commitment, that give recognition to others in similar endeavors, that enable growth and development of civic skills, perspectives, and frames of reference, that provide the necessary pauses for reevaluation, for improved strategies and modes of self-renewal, for keeping alert and alive the public's imagination of life's possibilities for human beings everywhere.

It is indeed the young who take the risks, who break new ground, who locate or create solutions to widespread needs, who think the unthinkable, who show how prevailing ideologies regularly lie to themselves through phony symbols and images. However, it is also the young who can be most dissuaded by a sensual, tempting corporate culture, who can be seduced into trivializing their lives and postponing their potential. As I have said to many college undergraduates, you have about fifteen thousand days or a little over two thousand weeks before you turn sixty-five. Whether you wish to relax and smell the roses after that age or continue making this a better world, there is little time to lose. Put your knowledge and your vision to work. Keep thinking of the valiant efforts from the past and the children of the future. Put your beneficent mark on your world. Become good ancestors. Let it never be said by future generations that, during your days in the sun, your generation declined to give up so little in order to accomplish so much.

FIRST-STAGE GOALS FOR A BETTER AMERICA

1. Enact legislation that mandates publicly financed public elections and broad reforms of the electoral process. Strengthen citizen participation in our political economy.

2. Enact living-wage laws, strengthen worker health and safety laws, and repeal Taft-Hartley and other obstructions to collective bargaining and worker rights.

3. Issue environmental protection standards to systematically reduce damaging environmental toxins and to promote sustainable technologies.

4. Provide full Medicare coverage for everyone and revamp our national programs for prevention of disease and trauma.

5. Launch a national mission to abolish poverty, as other Western democracies have done, based on proposals made long ago by conservatives, liberals, and progressives.

6. Design and implement a national security policy to counter violence and the silent mass violence of global diseases, environmental devastation, and extreme poverty. Reduce waste and corporate domination of defense budgets -- a wasteful defense is a weak defense. Wage peace and advance nonviolence by education and by foreseeing and forestalling global perils.

7. Renegotiate NAFTA and GATT to be democratic and to be "pull-up," not "pull-down," trade agreements that subordinate labor, consumer, and environmental standards to trade matters.

8. End criminal justice system discrimination, reject the failed war on drugs, and replace for-profit corporate prisons with superior public institutions.

9. Defend and strengthen the civil justice system, apply criminal laws against corporate crime, and fully prosecute consumer fraud and abuses. Expand consumer, worker, and children's health, safety, and economic rights.

10. Strengthen investor-shareholder rights, remedies, and authority over managers and officers and boards of directors so that those who own the companies also control them. End the massive corporate welfare schemes that distort and misallocate public budgets. Reintroduce the historic function of corporate chartering as an instrument of ensuring corporate accountability and the sovereignty of the people.
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Re: Crashing the Party, by Ralph Nader

Postby admin » Mon Aug 10, 2015 7:42 am

APPENDIX A: CITIZENS' COMMITTEE FOR NADER-LADUKE

(AFFILIATIONS PROVIDED FOR IDENTIFICATION PURPOSES ONLY)

Co-Chairs
Phil Donahue, talk-show host
Jim Hightower, author and radio commentator
Randall Robinson, TransAfrica Forum
Susan Sarandon, actor and activist

Members
John B. Anderson, third-party presidential candidate in 1980
David Barsamian, author and radio interviewer
Juliette Beck, Global Exchange
Elaine Bernard, Harvard Trade Union Program
Herbert Bernstein, Professor of Physics at Hampshire College
Thomas Berry, historian and author of Dream of the Earth
Wendell Berry, farmer and writer
Jello Biafra, former member of the Dead Kennedys
Norman Birnbaum, professor at Georgetown University
Grace Lee Boggs, human-rights activist
Blase Bonpane, Office of the Americas
Theresa Bonpane, Office of the Americas
Eric Brakken, United Students Against Sweatshops
David Brower, founder and chair of the Earth Island Institute
Ira R. Byock, physician, author, and advocate for Improved End of Life Care
Edgar Cahn, Time Dollar Institute
Peter Camejo, CEO of Progressive Asset Management
John Cavanagh, Director of the Institute for Policy Studies
Noam Chomsky, author and professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Yvon Chouinard, owner of Patagonia
Robert Clark, General Secretary of the United Electrical Workers
Steve Cobble, former political director of the Rainbow Coalition
Ben Cohen, cofounder of Ben & Jerry's
Barry Commoner, scientist and 1980 Citizen's Party candidate
Peter Coyote, actor and writer
Ronnie Cummins, National Director of the Organic Consumers Association
Herman Daly, professor at the University of Maryland
Iris Dement, folk musician
Rose Ann DeMoro, Executive Director of the California Nurses Association
Mark Dowie, journalist and former editor of Mother Jones
Barbara Dudley, former president of Greenpeace and the National Lawyers Guild
Ronnie Dugger, founder of the Alliance for Democracy
Troy Duster, professor at New York University
Barbara Ehrenreich, political essayist and social critic
Richard Falk, Center of International Studies, Princeton University
Robert Fellmeth, Director of the Children's Advocacy Institute
Jeff Gates, president of the Shared Capitalism Institute
Lois Gibbs, Love Canal Homeowners
Danny Glover, actor and activist
Jim and Rebecca Goodman, Organic Dairy Farmers
Kevin Gray, former ACLU National Board member
Arlo Guthrie, entertainer
Doris (Granny D) Haddock, Campaign Finance Reform activist
Dan Hamburg, former member of Congress
Stewart Harris, executive producer of WebWorks
Paul Hawken, author and economist
Randy Hayes, Rainforest Action Network
Tim Hertnach, Native Forest Council
Wes Jackson; The Land Institute
Nicholas Johnson, former commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission
David Kairys, law professor at Temple University and author
Casey Kasem, radio broadcaster
Mel King, founder of the Massachusetts Rainbow coalition
Ynestra King, ecofeminist author
John Kinsman, Family Farm Defenders
Philip M. Klasky, director of the Bay Area Nuclear Waste Coalition
David Korten, author of The Post-Corporate World: Life After Capitalism
Frances Korten, director of the Positive Futures Network
Ron Kovic, Vietnam veteran and peace activist
AI Krebs, Corporate Agribusiness Research Project
Saul Landau, California State Polytechnic University
Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun magazine
Theodore Lowi, historian and author
Howard Lyman, former rancher and vegetarian activist
Joanna R. Macy, author and teacher
Jerry Mander, president of the International Forum on Globalization
Dr. Manning Marable, director of Columbia University's Institute
for Research in African American Studies
Dave Marsh, writer and editor of Rock & Rap Confidential
Redwood Mary, Plight of the Redwoods Campaign
Arno Mayer, Dayton-Stockton Professor Emeritus at Princeton University
Dan McCarthy, UAW Local 417
Robert McChesney, professor at the University of Illinois
Kay McVay, president of the California Nurses Association
Carolyn Merchant, Professor of Environmental History, Philosophy, and Ethics at UC Berkeley
Peter Montague, Environmental Research Foundation
Michael Moore, filmmaker and journalist
Willie Nelson, country musician
Gus Newport, former mayor of Berkeley, California
Ruth Ozeki, novelist, filmmaker, and author of My Year of Meats
Jan Pierce, former vice president of Communication Workers of America
Frances Fox Piven, City University of New York
Anthony Pollina, candidate for governor in Vermont
Nora Pouillon, chef
Bonnie Raitt, blues singer/guitarist
Sheldon Rampton, coauthor of Toxic Sludge Is Good for You
Marcus Raskin, author, political theorist, and cofounder of the Institute for Policy Studies
John Rensenbrink, Bowdoin College
Mark Ritchie, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy
Tim Robbins, actor
Vicki Robin, New Road Map Foundation
John Schaeffer, CEO of Real Goods Trading Company, Inc.
Pete Seeger, musician
Andy Sharpless, vice president of Interactive Media, Discovery Enterprises Worldwide
Michelle Shocked, musician
Cora Lee Simmons, Round Valley Indians for Justice
Gerry Spence, Spence, Moriarity & Schister
John Stauber, coauthor of Toxic Sludge Is Good for You
Andrew Strauss, Professor of International Law at the Widerner University School of Law
Charlotte Talberth, Max and Anna Levinson Foundation
Meredith Tax, feminist author and human-rights activist
Studs Terkel, radio personality and historian
Tom Tomorrow, cartoonist
Jerry Tucker, former regional director of International UAW
Sarah van Gelder, editor of YES! magazine
Eddie Vedder, musician, Pearl Jam
Harvey Wasserman, author of The Last Energy War
Cornel West, professor and author of Race Matters
Sheldon Wolin, Professor Emeritus at Princeton University
Howard Zinn, Professor Emeritus at Boston University and author of A Peoples History of the United States.
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Re: Crashing the Party, by Ralph Nader

Postby admin » Mon Aug 10, 2015 7:43 am

APPENDIX B: SOME ORGANIZATIONS RALPH NADER FOUNDED OR HELPED START

American Antitrust Institute
Appleseed Foundation
Arizona Center for Law in the Public Interest
Aviation Consumer Action Project
Capitol Hill News Service
Center for Auto Safety
Center for Insurance Research
Center for Justice and Democracy
Center for Science in the Public Interest
Center for Study of Responsive Law
Center for Women's Policy Studies
Citizen Advocacy Center
Citizen Utility Boards
Citizen Works
Clean Water Action Project
Congress Project
Connecticut Citizen Action Group
Corporate Accountability Research Group
Democracy Rising
Disability Rights Center
Equal Justice Foundation
Essential Information
FANS (Fight to Advance the Nation's Sports)
Foundation for Taxpayers and Consumer Rights
Freedom of Information Clearinghouse
Georgia Legal Watch
Multinational Monitor
National Citizens' Coalition for Nursing Home Reform
National Coalition for Universities in the Public Interest
National Insurance Consumer Organization
Ohio Public Interest Action Group
Organization for Competitive Markets
Pension Rights Center
Princeton Project 55
PROD (truck safety)

Public Citizen

• Buyers Up
• Citizen Action Group
• Congress Watch
• Critical Mass Energy Project
• Global Trade Watch
• Health Research Group
• Litigation Group
• Tax Reform Research Group
• The Visitor's Center

Retired Professionals Action Group
The Shafeek Nader Trust for the Community Interest
Student Public Interest Research Groups nationwide
Telecommunications Research and Action Center
Trial Lawyers for Public Justice
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Re: Crashing the Party, by Ralph Nader

Postby admin » Mon Aug 10, 2015 7:44 am

APPENDIX C: ANNOUNCEMENT SPEECH

Speech Announcing Ralph Nader's Candidacy for the Green Party's Nomination for President, Washington, D.C., February 21, 2000

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 brushstrokes, 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, multifaceted, 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 it 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 they are 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-size 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 benefiting 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 percent 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 1968.
• American workers are working longer and longer hours -- on average an additional 163 hours per year, compared to twenty 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 middleclass 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's 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 backseat to fossil fuel and atomic power subsidies.
• Wealth inequality is greater than at any time since World War II. The top 1 percent of the wealthiest people have more financial wealth than the bottom 90 percent 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 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 three hundred CEOs paid themselves forty times the entry-level wage in their companies. Now the average is over four hundred times. This in an economy where impoverished assembly line workers suffering from carpal tunnel syndrome frantically process chickens that 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, co-opting, 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 nonunion 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 finally 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 sixties and seventies 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 nontrade 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-alike 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 sixty 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 service, 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 that 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 nonworking 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 that 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 that 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 (on 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 Mazzochi (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 ever more entertainment-focused media. (Note: Mention of these people 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.
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Re: Crashing the Party, by Ralph Nader

Postby admin » Mon Aug 10, 2015 7:45 am

APPENDIX D: WOULDN'T PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH AND VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY HAVE DONE THE SAME?

What the Clinton-Gore administration did:

1. Promoted legislation for welfare reform that ended the federal safety net and put many children at risk.

2. Lobbied, with big business, NAFTA and GATT into law against labor, consumer, environmental, and human-rights groups.

3. Expanded corporate welfare programs.

4. Approved dozens of giant mergers in the chemical, oil, drug, defense, agribusiness, media, HMO, hospital, auto, banking, and other financial industries.

5. Encouraged larger military weapons exports by the private munitions companies using taxpayer subsidies and approved many costly, redundant weapons programs.

6. Supported a bloated military budget, post-Soviet Union, driven more by defense industry greed than national defense needs.

7. Failed to enforce laws against corporate crime, fraud, and abuse.

8. Gave away to corporations massive taxpayers assets in natural resources, scientific, health, space, and other R&D areas.

9. Bailed out, with taxpayer billions, reckless foreign governments and oligarchies through the IMF.

10. Opened up large areas of Northern Alaska for oil and gas drilling and supported the destruction by coal companies of mountaintops in Appalachia.

11. Gave the auto companies an eight-year holiday from higher fuel efficiency and auto safety standards.

12. Signed legislation eroding civil liberties and produced a record that commentators called "abysmal."

13. Under-enforced the civil rights laws while orating for them.

14. Backed large corporate prison expansions and failed to address discriminatory patterns of criminal justice enforcement.

15. Supported dictatorships and oligarchies that have suppressed their people.

16. Continued the deep sleep of the regulatory agencies at the expense of health, safety, and economic assets of consumers and workers.

17. Favored big agribusiness over the family farmer.

18. Subsidized and gave the biotechnology industry insulation from regulation.

19. Raised large amounts of money from almost every corporate interest and let big money continue to nullify honest elections.

20. Opposed ways and means to facilitate consumers, workers, taxpayers, and investors banding together for self-defense.
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Re: Crashing the Party, by Ralph Nader

Postby admin » Mon Aug 10, 2015 7:45 am

APPENDIX E: THE NADERHOOD 2000

Tom Adkins
Theresa Amato
Darci Andresen
Michael Avey
Mike Avitzur
Jonah Baker
Jessica Berger
Vanessa Bliss
Byron Bloch
Keight Bloeser
Jerry Bloomer
Adrienne Boer
Rita Bogolub
Al Brooks
Matteo Burani
Alan Bushnell
Vergil Bushnell
Peter Byer
Amy Carberg
Laquetta Carpenter
Megan Case
Michael Caudell-Feagan
Anthony Cimino
Mark Clarke
Steve Cleary
Christopher Cloud
Steve Cobble
David Cobb
Bryan Conley
Steve Conn
Stacy Cordeiro
Charlie Cray
Kevin Crisp
Jana Cutlip
Pete D'Allessandro
Ericka Dana
Carolyn Danckaert
Paul DeMain
Dave DeRosa
Alan Dicara
James Diokno
Masada Disenhouse
Jonathon Dushoff
Matt Duss
Brian Duss
Josh Edelman
Karen Elenich
Khalid Elhassan
Hugh Esco
George Farah
Jill Farmer
Jan Ferland
Katie Fisher
Shelly Fite
Scott Foster
Nathan Foster
Erin Frisby
Jeff Gates
Mamie Glickman
James Goettler
Andrew Goldman
Raj Goyle
Gwendolyn Griffin
Winston Grizzard
Joshua Gronsbell
Max Guzman
Martha Guzman
Jacob Harold
Roberta Harper-McIntosh
Nancy Harvey
Woody
Hastings
Laird Hastay
Howie Hawkins
Linda Henry
Andrew Hinkel
Alan Hirsch
Lydia Holden
Rob Holzapfel
Greg Jan
Dan Johnson-Weinberger
Laura Jones
Tonya Jordan
Jason Kafoury
Partick Keaney
Smita Khatri
Susan King
Lauren Klepac
Kevin Kniffin
Tyesha Kobel
Alan Kobrin
Regina LaBelle
Rebecca Leamon
Kenneth Leija
Matt Leonard
Jake Lewis
Mark Lewis
Rita Lombardo
Bob Lyon
Todd Main
Lowell MacGregor
Stacy Malkan
Ben Manski
Amy Marshak
Scott McLarty
Benjamin Meiklejohn
Andrew Mercer
Dean Meyerson
Tarek Milleron
Elizabeth Mims
Ross Mirkarimi
Jason Morgan
Greg Mullen
Martha Murray
Faramarz Nabavi
Peter Noerr
Isaac Opalinsky
Mike Palmedo
Natalie Paravincini
Jeanna Penn
Dennis Perrin
Jan Pierce
Andrea Plant
Bernard Pollack
Nick Raleigh
Annette Ramos
Jim Reed
Sandi Rizzo
Ken Rogers
Scott Royder
Bonnie Rubenstein
Belvey Russ
Ken Sain
Anthony Schinella
Joe Sexauer
Arlen Slobodow
Aaron Smith
Leslie Smith
Dan Sockrider
Bryan Spoon
Peter Stair
Alex Stewart
John Stith
Doug Stuber
Jennifer Thangevalu
Lori Theis
Martin Thomas
Dru Tidwell
Jeff Toste
Tom Unzicker
Andrew Van Iterson
Juscha Vannier
Philip Varner
Marcia Vottero
Richard Wachs
Jaclynn Cavis Wallette
Elizabeth Wasson
Kevin Webb
Mark Weber
David Weiss
Rich Weiss
Branden Willman
Monica Wilson
Gary Wolf
Nathan Wolf
Alex Zwerdling

I also thank the following people for their pro bono and professional services:

Pat Alia
Harvey Jester
Jean Highland
Carl Mayer
Wesley J. Smith
Greg Kafoury
Mark McDougal
Michael Trister of Lichtman, Trister, Singer & Ross
Scott P. Lewis of Palmer and Dodge
John Bonifaz, Gregory Luke, Bonnie Tenneriello, and Brenda Wright of the National Voting Rights Institute
Glenn Moramarco and Elizabeth Daniel of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law
Howard Friedman
Jason Adkins
Anthony Fletcher
Stacy Grossman
Mark Lemley
Lawrence Kolodney

And to the tens of thousands of volunteers, donors, supporters, and those we have inadvertently not listed -- you know who you are -- my deepest gratitude for all your efforts.
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Re: Crashing the Party, by Ralph Nader

Postby admin » Mon Aug 10, 2015 7:45 am

APPENDIX F: THE GREENS' TEN KEY VALUES

1. Grassroots Democracy

Every human being deserves a say in the decisions that affect their lives; no one should be subject to the will of another. Therefore, we will work to increase public participation at every level of government and to ensure that our public representatives are fully accountable to the people who elect them. We will also work to create new types of political organizations that expand the process of participatory democracy by directly including citizens in the decision-making process.

2. Ecological Wisdom

Human societies must operate with the understanding that we are part of nature, not separate from nature. We must maintain an ecological balance and live within the ecological and resource limits of our communities and our planet. We support a sustainable society that utilizes resources in such a way that future generations will benefit and not suffer from the practices of our generation. To this end we must have agricultural practices that replenish the soil; move to an energy-efficient economy; and live in ways that respect the integrity of natural systems.

3. Social Justice and Equal Opportunity

All persons should have the rights and opportunity to benefit equally from the resources afforded us by society and the environment. We must consciously confront in ourselves, our organizations, and society at large barriers such as racism and class oppression, sexism and heterosexism, ageism and disability, which act to deny fair treatment and equal justice under the law.

4. Nonviolence

It is essential that we develop effective alternatives to our current patterns of violence at all levels, from the family and the streets to nations and the world. We will work to demilitarize our society and eliminate weapons of mass destruction, without being naive about the intentions of other governments. We recognize the need for self-defense and the defense of others who are in helpless situations. We promote nonviolent methods to oppose practices and policies with which we disagree, and will guide our actions toward lasting personal, community, and global peace.

5. Decentralization

Centralization of wealth and power contributes to social and economic injustice, environmental destruction, and militarization. Therefore, we support a restructuring of social, political, and economic institutions away from a system that is controlled by and mostly benefits the powerful few, to a democratic, less bureaucratic system. Decision making should, as much as possible, remain at the individual and local level, while assuring that civil rights are protected for all citizens.

6. Community-Based Economics

We recognize that it is essential to create a vibrant and sustainable economic system, one that can create jobs and provide a decent standard of living, for all people, while maintaining a healthy ecological balance. A successful economic system will offer meaningful work with dignity, while paying a "living wage" that reflects the real value of a person's work. Local communities must look to economic development that assures protection of the environment and workers' rights, broad citizen participation in planning, and enhancement of our quality of life. We support independently owned and operated companies that are socially responsible, as well as cooperatives and public enterprises that spread out resources and control to more people through democratic participation.

7. Feminism

We have inherited a social system based on male domination of politics and economics. We call for the replacement of the cultural ethics of domination and control with more cooperative ways of interacting, which respect differences of opinion and gender. Human values such as equity between the sexes, interpersonal responsibility, and honesty must be developed with moral conscience. We should remember that the process that determines our decisions and actions is just as important as achieving the outcome we want.

8. Respect for Diversity

We believe it is important to value cultural, ethnic, racial, sexual, religious, and spiritual diversity, and to promote the development of respectful relationships across these lines. We believe the many diverse elements of society should be reflected in our organizations and decision-making bodies, and we support the leadership of people who have been traditionally closed out of leadership roles. We acknowledge and encourage respect for other life forms and the preservation of biodiversity.

9. Personal and Global Responsibility

We encourage individuals to act to improve their personal well-being and, at the same time, to enhance ecological balance and social harmony. We seek to join with' people and organizations around the world to foster peace, economic justice, and the health of the planet.

10. Future Focus and Sustainability

Our actions and policies should be motivated by long-term goals. We seek to protect valuable natural resources, safely disposing of or "unmaking" all waste we create, while developing a sustainable economics that does not depend on continual expansion for survival. We must counterbalance the drive for short-term profits by assuring that economic development, new technologies, and fiscal policies are responsible to future generations who will inherit the results of our actions. Our overall goal is not merely to survive, but to share lives that are truly worth living. We believe the quality of our individual lives is enriched by the quality of all of our lives. We encourage everyone to see the dignity and intrinsic worth in all of life, and to take the time to understand and appreciate themselves, their community, and the magnificent beauty of this world.
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Re: Crashing the Party, by Ralph Nader

Postby admin » Mon Aug 10, 2015 7:46 am

APPENDIX G: CALIFORNIA NURSES ASSOCIATION AD

A VOTE FOR OUR FUTURE

RALPH NADER FOR PRESIDENT

"Every major social justice movement in our nation's history was made possible by more power to the people and it is way past time for a shift of power from big business to the people" -- Ralph Nader.

We union activists and leaders, have carefully reviewed the candidates and issues in this election and have decided we will vote for Ralph Nader for President and Winona LaDuke for Vice President and urge others to do so as well.

We believe Ralph Nader has been barred from the Presidential debates because his participation would mean a break in politics as usual, would present voters with clear policy alternatives and would offer the possibility, for working people to register their disgust with the way in which money determines the choice of candidates.

The Nader candidacy presents the most comprehensive and reasoned critique of the continuing inequities in our society and offers a humane alternative direction for our country.

Nader is the only candidate in this campaign who is talking about how unrestrained corporate power affects our political institutions, economy, media, culture and democracy.

Nader is the only candidate offering a comprehensive program to improve the quality of life for all of our people. It includes eradicating poverty, narrowing the income gap, enhancing labor rights, establishing a universal healthcare system, ending the death penalty, halting the current misguided and repressive "drug war," ending discrimination in our criminal justice system, protecting our environment, and democratizing our elections.

Here's where Ralph Nader stands on just a few issues of critical importance to working people:

• A living wage for all workers, repeal of the anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act, triple back pay for workers fired illegally in organizing drives, expanded power for the National Labor Relations Board to stop unfair anti-union practices and a ban on permanent replacement of strikers.
• Opposition to the unfair trade treaties and institutions such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the World Trade Organization (WTO).
• Tougher penalties for corporations that pollute or make (or withhold information about defective products.
• Elimination of unneeded weapons systems, reduction of our nuclear arsenal and a cut in Pentagon spending.
• Ending corporate welfare, subsidies, and bailouts. Redirection of these funds for public education, healthcare, renewable energy, childcare, public transit, clinics, libraries, drinking water systems, and public work.
• A publicly funded, administered, and accountable universal healthcare system with comprehensive preventive, diagnostic, and therapeutic services without co-payments or deductibles, including full prescription drug coverage for everyone.
• Genuine enforcement of affirmative action, opposition to police violence, equal rights for Lesbians and Gays, including civil unions and ending the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy.
• A Constitutional guarantee of equal rights for women and full abortion rights.

A strong showing by Ralph Nader will have a positive effect long past November. We have a chance to break with the past and raise the standard of political debate and decision- making in our country. A vote for Ralph Nader is not a vote for anyone else. It's a vote for the best candidate in the race. It's a vote against big-money politics as usual, It's a vote for our future,

To join Labor for Nader call 510 273-2240

Paid for by CNA Federal Pac. FEC number# C00360438
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Re: Crashing the Party, by Ralph Nader

Postby admin » Mon Aug 10, 2015 7:46 am

APPENDIX H: FDR LETTER TO THE DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION

Here is the text of the letter that FDR drafted to read to the Democratic Convention in 1940 when he thought they would deny him Henry Wallace as a running mate.

July 18, 1940
Members of the Convention:

In the century in which we live, the Democratic Party has received the support of the electorate only when the party, with absolute clarity, has been the champion of progressive and liberal policies and principles of government.

The party has failed consistently when through political trading and chicanery it has fallen into the control of those interests, personal and financial, which think in terms of dollars instead of in terms of human values.

The Republican Party has made its nominations this year at the dictation of those who, we all know, always place money ahead of human progress.

The Democratic Convention, as appears clear from the events of today, is divided on this fundamental issue. Until the Democratic Party through this convention makes overwhelmingly clear its stand in favor of social progress and liberalism, and shakes off all the shackles of control fastened upon it by the forces of conservatism, reaction, and appeasement, it will not continue its march of victory.

It is without question that certain political influences pledged to reaction in domestic affairs and to appeasement in foreign affairs have been busily engaged behind the scenes in the promotion of discord since this Convention convened.

Under these circumstances, I cannot, in all honor, and will not, merely for political expediency, go along with the cheap bargaining and political maneuvering which have brought about party dissension in this convention.

It is best not to straddle ideals.

In these days of danger when democracy must be more than vigilant, there can be no connivance with the kind of politics which has internally weakened nations abroad before the enemy has struck from without.

It is best for America to have the fight out here and now.

I wish to give the Democratic Party the opportunity to make its historic decision clearly and without equivocation. The party must go wholly one way or wholly the other. It cannot face in both directions at the same time.

By declining the honor of the nomination for the presidency, I can restore that opportunity to the convention. I so do.

***

Political Broadcast Paid for by Americans for Democratic Action
1948

Let's get one thing perfectly clear. You're not wasting your vote if you vote for Wallace, you're not just throwing it away. Far from it -- a vote for Wallace is a vote for Dewey. A vote for Wallace is a vote for Dewey. Almost every vote for Wallace reduces the number of votes Truman will get and every vote taken from Truman is given to Dewey....
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