Re: Crashing the Party, by Ralph Nader
Posted: 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:
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.
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.
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.
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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.