Ralph for President

*declaration speech*

Today I wish to explain why, after working for years as a citizen

advocate for consumers, workers, taxpayers and the environment, I am seeking

the Green Party's nomination for President. A crisis of democracy in our

country convinces me to take this action. Over the past twenty years, big

business has increasingly dominated our political economy. This control by

the corporate government over our political government is creating a widening

"democracy gap." Active citizens are left shouting their concerns over a deep

chasm between them and their government. This state of affairs is a world

away from the legislative milestones in civil rights, the environment, and

health and safety of workers and consumers seen in the sixties and seventies.

At that time, informed and dedicated citizens powered their concerns through

the channels of government to produce laws that bettered the lives of

millions of Americans.

Today we face grave and growing societal problems in health care,

education, labor, energy and the environment. These are problems for which

active citizens have solutions, yet their voices are not carrying across the

democracy gap. Citizen groups and individual thinkers have generated a

tremendous capital of ideas, information, and solutions to the point of

surplus, while our government has been drawn away from us by a corporate

government. Our political leadership has been hijacked.

Citizen advocates have no other choice but to close the democracy gap by

direct political means. Only effective national political leadership will

restore the responsiveness of government to its citizenry. Truly progressive

political movements do not just produce more good results; they enable a

flowering of progressive citizen movements to effectively advance the quality

of our neighborhoods and communities outside of politics.

I have a personal distaste for the trappings of modern politics, in which

incumbents and candidates daily extol their own inflated virtues, paint

complex issues with trivial brush strokes, and propose plans quickly

generated by campaign consultants. But I can no longer stomach the systemic

political decay that has weakened our democracy. I can no longer watch people

dedicate themselves to improving their country while their government leaders

turn their backs, or worse, actively block fair treatment for citizens. It is

necessary to launch a sustained effort to wrest control of our democracy from

the corporate government and restore it to the political government under the

control of citizens.

This campaign will challenge all Americans who are concerned with

systemic imbalances of power and the undermining of our democracy, whether

they consider themselves progressives, liberals, conservatives, or others.

Presidential elections should be a time for deep discussions among the

citizenry regarding the down-to-earth problems and injustices that are not

addressed because of the gross power mismatch between the narrow vested

interests and the public or common good.

The unconstrained behavior of big business is subordinating our democracy

to the control of a corporate plutocracy that knows few self-imposed limits

to the spread of its power to all sectors of our society. Moving on all

fronts to advance narrow profit motives at the expense of civic values, large

corporate lobbies and their law firms have produced a commanding,

multi-faceted and powerful juggernaut. They flood public elections with cash,

and they use their media factories here and open them abroad if workers do

not bend to their demands. By their control in Congress, they keep the

federal cops off the corporate crime, fraud, and abuse beats. They

imperiously demand and get a wide array of privileges and immunities: tax

escapes, enormous corporate welfare subsidies, federal giveaways, and

bailouts. They weaken the common law of torts in order to avoid their

responsibility for injurious wrongdoing to innocent children, women and men.

Abuses of economic power are nothing new. Every major religion in the

world has warned about societies allowing excessive influences of mercantile

or commercial values. The profiteering motive is driven and single-minded.

When unconstrained, it can override or erode community, health, safety,

parental nurturing, due process, clean politics, and many other basic social

values that hold together a society. Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt,

Franklin Roosevelt, Supreme Court Justices Louis Brandeis and William

Douglas, among others, eloquently warned about what Thomas Jefferson called

"the excesses of the monied interests" dominating people and their

governments. The struggle between the forces of democracy and plutocracy has

ebbed and flowed throughout our history. Each time the cycle of power has

favored more democracy, our country has prospered ("a rising tide lifts all

boats"). Each time the cycle of corporate plutocracy has lengthened,

injustices and shortcomings proliferate.

In the sixties and seventies, for example, when the civil rights,

consumer, environmental and women's rights movements were in their

ascendancy, there finally was a constructive responsiveness by government.

Corporations, such as auto manufacturers, had to share more decision making

with affected constituencies, both directly and through their public

representatives and civil servants. Overall, our country has come out better,

more tolerant, safer and with greater opportunities. The earlier nineteenth

century democratic struggles by abolitionists against slavery, by farmers

against large oppressive railroads and banks, and later by new trade

unionists against the brutal workplace conditions of the early industrial and

mining era helped mightily to make America and its middle class what it is

today. They demanded that economic power subside or be shared.

Democracy works, and a stronger democracy works better for reputable,

competitive markets, equal opportunity and higher standards of living and

justice. Generally, it brings out the best performances from people and from

businesses.

A plutocracy-rule by the rich and powerful---on the other hand, obscures

our historical quests for justice. Harnessing political power to corporate

greed leaves us with a country that has far more problems than it deserves,

while blocking ready solutions or improvements from being applied. It is

truly remarkable that for almost every widespread need or injustice in our

country, there are citizens, civic groups, small and medium-sized businesses

and farms that have shown how to 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 they could scarcely

be better. If, instead of corporate yardsticks, we use human yardsticks to

measure the performance of the economy and go beyond the quantitative indices

of annual economic growth, structural deficiencies become readily evident.

The complete dominion of traditional yardsticks for measuring economic

prosperity masks not only these failures but also the inability of a weakened

democracy to address how and why a majority of Americans are not benefitting

from this prosperity in their daily lives. Despite record economic growth,

corporate profits, and stock market highs year after year, a stunning array

of deplorable conditions still prevails year after year. For example:

* A majority of workers are making less now, inflation adjusted, than

in 1979

* Over 20% of children were growing up in poverty during the past

decade, by far the highest among comparable western countries

* The minimum wage is lower today, inflation-adjusted, than in 1979

* American workers are working longer and longer hours-on average an

additional 163 hours per year, compared to 20 years ago--with less time for

family and community

* Many full-time family farms cannot make a living in a market of

giant buyer concentration and industrial agriculture

* The public works (infrastructure) are crumbling, with decrepit

schools and clinics, library closings, antiquated mass transit and more

* Corporate welfare programs, paid for largely by middle-class

taxpayers and amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars per year, continue

to rise along with government giveaways of taxpayer assets such as public

forests, minerals and new medicines

* Affordable housing needs are at record levels while secondary

mortgage market companies show record profits

* The number of Americans without health insurance grows every year

* There have been twenty-five straight years of growing foreign trade

deficits ($270 billion in 1999)

* Consumer debt is at an all time high, totaling over $6 trillion

* Personal bankruptcies are at a record level

* Personal savings are dropping to record lows and personal assets

are so low that Bill Gates' net worth is equal to that of the net assets of

the poorest 120 million Americans combined

* The tiny federal budgets for the public's health and safety

continue to be grossly inadequate

* Motor vehicle fuel efficiency averages are actually declining and,

overall, energy conservation efforts have slowed, while renewable energy

takes a back seat to fossil fuel and atomic power subsidies

* Wealth inequality is greater than at any time since WW2. The top

one percent of the wealthiest people have more financial wealth than the

bottom 90% of Americans combined, the worst inequality among large western

nation

* Despite annual declines in total business liability costs, business

lobbyists drive for more privileges and immunities for their wrongdoing.

It is permissible to ask, in the light of these astonishing shortcomings

during a period of touted prosperity, what the state of our country would be

should a recession or depression occur? One import of these contrasts is

clear: economic growth has been decoupled from economic progress for many

Americans. In the early 1970s, our economy split into two tiers. Whereas once

economic growth broadly benefited the majority, now the economy has become

one wherein "a rising tide lifts all yachts," in the words of Jeff Gates,

author of The Ownership Solution. Returns on capital outpaced returns on

labor, and job insecurity increased for millions of seasoned workers. In the

seventies, the top 300 CEOs paid themselves 40 times the entry-level wage in

their companies. Now the average is over 400 times. This in an economy where

impoverished assembly line workers suffering from carpal tunnel syndrome

frantically process chickens which pass them in a continuous flow, where

downsized white and blue collar employees are hired at lesser compensation,

if they are lucky, where the focus of top business executives is no longer to

provide a service that attracts customers, but rather to acquire customers

through mergers and acquisitions. How long can the paper economy of

speculation ignore its effect on the real economy of working families?

Pluralistic democracy has enlarged markets and created the middle class.

Yet the short-term monetized minds of the corporatists are bent on weakening,

defeating, diluting, diminishing, circumventing, coopting, or corrupting all

traditional countervailing forces that have saved American corporate

capitalism from itself.

Regulation of food, automobiles, banks and securities, for example,

strengthened these markets along with protecting consumers and investors.

Antitrust enforcement helped protect our country from monopoly capitalism and

stimulated competition. Trade unions enfranchised 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--provide 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 this progress strenuously, but they lost and

America gained. ultimately, so did a chastened but myopic business community.

Now, these checkpoints face a relentless barrage from rampaging corporate

titans assuming more control over elected officials, the workplace, the

marketplace, technology, capital pools (including workers' pension trusts)

and educational institutions. One clear sign of the reign of corporations

over our government is that the key laws passed in the 60s and 70s that we

use to curb corporate misbehavior would not even pass through Congressional

committees today. Planning ahead, multinational corporations shaped the World

Trade Organization's autocratic and secretive governing procedures so as to

undermine non-trade health, safety, and other living standard laws and

proposals in member countries.

Up against the corporate government, voters find themselves asked to

choose between look-a-like candidates from two parties vying to see who takes

the marching orders from their campaign paymasters and their future

employers. The money of vested interests nullifies genuine voter choice and

trust. Our elections have been put out for auction to the highest bidder.

Public elections must be publicly financed and it can be done with

well-promoted voluntary checkoffs and free TV and Radio time for

ballot-qualified candidates.

Workers are disenfranchised more than any time since the 1920s. Many

unions stagger under stagnant leadership and discouraged rank and file.

Furthermore, weak labor laws actually obstruct new trade union organization

and leave the economy with the lowest percentage of workers unionized in more

than 60 years. Giant multinationals are pitting countries against one another

and escaping national jurisdictions more and more. Under these circumstances,

workers are entitled to stronger labor organizing laws and rights for their

own protection in order to deal with highly organized corporations.

At a very low cost, government can help democratic solution building for

a host of problems that citizens face, from consumer abuses, to environmental

degradation. Government research and development generated whole new

industries and company startups and created the Internet. At the least, our

government can facilitate the voluntary banding together of interested

citizens into democratic civic institutions. Such civic organizations can

create more level playing fields in the banking, insurance, real estate,

transportation, energy, health care, cable TV, educational, public services,

and other sectors. Let's call this the flowering of a deep-rooted democratic

society. A government that funnels your tax dollars to corporate welfare

kings in the form of subsidies, bailouts, guarantees, and giveaways of

valuable public assets can at least invest in promoting healthy democracy.

Taxpayers have very little legal standing in the federal courts and

little indirect voice in the assembling and disposition of taxpayer revenues.

Closer scrutiny of these matters between elections is necessary. Facilities

can be established to accomplish a closer oversight of taxpayer assets and

how tax dollars (apart from social insurance) are allocated. This is an arena

which is, at present, shaped heavily by corporations that, despite record

profits, pay far less in taxes as a percent of the federal budget than in the

1950s and 60s.

The "democracy gap" in our politics and elections spells a deep sense of

powerlessness by people who drop out, do not vote or listlessly vote for the

"least-worst" every four years and then wonder why after another cycle the

"least-worst" gets worse. It is time to redress fundamentally these

imbalances of power. WE need a deep initiatory democracy in the embrace of

its citizens, a usable brace of democratic tools that brings the best out of

people, highlights the humane ideas and practical ways to raise and meet our

expectations and resolve our society's deficiencies and injustices.

A few illustrative questions can begin to raise our expectations and

suggest what can be lost when the few and powerful hijack our democracy:

* Why can't the wealthiest nation in the world abolish the chronic

poverty of millions of working and non-working Americans, including our

children?

* Are we reversing the divestment 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 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 able to keep our democracy, there must be one commandment: Thou shall

not ration out 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 images? 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 o four campaign, to focus on active citizenship,

to create fresh political movements that will displace the control of the

Democratic and republican Parties, two apparently distinct political entities

that feed at the same corporate trough. They are in fact simply the two heads

of one political duopoly, the DemRep Party. This duopoly does everything it

can to obstruct the beginnings of new parties including raising ballot access

barriers, entrenching winner-take-all voting systems, and thwarting

participation in debates at election times.

As befits its name, the Green Party, whose nomination I seek, stands for

the regeneration of American politics. The new populism which the Green Party

represents, involves motivated, informed voters who comprehend that "freedom

is participation in power," to quote the ancient Roman orator, Cicero. When

citizen participation flourishes, as this campaign will encourage it to do,

human values can tame runaway commercial imperatives. The myopia of the

short-term bottom line so often debases our democratic processes and our

public and private domains. Putting human values first helps to make business

responsible and to put government on the right track.

It is easy and true to say that this deep democracy campaign will be an

uphill one. However, it is also true that widespread reform will not flourish

without a fairer distribution of power for the key roles of voter, citizen,

worker, taxpayer and consumer. Comprehensive reform proposals from the

corporate suites to the nation's streets, from the schools to the hospitals,

from the preservation of small farm economies to the protection of privacies,

from livable wages to sustainable environments, from more time for children

to less time for commercialism, from waging peace and health to averting war

and violence, from foreseeing and forestalling future troubles to journeying

toward brighter horizons, will wither while power inequalities loom over us.

Why are campaigns just for candidates? I would like the American people

to hear from individuals such as Edgar Cahn (Time Dollars for neighborhoods),

Nicholas Johnson (television and telecommunications), Paul Hawken, Amory and

Hunter Lovins (energy and resource conservation), Dee Hock (on chaordic

organizations), James MacGregor Burns and John Gardner (on leadership),

Richard Grossman (on the American history of corporate charters and

personhood), Jeff Gates (on capital sharing), Robert Monks (on corporate

accountability), Ray Anderson (on his company's pollution and recycling

conversions), Johnnetta Cole, Troy Duster and Yolanda Moses (on race

relations), Richard Duran (minority education), Lois Gibbs (on community

mobilization against toxics), Robert McIntyre (on tax justice), Hazel

Henderson (on redefining economic development), Barry Commoner and David

Brower (on fundamental environmental regeneration), Wendell Berry (on the

quality of living), Tony Mazzocchi (on a new agenda for labor), and Law

Professor Richard Parker (on a constitutional popular manifesto). These

individuals are a small sampling of many who have so much to say, but seldom

get through the evermore entertainment-focused media. (Note: mention of these

persons does not imply their support for this campaign.)

Our political campaign will highlight active and productive citizens who

practice democracy often in the most difficult of situations. I intend to do

this in the District of Columbia whose citizens have no full-voting

representation in Congress or other rights accorded to states. The scope of

this campaign is also to engage as many volunteers as possible to help

overcome ballot barriers and to get the vote out. In addition, it is designed

to leave a momentum after election day for the various causes that committed

people have worked so hard to further. For the Greens know that political

parties also need to work between elections to make elections meaningful. The

focus on the 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."

You can send campaign donations to:

Nader 2000 Primary Committee

P.O. Box 18002

Washington, DC 20036