Re: RAT Fwd: ZNet Update / Arrestees in Philly, Action Urgently Needed

[Gleaball@aol.com]

In a message dated 08/12/2000 1:12:09 PM Pacific Daylight Time, 
ohbelladonna@hotmail.com writes:

<<  I  haven't made up my mind about who to vote for yet.  I want to know 
what 
 people think. >>

ohbelladonna et al -

I'm sorry to clog the screen, so delete if you need to, but here's some Nader 
made easy...
This is his acceptance speech for Green Party candidate -
Read it, if you haven't already done so...

On behalf of all Americans who seek a new direction, who yearn for a new 
birth of freedom to build the just society, who see justice as the great work 
of human beings on Earth, who understand that community and human fulfillment 
are mutually reinforcing, who respect the urgent necessity to wage peace, to 
protect the environment, to end poverty and to preserve values of the spirit 
for future generations, who wish to build a deep democracy by working hard 
for a regenerative progressive politics, as if people mattered - to all these 
citizens and the Green vanguard, I welcome and am honored to accept the Green 
Party nomination for President of the United States.
The Green Party stands for a nation and a world that consciously advances the 
practice of deep democracy. A deep democracy facilitates people's best 
efforts to achieve social justice, a sustainable and bountiful environment 
and an end to systemic bigotry and discrimination against law-abiding people 
merely because they are different. Green goals place community and self- 
reliance over dependency on ever larger absentee corporations and their 
media, their technology, their capital, and their politicians. Green goals 
aim at preserving the commonwealth of assets that the people of the United 
States already own so that the people, not big business, control what they 
own, and using these vast resources of the public lands, the public airwaves 
and trillions of worker pension dollars to achieve healthier environments, 
healthier communities and healthier people.
These goals are also conservative goals. Don't conservatives, in contrast to 
corporatists, want movement toward a safe environment, toward ending 
corporate welfare and the commercialization of childhood? Don't they too want 
a voice in shaping a clean environment rooted in the interests of the people? 
Don't they too want a fair and responsive marketplace, for their health needs 
and savings? Let us not in this campaign prejudge any voters, for Green 
values are majoritarian values, respecting all peoples and striving to give 
greater voice to all voters, workers, individual taxpayers and consumers. As 
with the right of free speech, we may not agree with others, but we will 
defend their right to free speech as strongly as we do for ourselves.
Earlier this year, I decided to seek your nomination because obstacles 
blocking solutions to our society's injustices and problems had to be 
overcome. Feelings of powerlessness and the withdrawal of massive numbers of 
Americans from both civic and political arenas are deeply troubling. This 
situation had to be addressed by fresh political movement arising from the 
citizenry's labors and resources and dreams about what America could become 
at long last. The worsening concentration of global corporate power over our 
government has turned that government frequently against its own people, 
denying its people their sovereignty to shape their future. Again and again, 
the will of the people has been thwarted and the voice of the people to 
protest has been muted.
In the past, citizens who led and participated in this country's social 
justice movements faced steep concentrations of power and overcame them. A 
brief look at American history is instructive today. Common themes occur from 
the Revolution of 1776 against King George III's empire to the anti-slavery 
drives and women's suffrage movements of the 19th century, to the farmers' 
revolt against the large banks and railroads that began in 1887, and on to 
the trade union, civil rights, environmental and consumer protection 
initiatives of the 20th century, culminating in the demands for equity by 
Americans who are discriminated against due to their race, gender, tribal 
status, class, disability or sexual preference.
All these movements took on excessive power, pressed for relinquishment or 
sharing of that power despite vigorous opposition by elements of the dominant 
business community. Many years were lost to the resolutions of these 
injustices before justice began to prevail and corporate power receded. 
However, when citizens won, and Tory merchants, cotton slave holders and 
corporations were compelled to share that power with the people they 
oppressed or excluded, America was a better place for it. America became more 
beautiful. Moreover, the companies behaved better and prospered more.
Over the past twenty years we have seen the unfortunate resurgence of big 
business influence, generating its unique brand of wreckage, propaganda and 
ultimatums on American labor, consumers, taxpayers and most generically, 
American voters. Big business has been colliding with American democracy and 
democracy has been losing. The results of this democracy gap are everywhere 
to be observed by those who suffer these results and by those who employ 
people's yardsticks to measure the quality of the economy, not corporate 
yardsticks and their frameworks. What we must collectively understand about 
the prevalent inequalities is important because so many of these conditions 
have been normalized in our country.
Over the next four and one half months, this campaign must challenge the 
campaigns of the Bush and Gore duopoly in every locality by running with the 
people. When Americans go to work, wondering who will take care of their 
elderly parents or their children, irritated by the endless traffic jams, 
stifled by their lack of rights in the corporate workplace, ripped off by 
unscrupulous sellers and large companies, put on telephone hold for the 
longest times before you get an answer to a simple question-so much for this 
modern telecommunications age, beset by having to pay for health care you 
cannot afford or drug prices you shouldn't have to suffer, aghast at how 
little time your frenzied life leaves you for children, family, friends and 
community, overcome by the sheer ugliness of commercial strips and sprawls 
and incessantly saturating advertisements, repelled by the voyeurism of the 
mass media and the commercialization of childhood, upset at the rejection of 
the wisdoms of our elders and forebears, anxious over the ways your tax 
dollars are being misused, feeling that there needs to be more to life than 
the desperate rat race to make ends meet, then think about becoming a part of 
a progressive movement of Greens, of this citizens' campaign, to change the 
political economy so that healthy environments, healthy communities, and 
healthy people become its overwhelming reason for being.
Look at Europe. During the Fifties and Sixties, several European countries 
provided all their citizens with health care coverage, day care and other 
services for children, labor laws which facilitate the organization of trade 
unions, a statutory "social wage" for all workers, union and non-union, 
providing one month paid vacations, retention of pay while caring for sick 
family members, pensions and other services. In the year 2000 A.D., most 
workers in our country do not have these basic rights. In fact, according to 
the World Health Organization, the United States was ranked 37th among 
nations in the world regarding the quality of health care a country provides 
its people. This is not only embarrassing but also unacceptable. Western 
European countries provided for their people thirty to fifty years ago. Why 
can't we do it now in a period of economic boom? It's possible. We can make a 
difference. Together we can chart a new course. 
However, what we must first do, as I mentioned already, is to collectively 
understand the inequalities afflicting so many of our citizens to translate 
this understanding into a demand for solutions. What is so normalized now 
must now be defined as intolerable and unworthy of this great country of ours.
A collective understanding must distinguish peoples' yardsticks to measure 
the quality of the economy from corporate yardsticks. Consider business money 
in politics which overpowers labor money by eleven to one. Corruption reaches 
new peaks every two years and further nullifies what the voting franchise is 
supposed to mean. What about the bragging about the economy's nearly ten 
straight years of spectacular performance? Try applying people's yardsticks 
instead of the measures of record GDP, corporate profits and stock exchange 
prices. A very different picture emerges. Because the benefits of this boom 
have accrued to the wealthier and especially wealthiest classes, the majority 
of Americans are left behind. There is over 20 percent child poverty, 25 
percent for pre-school children. This is by far the highest percentage among 
comparable countries in the western world. There are about 47 millions 
workers, over one-third of the workforce, making less than $10 per hour, many 
at $5.25, $6.00, $7.00, with no or few benefits. The majority of workers 
still, after ten years of overall economic growth, make less today, in 
inflation adjusted dollars, and work 160 hours longer per year than workers 
did in 1973!
Moreover, today's workers have to spend more to get to work and commute 
longer distances. They pay more for what were family functions that were once 
free or inexpensive. A record number of people are without health insurance. 
$6.2 trillion in consumer indebtedness to supplement living wages, and 
inadequate crumbling public works that serve the mass populace, from schools, 
health clinics, mass transits, drinking water systems and other services. The 
lower unemployment rate is masked by low wages and millions of part-time 
laborers who are registered as employed if they work 21 hours a week and 
cannot get a full-time job.
The need for more than one job to pay one's bills, the fear and reality of 
medical expenses for the uninsured , the growing distance between home and 
job, home and shopping, the lack of affordable day care all combine to form a 
daily, exhausting frenzy with less time for children and community. Who 
designed this economy anyway? Was it topsy or was it economic forces beyond 
the control of regular people? An economy that grows with more ways to leave 
people behind raises the question of what will happen when a recession or 
worse occurs?
Then, there is the people's yardstick for individuals who pay most of the 
taxes to their 
governments. Given proliferating corporate tax shelters, trillions of dollars 
in corporate and individual tax havens overseas, corporate income tax 
contributions to the federal treasury are well under ten percent, 
notwithstanding awesomely record profits. Between 1981-83, a worker in a 
General Electric plant or office paid Uncle Sam more in actual total dollars 
than did giant GE which paid no federal income taxes on over $6 billion in 
profits and received a refund to boot.
In 1941, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis made a prescient observation 
when he wrote: "We can have a democratic society or we can have the 
concentration of great wealth in the hands of the few. We cannot have both." 
Today, that concentration of wealth and its political power has reached 
stunning intensities. In large companies, people who work in the same 
enterprise are now earning $1 for every $416 that the CEO takes away. In 
1940, it was $1 for every $12. Today the financial wealth of the top 1 
percent of households exceeds the combined wealth of the bottom 95 percent of 
American households. Earlier this year Bill Gates' wealth was equal to the 
combined wealth of the poorest 120 million Americans. Whatever this enormous 
imbalance says about the Great software imitator from Redmond, Washington, it 
means that about tens of millions of Americans, who work year after year, 
decade after decade, are nearly broke. What democracy worth its salt would 
have led to this profound inequity? Globally, the combined annual income of 
the world's poorest 3.5 billion people equals the world's two hundred richest 
people who more than doubled their net worth between 1996 and 1999.
The net would be much smaller were other forms of corporate welfare such as 
subsidies, erased corporate debts to Uncle Sam, giveaways and bailouts to be 
subtracted. Of course, small businesses don't have such complex shelters to 
avoid taxes. When small businesses get into trouble, they are free to go 
bankrupt, unlike speculating, mismanaged or corrupt big businesses that can 
go to Washington for a complex bailout.
What about measures of environmental devastation? These don't appear on the 
balance sheets of Exxon, DuPont, General Motors, or Peabody Coal. Degrading 
the air, water and soil that we use does not register with any reports of 
such companies. Global warming, ozone depletion, oceanic deterioration and 
forest clear-cutting do not have company logos on them. GE still has not been 
held responsible for the PCB poisoning of the Hudson River and got away with 
a trivial charge for what it did to my home area's Housatonic River.
A low level flight across the USA would reveal the enormous wounds and scars, 
toxic hotspots, runoffs and dumps exacted by the timber, mining, paper, 
chemical and metals industries, taking out the livability of entire 
communities and their legions of worker-victims. More coal miners have lost 
their lives from black lung disease and mine collapses in the past 110 years 
than all the American lives lost in WWII. And that is just one industry's 
casualty toll. The epidemic of silent environmental violence continues. 
Whether it is the 65,000 Americans who die every year from air pollution, or 
the 80,000 estimated annual fatalities from hospital malpractice, or the 
100,000 Americans whose demise comes from occupational toxic exposures or the 
environmental racism where the poor and their often asthmatic children live 
in pollution sinks, to cite a few preventable conditions. The mortality and 
morbidity toll is far in excess of the appalling street- level homicide 
numbers that amount to about 20,000 annually. The corporate youth addictors, 
tobacco and alcohol, the deliberate over-medicators, bear some responsibility 
for yet more fatalities and sicknesses.
The economic indicators preferred by Chairman Alan Greenspan and most 
politicians from the two parties exclude much more that matters to people: 
consumers who are defrauded, injured and killed by hazardous or mis-sold 
products and services such as drugs, medical devices, vehicles, pesticides, 
flammables, medical malpractices, insurance and bank reports, credit, low 
income repair and loan scams. These tragedies are ignored, although they do 
sometimes come before the courts and are covered in excellent major media 
investigative features. Then, to the chagrin of the dutiful reporters, too 
often nothing happens.
The percentage of union members in the private economy has just dropped below 
10 percent, the lowest in 60 years and the lowest percentage in the western 
world. This indicator of people's plight explains much more about why many 
workers do not earn enough to support their families, why they have to bear 
more of the health insurance premiums, if they receive any from their 
employer, and why they go without or endure shrinking retirement benefits.
What we must achieve is a stronger democracy to turn all these deplorable 
conditions around. Because we know from our own inner strength and knowledge 
as a nation and from the experiences of our courageous forebears who 
surmounted their injustices, we can and we must. Just as with past 
resistance, the dominant business lobbies are saying no to advanced consumer 
protection, no to environmental law enforcement, no to an end to corporate 
welfare on the backs of taxpayers, no to worker's rights to decent living 
standards and safer workplaces. Simply read the mainstream press, along with 
stalwart smaller publications such as the Nation, Washington Monthly, 
Harpers, Atlantic Monthly, The Progressive magazine and the Progressive 
Populist, to name a few, and you will have your evidence, your 
heart-wrenching reports, your manifest injustices.
All this signifies the gradual closing down of civil society symbolizing an 
underdeveloped democracy and an overdeveloped plutocracy or corporate state, 
in short, business acquisition of government to serve its insatiable 
short-term interest.
This country has more problems than it deserves and more solutions than it 
uses. Because our democracy is underdeveloped, there is little 
accountability. The corporate commercialization of our country, our 
government, our universities, our schools, our youngsters, our very 
expectation levels continues unabated. Health, safety, justice, education, 
respect for the environment and future generations are subordinated to 
boundless greed and commercialism. Much of our foreign policy is driven by 
unsatiable corporate pressures to sell military hardware to both the Defense 
Department and directly to foreign dictators. This happens even if it goes 
against the interests of our country, taxpayers and the principle of 
prudently allocated public budgets. Weapons manufactures foist weapons 
systems onto the Pentagon, working through a PAC-greased, supine Congress. 
Lower level Pentagon analysts are left to fume in private, powerless to stop 
the waste and distortions of our policies.
There is more to collectively understand. Corporatization is fast going 
global with autocratic support structures such as the World Trade 
Organization (WTO). The WTO undermines our legitimate local state and 
national sovereignties which enable America to lead the way in worker, 
consumer, environmental standards. Global corporations command the capital, 
technology, labor and many governments. How have they used this unprecedented 
supremacy to alleviate the world's problems? The big drug companies avoid 
research into global infectious diseases, such as malaria and TB, that claim 
millions of lives a year and are heading to our shores in drug resistant 
form. Despite adverse publicity over their duplicitous behavior, the tobacco 
companies are straining to hook every possible youngster in the Third World 
with portents of massive cancer and other tobacco-related deaths yearly. The 
munitions makers are busy expanding their lethal export trade, using your tax 
dollars in the form of subsidies.
The food processing giants and the fast food chains are busy displacing 
indigenous foods with fat and sugar pumps a la McDonalds fast food. At the 
same time, the biotechnology companies drive to change the nature of nature 
without answering basic scientific or need questions. The banking giants and 
their IMF and World Bank cohorts are continuing their structural adjustment 
polices in Third World countries that cut public budgets, end critical 
consumer subsidies and replace real food acreage with cash crops for exports, 
while imposing environmentally damaging megaprojects that enrich the local 
oligarchy. The timber companies, working directly or through local firms are 
rapidly destroying the rich biological diversity of the equatorial forests. 
The large energy companies want these countries to buy more nuclear and 
coal-burning plants, develop the same fossil fuel-nuclear alliances that 
undermine local renewable solar technologies and energy efficiencies. By 
cutting such deals and supporting dictatorial regimes and the domestic 
oligarchies, democratic developments that would help the people, for example, 
land reform, agrarian credit, cooperatives, trade union rights, and political 
reforms are stymied and destroyed.
These conditions come back to plague us one way or another, as in the 
billions of wasted taxpayer dollars Congress has appropriated for the 
International Monetary Fund. When we overspend on munitions, the arms 
companies make money. Should we wage peace through preventative diplomacy and 
defense, they would make very little. One would think with the demise of the 
Soviet Union ten years ago, we would have had that Peace Dividend allocated 
to improve peoples lives.
Fifty years after World War II, tens of thousands of our troops are still in 
Europe and East Asia, defending prosperous nation allies who are fully 
capable of defending themselves against non-existent enemies. Yet, useless 
massive weapons systems remain on the drawing boards to further mortgage our 
fiscal future and drain money and talent from long overdue civilian projects.
At home our criminal justice system, being increasingly driven by the 
corporate prison industry that wants ever more customers, grossly 
discriminates against minorities and is greatly distorted by the extremely 
expensive and failed war on drugs. These prisons often become finishing 
schools for criminal recidivists. At the same time, the criminal justice 
system excludes criminally behaving corporations and their well defended 
executives.
A most insidious influence of corporations is their way of making us feel 
powerless, as did the auto industry for so many years. They did this by 
withholding information on better ways to build cars that they know how to 
design. We grow up corporate, thinking that this is the way things are and 
that will always be and reducing our expectation levels in the process. It 
was Ford Company Vice President William Gossett who wrote in 1959 candidly, 
that the modern corporation is the dominant institution in our society.

to be continued...