RAT Re: Nader cont.- deleter's beware...

[Gleaball@aol.com]

I grew up corporate at a time of the ascendancy of the motor vehicle highway 
expansion and the deliberate tearing up of the electrified trolley system (by 
GM and company) and blocking new systems of public transit. Research 
information about unsafe cars, sponsored by the Department of Defense, 
because soldiers were dying in highway crashes here at home in large numbers, 
liberated my civic perspectives. Good things happened. As a nation, in 1960 
we started to raise our expectations about what levels of safety, emission 
controls, fuel efficiency should come with motor vehicles. As a result of 
federal regulation, motor vehicles became much safer than they were and 
millions of casualties have been prevented since then. The options were much 
wider than we had been led to believe. 
We can remind ourselves that through our state governments, we give business 
corporations the charter that brings them into existence. We can, therefore, 
as was done in the 19th century, condition this charter on good behavior and 
withdraw the charter for recidivist companies which then become subject to 
trusteeships for rehabilitating the companies with new leadership. Bad trade 
unions had to undergo such rehabilitation. Ultimately, it is always the 
people who bear the fundamental responsibilities to correct the course of 
their societies and their wayward institutions.
One of those critical responsibilities is to ensure that our children are 
well cared for. This is an enormous undertaking because our children are now 
exposed to the most intense marketing onslaught in history. From the age of 9 
months to 19, years precise corporate selling is beamed directly to children 
separating them from their parents, an unheard of practice formerly, and 
teaching them how to nag their beleaguered parents as unpaid salesman for 
companies. There is a bombardment of their impressionable minds.
Through television, the Internet stores, samples and mailings, these 
companies convey their message to the little ones. They teach them how to 
crave junk food, thrill to violent and pornographic programming, interact 
with the virtual reality mayhem. The marketeers are keenly aware of the 
stages of child psychologies, age by age, and know how to turn many into 
Pavlovian specimens powered by spasmodically shortened attention spans as 
they become ever more remote from their own family.
Conditioned to become gazers and spectators for an average of 30 hours a 
week, youngsters now register as more obese and out of shape than any 
previous generation since 1900 when such records began to be collected. Their 
teachers see the results of this addictive commercial exploitation, the rat 
pack product conformity, the intrusion of commerce into the schools 
themselves. This does not prepare the next generation to become literate, 
self-renewing, effective citizens for a deliberative democracy. Instead, this 
commercial traffic makes them even more vulnerable to the streets.
So offensive are these intrusions to the basic norms of nurturing a wholesome 
childhood that people, conservative and liberals alike are joining together 
to protest, demand restraints and encourage a wider association of adults, 
including retired adults, with children. There are good reasons why every 
major religion long ago warned about giving too much power to the merchant 
mind. Why? Because its singular focus and its self-driven impulses run 
roughshod over the more non-commercial values that define a worthy society.
How badly do we want a just and decent society, a society that raises our 
expectation levels about ourselves and our community, a society that foresees 
and forestalls future risks, a society that has the people planning the 
future of their country, not global corporations as is the case now? A just 
and decent society is the dream of all those good citizens across our land 
who fight the good fight daily, it is the dream of the Green Party, it is the 
dream of a growing number of people seeking to involve themselves more 
actively in reclaiming this democracy of ours.
This campaign is about strengthening our Republic with "liberty and justice 
for all" so that freedom is defined as participation in power: power to solve 
our problems and diminish our injustices that cause such pain and stultify so 
many Americans and their children. It is good to have such dreams, my mother 
would tell us, but she added a challenge. She taught us that determination 
puts your dream on wheels. Together we reviewed the problems and have 
understood that inequalities are getting worse. Together we can change the 
course of events as our forebears did. With commitment, dedication and 
determination we can put our dreams on wheels in this campaign.
The people of this country have options. There are more citizen organizations 
and individuals knocking on the doors of their governments than a government 
responding. This means we must persist until we prevail. There are hopeful 
signs across the country as this campaign is demonstrating. We are 
campaigning all over the country with citizen groups on the ground who are 
working to lift standards of living and quality of life. The tide is starting 
to turn. 
Last year our campaign promised to journey to all fifty states. I am the only 
Presidential candidate to have completed campaigning in every state of our 
country since the first of March. In Boise, Idaho, recently, a reporter asked 
me: "Since Bush is expected to win Idaho and Gore has essentially conceded 
Idaho, neither of them are coming here, why did you? "Because," I replied, 
"if you're going to run for President of the United States, you should 
campaign in every one of our states."
Campaigning with the people in all the places we visited is illuminating and 
heartwarming. The impulse for changes as if people mattered are visible 
everywhere. Let me share some examples. 
In Toledo, Ohio, we joined with members of a community of some 80 
householders and 16 small businesses taken by the City, under threat of 
eminent domain, to provide Daimler/Chrysler with a landscaping area. Already, 
the cowed city had given Chrysler ample acreage for its Jeep Plant. The city 
of Toledo cleared the land for the giant company, absorbed any environmental 
liabilities, gave Daimler/Chrysler a long tax holiday as part of a nearly 
$300 million package in federal, state and local subsidies. The auto company 
got the additional land it wanted for its shrubbery and a long-time cohesive 
neighborhood was utterly demolished just like Detroit's Poletown in the 
1980s. A World War II veteran told us that when he was fighting the fascists, 
he never dreamed his long-time home would be taken for corporate shrubbery. 
In stark contrast, Daimler/Chrysler, recording record profits, had $20 
billion cash in the bank. ~
In Madison, Wisconsin, we marched with workers picketing for a livable wage. 
They were working for an independent contractor who provided services for the 
University of Wisconsin.
In Atlanta, we stood in solidarity with a large homeless shelter in the 
downtown Business District where homeless people are not supposed to be seen. 
The city has not given the Shelter a kitchen permit for two years.
In Nashville, Tennessee, I met Tom Burrell, now running for the U.S. Senate 
on the Green Party line. Mr. Burrell returned from Vietnam to work in the 
auto industry and then came home to Tennessee to farm a large tract of land. 
There he learned about the shocking state of Black farmers in America, 
dispossed of most of their land and forced to give up their farms over the 
last seventy years, in no small part due to blatantly discriminatory behavior 
by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The Department is only now offering to 
make inadequate amends. Mr. Burrell has been a transforming leader of these 
farmers seeking recompense and land. We had reported on this situation nearly 
30 years ago. 
In Boston, right next to Fenway Park, we gathered with members of the 
neighborhood at a news conference. The issue was a forthcoming demand by the 
Boston Red Sox organization that some $300 million in tax monies be used to 
help build a new ballpark nearby. The neighborhood groups, disturbed by 
diversion of tax dollars from neglected needs of the city, wondered why 
renovation of this historic park was not wiser than demolition. Did not the 
Red Sox learn from the experience of the New England Patriots football team 
who were sent fleeing back to Boston after their $500 million bonanza for a 
stadium in Hartford was successfully blocked? There, an aroused citizen 
coalition spearheaded by the Connecticut Green Party effectively routed the 
power of a determined executive-legislative alliance by the Republicans and 
Democratic parties.~ 
In Montana and Idaho, we heard unassailable arguments that stopping the 
logging in national forests made superior environmental, economic and job 
sense. Enjoy these forests now and for future generations rather than destroy 
them for 3 percent of the nation's annual timber harvest and $1.2 billion of 
annual taxpayer subsidies to the timber barons. "Let the Forests breath for 
us," America's great environmentalist, David Brower told us. 
In Hartford, Connecticut's grim inner city amidst the office buildings of the 
affluent insurance companies, we met with clergy from the Churches and social 
activists and discussed what this so called booming economy has left behind 
in misery, deprivation and neighborhood heroics. 
In Nebraska and Iowa we learned about the shocking crisis of much rural farm 
country where small farmers and ranchers, despite working from dawn to dusk, 
cannot make a living. They are being mercilessly squeezed by giant suppliers 
and giant buyers, who are relentlessly driving toward an industrialized 
corporate-contract agriculture mutated by genetic engineering.
In Hawaii, we visited one of the only two plots in the United States (the 
other is on the Pine Ridge Reservation) legally permitted to grow industrial 
hemp, that 5000 year old, versatile plant with thousands of uses, including 
textiles, fuel, food and paper. A fraction of an acre was surrounded by 
barbed wire fence, saturation night lights inside a larger fenced area. This 
medieval experience brought home once again that for the sake of farmers, the 
environment, consumers and energy independence, it is necessary to free 
industrial hemp from the proscribed list of U.S. Drug and Enforcement Agency. 
In West Virginia, the misbehavior of King Coal is painfully visible. Some 
coal companies think nothing of blowing the tops off of mountains and 
producing a polluting rubble and consequent jamming of streams for many 
miles. Imagine! Against prevailing public opinion, King Coal is dynamiting 
mountains, whose lore and beauty formed the natural space for the mountain 
people. There was no objection from the Clinton-Gore Administration. 
Similarly, the company that operates the giant incinerator, an extremely 
hazardous polluter in southwestern Ohio benefitted from the broken promises 
of the Clinton-Gore team made in 1992, to the citizen groups that fought and 
continue to fight to shutdown the incinerator. 
>From Minnesota, my vice-presidential running mate, Winona LaDuke and called a 
conference of tribal leaders about the need to respect Treaties, and end the 
budgetary and other discriminations against the impoverished reservations. 
This is long over due.
Around the country from Delaware to Kentucky to Oregon to Minnesota, we 
joined with students deeply involved with the anti-sweatshop movement and 
with workers who have lost their jobs to these sweatshops abroad. We surveyed 
and confirmed the need for modern public transit and the wonderful new 
technologies that community groups were demanding to enable low- income 
people to get to work and to relieve the enormous time wasted in chocking 
bumper to bumper traffic. We spoke with nurses from coast to coast about 
furthering their leading role in advancing patients' rights, the quality of 
health care and universal health care for all. And, a tip of the hat to the 
California Nurses Association, the standard-setter for unions everywhere, for 
being the first union to support this Green Party Presidential campaign.
How uplifting were our conversations with peace and nuclear arms reduction 
groups whose members, most of them sagacious, experienced and determined 
elderly women and men whose concern is first and foremost for the "Seven 
Generations" ahead. They set a new standard for grandparenting. We should 
recall that the nuclear freeze movement began in town meetings in New 
England. 
We saw struggling small businesses, the Main Street core of their community, 
slipping before the onslaught of the Walmarts and other giant chains that 
have privileges not available to these merchants. We met with volunteers and 
donors at receptions filled with civic activists excited over the premises 
and promise of an expanding Green Party. It would take about one million 
Americans, pledging 100 volunteer hours a year and raising $100 a year, 
advancing a broad and deep agenda for the just society congenial to millions 
of other Americans, to establish a majority political Party in a few years. 
The citizens of this country are not a backdrop for political maneuvering by 
big business. They are central to a democratic politics. They are central for 
reality testing, to help the politicians stay close to growing inequalities 
because politicians can insulate themselves by design. Did we really need a 
World Health Organization report to tell us how badly we stand on health care 
issues? Big money in electoral politics produces a kind of institutional 
insanity. This campaign will set an example of what can be accomplished with 
the honest dollars of individuals, by refusing to take PAC money or use soft 
money. This is a sane choice, now and in the future. It offers the citizens 
of this country an authentic role in defining and solving problems.
A progressive political party is most authentic when it connects with or 
arises from citizen movements and does not forget where it is coming from or 
the reason for its being. Major changes for the betterment of human beings 
start with major changes of direction. Such changes start with small steps 
taken by each individual and their community together with other individuals 
and these small steps evolve into ever larger steps which are thereby more 
tested and surefooted. 
The question we have to ask of ourselves is how badly, how urgently do we 
want these changes? Do we want public financing of public elections, which 
will remove any roadblocks to progress? Do we want universal, accessible and 
quality health care, with an emphasis on prevention, for all children, women 
and men in America, at long, long last? Do we want the repeal of restrictive 
labor laws such as Taft-Hartley which fuel the obstruction of trade union 
organizing for tens of millions of American workers who do not earn a livable 
wage? Do we want adequate budgets and do we have the willpower for enforcing 
and strengthening the environmental, consumer protection and job safety laws 
against corporate crime, fraud and abuse so often and well reported in the 
mainstream media but, alas, to so little effect? Do we want to end hundreds 
of billions of dollars of corporate welfare, the so familiar subsidies, 
giveaways and bailouts? Do we wish to discover the small and medium-size 
businesses in the Social Venture Network, and other places that believe in 
sustainable economies, like the Interface Corporation in Atlanta, Georgia, so 
as to refute the chronic nay saying of Big Business? Can we not move our rich 
country to become a society that abolishes poverty? Do we want an expansive 
transformation of our energy sources to the many kinds of solar energy, some 
of which have been around for centuries? Do we wish to advance the 
appropriate technologies that define efficiency and productivity as if 
consumers, environment and workers mattered?
Do we want to elevate the many civil servants in our federal government above 
the demeaning stereotypes that politicians have pasted on them and liberated 
their knowledge, insights and imagination to make government our servant?
Can we assure that these civil servants - physicians, engineers, scientists, 
lawyers, cost analysts, procurement managers and others - have a place where 
they can bring their conscience and ethics to work everyday?
Do we want our own media, our own television, radio and cable networks as a 
functioning and deliberative democracy desires and needs? Do we want to 
reserve part of the public airwaves which the people own in the first place 
for programming that reflects our solutions, our cultures, our sense of the 
heroic and the many models of little known success that need to be publicized 
and emulated?
Do we wish to so lift the horizons of the pursuit of happiness in our society 
through the pursuits of justice so that bigotry, discrimination and virulent 
intolerance recedes toward oblivion?
Do we wish to expand the definition of national security and national purpose 
to show how, with reasonable amounts of knowledge, resources and goodwill, we 
can rapidly begin to defeat the global scourges of poverty, contagious 
disease, illiteracy, lack of shelter, environmental devastation, and to 
recognize the genius of Third World peoples to help it flower? 
Isn't it about time that the United States government stop supporting 
dictatorships and avaricious oligarchies with our tax monies, munitions and 
diplomacy? Isn't it time that our government takes a cue from numerous 
studies and model projects, and advances foreign policies that support the 
peasants and the workers for a change.
Do we want to say to the 70 million non-voters, the Greens want to help you 
build a new beginning? Here is your chance to come forth and support what you 
have long wished for, a progressive movement that is for the people because 
it is of the people.
To the contented classes in America, the top five percent on the income 
ladder, I ask, is your choice only to exit or is it also to voice? Your 
income enables you to exit and buy bottled water when you are concerned about 
the quality of your communities' drinking water, to send your children to 
private schools, and to move to some more pleasant community. But you are the 
people who can get your calls returned. You are the citizens who can give 
voice to the powerless and the beleaguered to improve their conditions.
My classmates at Princeton University and Harvard Law Schools have chosen to 
voice. Over ten years ago our Princeton class of 1955 established a Center 
for Civic Leadership to place undergraduates in dozens of civic organizations 
dedicated to systemic change. The Center is also pursuing a major effort to 
reorder our public health budget so that a major assault on global 
tuberculosis can be mounted. In 1993, members of my Law School class of 1958 
established the Appleseed Foundation that organized state-based Centers for 
Law and Justice. Over a dozen of these centers are underway, for the purpose 
of furthering systemic approaches to systemic injustices. How many other 
older alumni classes, undergraduate and graduate, can develop their systemic 
initiatives for building democracy and justice?
A progressive political movement highlights civic energies which are 
dedicated to the proposition that a society which has more justice is a 
society that needs less charity. Too many good people are walking around with 
invisible chains which restrict their contributions to the good life for 
themselves and their fellow citizens. A progressive political movement 
liberates their wisdom, judgment, experience, creativity and idealism.
To the millions of retired Americans with such capacities, a progressive 
political movement offers endless opportunities for this community-based 
patriotism to blossom. We need you in this fresh campaign. Small numbers of 
large corporations are playing roulette with the planet.
To the youth of America, I say, beware of being trivialized by the commercial 
culture that tempts you daily. I hear you saying often that you're not turned 
on to politics. The lessons of history are clear and portentous. If you do 
not turn on to politics, politics will turn on you. The fact that we have so 
many inequalities demonstrates this point. Democracy responds to hands-on 
participation. And to energized imagination. That's its essence. We need the 
young people of America to move into leadership positions to shape their 
future as part of this campaign for a just society. Let's prepare to take the 
politicians and the lobbyists on a tour of the People's America. 
Two premises are basic to this political campaign. First, that a basic 
function of leadership is to generate more leaders, not more followers. 
Secondly, this political movement is first and foremost movement of thought, 
not of belief. There is nothing wrong with beliefs but it would be better to 
have them preceded by thought and followed by action.
By debating, phoning, e-mailing, and marching during the next four months, we 
the people will grow a new political start, a green plant pushing up between 
the two fossil parties.
With a new progressive movement, we the people have the ability to vastly 
improve our lives and to help shape the world's course to one of justice and 
peace for years to come.