NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #18

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Newsgroups: misc.activism.progressive Path: sparky!uunet!usc!wupost!mont!pencil.cs.missouri.edu!daemon From: dave@ratmandu.esd.sgi.com (dave "who can do? ratmandu!" ratcliffe) Subject: Ralph Nader: Plutocracy and the Citizen Agenda for '92 and beyond Message-ID: <1992Aug17.174030.23080@mont.cs.missouri.edu> Followup-To: alt.activism.d Summary: growing up corporate, we never think of what we own/is the commonwealth Originator: daemon@pencil.cs.missouri.edu Keywords: the plutocracy continues to take more and more control of what we own Sender: news@mont.cs.missouri.edu Nntp-Posting-Host: pencil.cs.missouri.edu Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc. Date: Mon, 17 Aug 1992 17:40:30 GMT Approved: map@pencil.cs.missouri.edu Lines: 1270 Ralph Nader spoke to students at Harvard Law School on January 15th about the continuing concentration of plutocratic power being exercised in the United States. Corporate crime, corporate socialism at the expense of the taxpayer. Why is this issue never addressed in Presidential campaigns? At least read the following excerpts, taken from the speech starting 109 lines below this one, for a perceptive analysis of what is happening in this country AND ways to address it. --ratitor . . . "plutocratic power" . . . is really the singular index of what has been going on, decade after decade, in this country. . . . those people who have civic power accorded them--freedom to vote, freedom to speech--if they do not *use* the authority that they are empowered to use in a constant, daily, diverse manner, power tends to concentrate itself and before you know it, you have a plutocracy that uses the symbols of government, and the symbols of democracy, to regale itself and to achieve legitimacy. Now, the avaricious triumph and spreading tragedy of corporatism *should* be the singular, most important issue in the presidential campaign. Part of it is an issue in the presidential campaign, but only in an oblique manner. . . . Now this is why I am standing in in New Hampshire for a write-in vote for "None Of The Above." I am up in New Hampshire saying to people, after the groundwork is laid, "I am `None Of The Above.' And I'm not running for president." This is initially confusing. But later on it becomes invigorating. Because when people have a "None of the above" option, and, presumably, giving visibility to a write- in for "None Of The Above" will lead states to pass laws putting "None Of The Above," formally, or a No-Vote, on the ballot. That's what they have now in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, we should not be too far behind--or in Russia, the Ukraine. When there is a "None Of The Above," then the No-Vote congeals. It's quantifiable. It can be discussed. It can have substance lent to it by those who prefer that option. It also is a silent third party. Because the candidates will not only have to look at each other when they campaign, they will have to risk the ultimate humiliation of being defeated by "None Of The Above." Furthermore a "None Of The Above" which is binding means that if "None Of The Above" gets more votes than any of the candidates on the ballot, it cancels the election and the candidates, and a new election is ordered--with new candidates. This might have happened in Louisiana a few weeks ago. Now it's not likely that "None Of The Above" will too frequently win, because there will be a reaction to it in anticipation of a possible win by the candidates to broaden out their message and how they interact with the public. If they don't, more people will vote for "None Of The Above." Remember please that half the people do not vote in a presidential election, and sixty percent of the eligible voters do not vote in congressional elections. So there's a big constituency out there who for a variety of reasons--and it is a *variety* of reasons--choose not to participate in the electoral process. . . . When we're talking about plutocracy, what are we talking about? Here's an example of plutocracy: corporate socialism. That is, corporations who get in trouble if they're important enough or big enough, do not go bankrupt, they go to Washington. They are then subject to a process known as corporate welfare--entitlements--where their bankruptcy, mismanagement, speculation or corporate crime generates losses which are socialized on the backs of the taxpayer. This corporate socialism and corporate welfare is booming. In fact most of what Washington does is conduct a bazaar of "Accounts Receivables" for corporate requestors. There are dozens and dozens of corporate welfare projects that we can conveniently call "aid to dependent corporations." Now look what this does. First of all it reduces corporations incentive to work, productively. Because they know they're going to be bailed out. They know that there are a certain number of banks in this country which are too big to fail and the federal reserve had them on the list: Citicorp, Bank of America, Chase Manhattan, Morgan Guarantee, Chemical, etc. In other words, they were too critical to avoiding a domino affect and they would be bailed out. . . . I mentioned plutocratic power versus democratic power . . . plutocratic power exercises its will on us everyday. . . . The plutocracy takes control of what we own. . . . Look at what we own: we own, as a commonwealth, the public airwaves, the public lands, three trillion dollars of public and private pension money, a trillion dollars of savings, a half a trillion dollars at least of mutual insurance monies--all these we technically, legally own. Some as a commonwealth, some as *pooled* assets. Can you imagine how our political economy would be different, how our standards of living would be different, if we *controlled* what we legally owned? And that is *never* discussed in any political campaign that I have been aware of in the last several decades. Can you imagine anything more fundamental to discuss than the incidence of popular and commonwealth ownership of assets? Here's how it goes: we grow up corporate. By growing up corporate, we never even *think* of what we own. We never even *think* of what is the commonwealth. We are told to "go for it" individually and make a pile of money. And because we're growing up corporate, our minds are anesthetized so they can be controlled by the corporate ethos. . . . The unaccountability of government has become a complex and little-studied phenomena except a public grunt here and there. The unaccountability of government has gone to the point where the very use of the law is the instrument of illegality. The very use of the law is the instrument of illegality. The color of the law. And it has become so intricate, and so broad-based, that law schools don't even study it: government lawlessness. Not just Watergate. . . . democracy is like a tree--branches, twigs, fruit, trunk, root. The people are the root and the trunk, the elected officials are the branches and twigs. If the root and the trunk do not provide the nutrients, the branches and the twigs become very brittle and don't produce fruit. I've spent all these years working at the root and the trunk, and I'm not at *all* persuaded that the root and the trunk is sending enough nutrients for *any*body to aspire to become a branch or a twig. ___________________________________________________________________________ The Citizen Agenda for '92 Disolving the Plutocracy Ralph Nader speaking @ Harvard Law School, January 15, 1992 Thank you very much Ross, ladies and gentlemen--it's nice to be here at the Arco Forum. Was Arco a professor here? A revered professor? With this rampant commercialism now that buildings on campuses around the country are named for the corporations who fund them. They used to be named for deans and professors who performed in a distinguished manner in the past. But I can see by the architecture that it does reflect the cold-blooded nature of that corporation. Those of you who are somewhere way up there please forgive me, I couldn't see you if I tried because of the lights. But I hope the acoustics will reach you. My discussion this evening is not a conventional one. It will border, to some of the uninitiated, on tedium because it involves important and fundamental redistribution of power through constitutional, statutory, regulatory, and other changes in our society. This is what politics should be all about. Politics should address the questions of the proper distribution, balance of power, between the various roles that people play in a democracy as voters, taxpayers, consumers, workers, as people in political office, elected, people appointed in the formal decision-making forums of the judiciary, executive, legislative branches, in the trade union and non-trade union areas, in the business areas and other sources of activity and impact on the society. Now, I suppose the best way to describe what I'm going to talk about is first of all to use the phrase "plutocratic power." That is really the singular index of what has been going on, decade after decade, in this country. Formerly we are a republic--operationally we like to talk about our being a democracy. There are deep democracies and thin democracies around the world. There are societies that call themselves democracies because their constitution reads that way but everything else reads dictatorship or authoritarianism. There are other countries that have democratic roots, and custom, and tradition, rather than constitutional enablements and prescriptions. Britain has displayed the fragility of that foundation under the Thatcher regime. And there are countries that have their foundations in more written fashion, elaborated hundreds of times through judicial interpretation, and that's our country. But, what happens of course is that those people who have civic power accorded them--freedom to vote, freedom to speech--if they do not *use* the authority that they are empowered to use in a constant, daily, diverse manner, power tends to concentrate itself and before you know it, you have a plutocracy that uses the symbols of government, and the symbols of democracy, to regale itself and to achieve legitimacy. Now, the avaricious triumph and spreading tragedy of corporatism *should* be the singular, most important issue in the presidential campaign. Part of it is an issue in the presidential campaign, but only in an oblique manner. For example, national health insurance is now being discussed. It was not discussed in '88 to any appreciable degree; it was not discussed in '84; it was not discussed in '80, or '76, or '72--yet, tens of millions of people in those years, including millions of children, had no health insurance. And of course there are other adverse effects of the euphemistically called "health care" or "health provider industry," on them. In contrast, years ago, energy was the big issue in the presidential campaign in 1976, 1980, and now we hear very little about energy, in terms fossils, nuclear, efficiency, renewables, geo-political conflicts, pollution, impact on the consumer budget, etc. So what is the characterization of the presidential campaign anyway? Is it the novelty of the quadrenial period? Is it whatever the candidates think will play in Peoria? Is it the limited range of the candidate's backgrounds? Is it what conflicts with their campaign contributors priorities? What really determines it? You'll notice I haven't raised the most important determinant, which should be what the citizens instruct them, urge them, to talk about. Now the reason of course, is that the citizens are not at a level of expectation that is in accord with their true significance and participating in a democracy. They have very low expectations. Their expectations now, under the conditioned response of the dozens ever-decreasingly significant campaigns, their expectation is one of a bystander. Basically they watch the ads, they listen to speeches and the slogans, And, if they care to, they will go to the polls. And if they don't care to, because they can't can't conceive that their single vote has any significance, or they adhere to the philosophy of "que sera sera," or they don't like any of the candidates, whom they regard as Tweedledum and Tweedledee. They stay home, is the option--the only option--is stay home, don't vote. Of course, not voting exposes themselves to a characterization of being apathetic, democratic dropouts, lethargic, people who are resigned to futility. And not voting has no electoral significance at all, in terms of congealing a point of view. Now this is why I am standing in in New Hampshire for a write-in vote for "None Of The Above." I am up in New Hampshire saying to people, after the groundwork is laid, "I am `None Of The Above.' And I'm not running for president." This is initially confusing. But later on it becomes invigorating. Because when people have a "None of the above" option, and, presumably, giving visibility to a write- in for "None Of The Above" will lead states to pass laws putting "None Of The Above," formally, or a No-Vote, on the ballot. That's what they have now in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, we should not be too far behind, or in Russia, the Ukraine. When there is a "None Of The Above," then the No-Vote congeals. It's quantifiable. It can be discussed. It can have substance lent to it by those who prefer that option. It also is a silent third party. Because the candidates will not only have to look at each other when they campaign, they will have to risk the ultimate humiliation of being defeated by "None Of The Above." Furthermore a "None Of The Above" which is binding means that if "None Of The Above" gets more votes than any of the candidates on the ballot, it cancels the election and the candidates, and a new election is ordered--with new candidates. This might have happened in Louisiana a few weeks ago. Now it's not likely that "None Of The Above" will too frequently win, because there will be a reaction to it in anticipation of a possible win by the candidates to broaden out their message and how they interact with the public. If they don't, more people will vote for "None Of The Above." Remember please that half the people do not vote in a presidential election, and sixty percent of the eligible voters do not vote in congressional elections. So there's a big constituency out there who for a variety of reasons--and it is a *variety* of reasons--choose not to participate in the electoral process. I mentioned plutocratic power versus democratic power. Now plutocratic power exercises its will on us everyday. It's important to give a few examples because, when you're talking to students at Harvard University, you are talking to students who, unfortunately, develop intellectual rigor in an intellectual cage. And they too often think they have it made by simply matriculating here in life, and too often they're right. Too often it is the status, rather than the substance, that carries you leaping over other more meritorious competitors after you graduate. Because we live in a society that gives Harvard University graduates the benefit of the doubt. They even give Harvard Law School graduates the benefit of the doubt. It certainly helped me when I was challenging General Motors. People would say on Congressional committee, "Who is this fellow? Why is he attacking American capitalism?" And some other one would say, "Hey you better listen. He's a graduate of Harvard Law School." Now if I had graduated from Cumberland Law School I wouldn't have gotten very far at that congressional hearing. So you want to use that asset as a source of humility rather than arrogance, so you can continue learning even after you've gotten your diploma, which people who blend uncertainty with self-confidence do the rest of their lives. They do continue to learn. And people who just are very self-confident tend not to learn after they finish their formal education. They have year-after-year similar experiences that are ever more lucratively compensated for. Now if you were to have an exam over at Memorial Hall which asked you the following question as a government major, `Would you a please rank the fifty states in terms of their democratic quality (small `d') and their democratic product. That is enablement and result.' And you wrote that you really don't know enough about fifty states, but you're going to establish the criteria for the quest. How would you establish a ranking for Mississippi, Massachusetts, Oregon, Florida, on that scale of being less democratic and more democratic. Now I have never seen a single course in government in any university in the country that exercises the student's minds in that way. I took government courses and I learned all about John Locke, and Mr. Hobbes, and the others, and sometimes it comes in handy. It comes in handy. For example it stimulated me to describe presidential campaigns as "shallow, narrow, redundant and frantic." (Instead of "poor, nasty, brutish and short.") But somehow there's an empirical starvation that associates itself with political theory and commentary. The latest rage on some campuses is Fucco. Do you understand Fucco? Disciplinary power, sovereignty power, other kinds of power. I heard a lecture on it at Princeton recently. It was a very logical lecture. She did an excellent job of de-mystifying the occult. But there weren't many empirical examples in the discussion. And that's the problem. There is a language of avoidance that afflicts politics and politicians. It's one thing that afflicts science advisory committees to the government. It's one thing that afflicts faculty meetings. But to afflict politics and politicians is really unforgivable. When we're talking about plutocracy, what are we talking about? Here's an example of plutocracy: corporate socialism. That is, corporations who get in trouble if they're important enough or big enough, do not go bankrupt, they go to Washington. They are then subject to a process known as corporate welfare--entitlements--where their bankruptcy, mismanagement, speculation or corporate crime generates losses which are socialized on the backs of the taxpayer. This corporate socialism and corporate welfare is booming. In fact most of what Washington does is conduct a bazaar of "Accounts Receivables" for corporate requestors. There are dozens and dozens of corporate welfare projects that we can conveniently call "aid to dependent corporations." Now look what this does. First of all it reduces corporations incentive to work, productively. Because they know they're going to be bailed out. They know that there are a certain number of banks in this country which are too big to fail and the federal reserve had them on the list: Citicorp, Bank of America, Chase Manhattan, Morgan Guarantee, Chemical, etc. In other words, they were too critical to avoiding a domino affect and they would be bailed out. Now the S&L's are a case in point. The government, under pressure by the banking industry, expanded the deposit insurance to $100,000 per account (in 1982). It also allowed the S&L's to veer away from their housing mortgage duties and invest money, with very little criteria of accountability, in Equity Real Estate, which they read to include, skyscrapers in Dallas and Houston, and in junk bonds and other reckless investments--certainly from a traditional, prudent banking standpoint. And because these deposits were guaranteed, speculators could take over a small S&L in Texas called Vernon Savings and Loan--boom!--it's deposits by offering higher interest, attracting brokered CD's from Merrill Lynch and Paine Weber and others, and then proceed to put these monies in speculative ventures. When they got in trouble, then of course they were subject to being rescued, in terms of the deposits, by the FDIC or FSLIC before it. Notice, the sequence: the people who have to pay for the bailout--the taxpayers--are largely middle class taxpayers. Not a progressive tax, specially suited for the rich and the corporate, who participated, condoned and/or benefited from these capers and these excessive interest rates. Yet the taxpayers are going to have to pay for it over thirty to forty years, it'll total with interest over a trillion dollars. They did not cause it. They weren't direct beneficiaries of it. They were direct adverse recipients of the resultant collapse in unemployment, real estate, etc. And they had no say. See they had no say. The executives of the banks--some of them were prosecuted, some of them got away, some of them will never be prosecuted even thought they're on the list. Notice however: the taxpayers could not get any documents from the federal banking agencies--they were secret. The House Banking Committee couldn't get many documents. There was no standing to sue by taxpayers against this enormous requisition of taxpayer dollars over the next thirty, forty years. They were basically shut out-- they weren't part of a democracy. They were supplicants subject to the coercion of a plutocracy. This happens all the time in Washington. Time and time again. Defense contracts for example. Defense contracts are signed in great secrecy by Pentagon contract specialists and McDonnell-Douglas or General Dynamics. Most of the important parts of these contracts are not public. They are amended in a format know as the `golden handshake.' Whenever they engage in cost overruns, or, excuse me the latest phrase is "cost growth." When the taxpayers through the Pentagon pays $450 for a $10 claw- hammer you can get at your hardware store, the vendor to the Pentagon describes it as a "uni-directional impact generator." Well, when you're getting $450 you don't say "a claw hammer." You call it a "uni-directional impact generator." This goes on, and it continues to go on, and it transcends exposure. Now when an abuse transcends high-level, relentless exposure, and still continues, you know how entrenched the plutocracy really is. 1986 tax reform law, so-to-speak, small paragraph, which nobody really understood what it meant because nobody read it. Hundreds of pages in this tax bill. It was put in by a senator from the midwest to benefit John Deere equipment Company, which was in trouble at that time. But it was written in a general enough fashion that the lawyers from General Motors and Ford spied on it, and within weeks took advantage of it to a level of two billion dollars. The provision--the amendment--was discovered by the "Washington Post" six months after enactment of the law. *Discovered* you see? Even though its on print. They are so esoteric, so abstruse, the cross- references are so intricate that probing newspapers can take months to discover this. Back in the '70s twelve billion dollars of deferred profits on exports by corporations such as Boeing and General Electric were forgiven in a one sweeping few lines in a large piece of legislation. No knowledge to the taxpayer. No challenge by the taxpayer. No standing. Energy bill--last year proposed by Senator Bennett Johnston and his republican counterpart--it was going to open up ANWR [(a portion of Northeastern Alaska's) Arctic National Wildlife Refuge --ratitor] in Alaska and it was going to speed up nuclear licensing by cutting out community participation, compressing the two stages of license and challenge. But deep inside this *huge* piece of legislation, was a forgiveness of an eleven billion dollars debt by the utilities to the U.S. government for uranium enrichment services. You know: eleven billion dollars here; twelve billion dollars there. As Dirksen once said, pretty soon it adds up to real money. Now let's look at contrast. There's not enough contrast in public dialogue. Let's look at the opposition by the Reagan-Bush administration to a seven hundred million dollar infant nutrition program, which was reducing infant mortality, which is a disgrace in this country, in 1981. How about the few tens of millions of dollars to make sure that fundamental inoculation programs are available to infants in this country. The inoculation incidence for childhood diseases among minority children in Washington, D.C., is lower than that which prevails in the country of Botswana. It's at fifty-eight percent. "Don't have the money." The agency that establishes standards to protect children's safety from household products is going at thirty-eight million dollars a year, and dropping. This is for millions of children and all the appliances, and ways they can get burnt, and cut, and harmed, toxic and so on. The agency that establishes standards for motor vehicle safety does it, apart it from its highway safety wing, does it on less than forty million dollars. A B-2 bomber is running at 850 million dollars per bomber; its radar evasiveness doesn't operate properly, and there's no longer any Soviet Union against which it was designed. That is about what the very controversial childcare bill would have cost, per year. Which finally got through congress, under great opposition, threats of veto, etc. See? That's the plutocracy. The plutocracy is agribusiness in California which makes *you* pay for *their* water, and then they make tons of money (great subsidy), they over-produce agricultural products--and therefore the price would go down except you also pay for the price supports--and what's left over is in warehouses which you also pay the rent for. This excessive use of water where it shouldn't be used in a wasteful manner is increasing salinity and having other contrary environmental affects. Has that been on your mind lately? It's just a few billion dollars a year. It's O.K. It's depleting the acquifer which took ten thousand years to fill up in south-central Nebraska, Oklahoma. These are profit-making corporations. They call themselves farmers, they're agribusiness. Why aren't they paying the freight? Maybe they wouldn't waste as much water. Maybe certain crops wouldn't be in over-supply rotting in warehouses. Or taking a portion of the twenty-seven billion dollars in price supports, very few of which go to small farmers, under a federal agriculture policy that's driving small farmers over the cliff and into oblivion. Think about that lately? What's the small talk on campus at Harvard these days? Does it relate to matters above the belt, or below the belt? What do you talk about? What do the law school students say? Do you hear them talk about corporate crime? Saying what they should do about it, taking stands, doing research? Or are they talking about "fly outs" to law firms where they're wined and dined and considered for partnerships preceded by six years of associateship? Plutocracy conditions the distribution of resources. Poverty is higher today than it was in 1960. Children's poverty in many ways is even more dire. We have crack babies now. That didn't occur in 1960. Did you ever see a two-and-a-half pound little infant born of a crack-addicted mother? Go to some of the hospitals and take a look. We have chronic unemployment. We have unemployment statistics that don't count people that stop looking for work after a few months. We have more homelessness. Housing is at atrocious levels in this country because "the single room," that used to be place that poor people and individuals lived, is at a minimum these days. Gentrification, condominiums, higher rents, out into the streets they go. Two thousand children are homeless in the greater Washington area who have to go to school every day. That's George Bush's home town. Excuse me, technically, Houston is his home town. But where he lives, a lot of the time, is in Washington. And within view of the White House, you see a level of poverty and misery that can only be called "third world" 1960 imagery and content. The plutocracy takes control of what we own. This must be a hot topic and the Kennedy school. Look at what we own: we own, as a commonwealth, the public airwaves, the public lands, three trillion dollars of public and private pension money, a trillion dollars of savings, a half a trillion dollars at least of mutual insurance monies--all these we technically, legally own. Some as a commonwealth, some as *pooled* assets. Can you imagine how our political economy would be different, how our standards of living would be different, if we *controlled* what we legally owned? And that is *never* discussed in any political campaign that I have been aware of in the last several decades. Can you imagine anything more fundamental to discuss than the incidence of popular and commonwealth ownership of assets? Here's how it goes: we grow up corporate. By growing up corporate, we never even *think* of what we own. We never even *think* of what is the commonwealth. We are told to "go for it" individually and make a pile of money. And because we're growing up corporate, our minds are anesthetized so they can be controlled by the corporate ethos. Such a thesis is so easily proven that it's not worth spending much time on other than to give one example: who is raising our children today? Ask parents who's raising the children. Children are raised by those environments in which they spend most of their time. Children today spend less time with adults, including their parents, than any children in *history*. They are spending, pre- teen, thirty-five hours a week on the average, watching TV, video games, and in between, walkman audios. So for thirty-five hours a week they are Pavlovian specimens. They are not engaging in human conversation. They are not interacting with their their siblings and their parents, except modest squabbles during ad time perhaps. They are watching programs that convey basically three themes relentlessly. Look at Saturday and Sunday morning TV if you doubt that. Theme one is violence is a solution to life's problems: zapping, vaporizing, terminating. Theme two is low-grade sensuality illustrated by junk food, turning their tongues against their brains. And getting them to nag their parents--which is the purpose of these ads and the accolades are given to the ad writers when these ads "have high nag factors"--to demand that food with high-fat, high- sugar, low-fiber, coloring, additives, etc., are purchased. Hostess Twinkees, not apples. For desert they ask to purchase Hubba Bubba. Tony the Tiger is the authority figure, not President Myier (sp?) of Tufts University, a world-renowned nutritionist. Who knows Mr. Myier among the children of America? It's Tony the Tiger. It's Morris the cat. And thirdly, they convey addiction. Addiction comes in many forms--not just addiction to certain kinds of food additives, or addiction to drugs, or to alcohol, or to tobacco--it's behavioral addiction: sitting there, letting their little minds rot in front of that television. That's whose raising the children. War toys--five year old boys, cosmetic companys--seven year old girls, over medication--starting from almost day one. Mother's breast milk is now replaced by infant formula, compliments of the Nestle Company. Nowhere near as good. Kindercare is raising our kids more and more, McDonalds is feeding them more and more, and HBO-Time/Warner is entertaining them more and more. Pretty soon parents will be obsolete . . . when they're around. Now when you grow up corporate like that do you develop a critical mind? Do you develop a civic spirit? Do you understand what community is? Do you ever thirst for *feedback*? For talking *back* to the TV set, in front of you. Never occurs to people to even ask for an electronic Letters-to-the-Editor time on TV. And what is TV? It's ninety percent entertainment--including ads--, ten percent redundant news, zero percent mobilization. But it is our property. We own the public airwaves. That's federal law, approved by the Supreme Court of the United States. We are the owners, we are the landlords. The Federal Communications Commission is our real estate agent. It licenses portions of the spectrum to corporate broadcasting TV and radio stations--they are the tenants. They pay nothing for the rent of a TV station. Some of the greatest fortunes in American history have been made by television and other electronic communication company executives- -tens of millions of dollars--using public property free of charge. The tenant pays the landlord nothing, decides who says what on radio and TV, and laughs all the way to the bank, and because we grow up corporate, we don't even *think* of challenging it because we never *heard* of it. We never reflected on it. Our courses never *talked* about it. We never majored in it. And therefore, we're anesthetized. It's a controlling process. The challenge in our country, in getting democracy upgraded to override plutocracy, is not the challenge that is contained in Orwell's "1984," it's the challenge that is contained in Huxley's "Brave New World." Now, the plutocracy continues on. The candidates talk about street crime--it's bad, it's really bad. But they don't talk much about certain remedies. Immediate ones and, shall we say, causative ones. People who have work, decent housing, who have realistic opportunities, who have health, who have certain decent comforts, who have people who care about them--especially when they're children-- are historically, less likely to commit street crime. Remedial ones are, there've never been more police--five out of seven of them are sitting behind desks, because patrolling is hard work--foot patrolling--being part of a neighborhood, *living* in a neighborhood, going to the neighborhood, and knowing the neighborhood. That's hard work. Much better to be back at the office in front of switchboards, computers, feet on the desk, or in patrol cars. Zooming in when there's a crime, and zooming out quite as rapidly. Leaving the terrified behind. Where did we ever see a campaign that focuses not just on crime in the streets, but on crime in the *suites?* Corporate crime--at epidemic levels--read the "Wall Street Journal," apart from its editorial pages, and you'll get a does of it every day. Corporate crime comes in many modes: occupational diseases, illegal contamination of air, water and soil, bribery, and various forms of corruption. Violations of all kinds of criminal laws. And there is less money spent on enforcing the criminal laws in our country, at the federal state, and local level, than is spent in six months of catfood purchases in the United States. Billion and a quarter dollars if you're interested in the figure. Six months worth of catfood; billion and a quarter dollars--not counting *gourmet* catfood. That is what the plutocracy wants. They don't want the emphasis on corporate crime. They don't want to develop new kinds of behavioral sanctions, deterrents. They don't want the Attorney General to have a list of the ten most-wanted corporate criminals. They don't want any research done on corporate crime--go over here at Harvard and see how much research has been done in the last fifty years at the law school, on corporate crime. Compared to street crime. Look at the index to legal periodicals. Look at the LEAA and the justice department. Three or four, maybe a half-dozen reports on corporate crime. Thank goodness for them. Not much compared to its range. And more people in this country are dying, being injured, being exposed to diseases, and being defrauded by corporate crime by *far* than street crime, bad as the latter is. Just think of the scandals--equity funding. Twenty years ago when corporate crime scandals were modest, 250 million dollars there. Drysdale Securities was another 200 million. That's twenty years ago. Today they're running *billions* of dollars of swindles and fleeces. And they're not just the hard-core boiler-room type of stock solicitation on the telephone. You've read about a lot of them. So much for the plutocracy, we don't have time to really go into great detail. There are books--a book called "Corporate Crime and Violence," by Russell Mochiver (sp?) (Sierra Club Books). There's "The Corporate Crime Reporter," published by the same author *every week* out of Washington, D.C. And there are other articles--not too many--but that give you a flavor. I hope I have conveyed enough to indicate that we *do* grow up corporate. We *do* grow up acculturated according to corporate parameters. No matter how smart we may be. No matter what scores we may get on the SAT or the Graduate Record Exams. What are our assets? Well look at what we own, but don't control. Look at the redirection of investment, for sound employment at the community-level, for sound output that three trillion dollars in pension moneys can provide. Not to mention *other* huge pools of money legally owned by people but controlled by banks and insurance companies. They took a trillion dollars of people's money to finance mergers and acquisitions in the 1980s in the United States of America, largely for empire-building--not for any rational reasons--largely for empire building, huge fees for investment bankers, huge emoluments for the corporate executives, ingoing, outgoing or staying. And to top it off, these mergers and acquisitions often strip-mined the acquired company, and bellied it up, and they usually didn't create a single job or any wealth. One trillion dollars, thank you very much. Any of the presidential candidates talking about that? But that's an asset we can recover. The public lands. The taxpayer's assets are great assets. People talk about taxes mostly in terms of rates. How about the *assets* they create? For example, government R&D is half of the R&D in the United States. Half--science, engineering, medical. Much of it is given away to private corporations, some of it under monopoly patents. Who asked them to do that? Our representatives. To be sure, our appointees at National Institutes of Health. AZT, clinically discovered for application against the AIDS disease by the National Institutes of Health--*your* doctors, *your* taxpayer scientists. It was then given by Mr. Reagan's regime to the Burroughs-Welcome Corporation, a British firm, under a seventeen-year monopoly patent. They turned around and charged AIDS patients eight thousand dollars a year. They're now down to maybe four or five thousand. A third of AIDS patients couldn't pay--Medicaid paid, that means taxpayers paid. So the taxpayers paid for the discovery, they then witnessed its giveaway, they then witnessed its gouging price, and then they paid for the Medicaid. That's a taxpayer asset. Information is a taxpayer asset. *Huge* information databases in the government that can be used for civic purposes, for justice purposes, for consumer purposes. They know which drugs work, which don't. They know what the side-effects are. Our health research group has to assemble them every few years and put them out in paperbacks. A little tiny health research group--not the Food and Drug Administration, or the Health and Human Services Department. That's a taxpayer asset. It's increasingly being privatized. So that Mead Data and McGraw Hill and others, in the information industry, can resell it to industry, graduate students, etc., for prohibitive prices. Increasingly graduate students are being confronted with twenty thousand dollar bills that they cannot pay to do their PhD. research with. Highways are taxpayers assets. The plutocracy likes highways just the way they are, They break down, crack open, a lot of potholes. But it's eight to nine inches of cement and asphalt. There are better highways that can be built--six inches of cement, virtually maintenance free, the highways breath, they have a plastic sheet half-way in between so they breath in the summer and in the winter. They don't buckle and crack. But it's less asphalt, less concrete, less maintenance and repair. Who's controlling that taxpayer asset? Look at all the idling cars waiting in line while there are detours. Look at all the axles that are broken. Look at the wear-and-tear, and the fuel waste. Look at the asphalt which doesn't have . . . [tape goes blank here and then comes back in with:] . . . city office buildings would be considerably lower. Reference for that?--one of the country's most brilliant physicists who's now working at Berkeley on energy conservation, professor Arthur Rosenfeld. If you're doubtful, write him, and find out. We have a lot of assets. A lot of assets that are not in the control of a broad spectrum of citizenry. So what do we do? We start taking control of presidential campaigns. We don't let advance people, and photo opportunity specialists, and other campaign slicksters, completely shape the tempo, timing, content, locale, of presidential campaigns, leaving us with nothing but a passive, bystander role. That's the purpose of the citizen's campaign in New Hampshire to which I recommend some of you might want to contemplate volunteering for. A little card will be passed around, which indicates whether you want to help, where, etc. Volunteer time and talent. We want your talent and your time. To do what? To start putting up on the front agenda, the new democratic toolkit for the 21st century. We are operating with citizen rights and remedies that are anywhere from two hundred to a hundred years old. And we're up against a 21st century array of skills and tools by corporate and governmental powerholders. It's not a fair contest at all. To give you an illustration. Two hundred years ago we got free speech--first amendment--ratified. That meant that a big merchant in Boston and a worker in Boston could get up on a soapbox on the Boston Commons and tell it the way it is. Who could hear? As many people as wanted to congregate, and as powerful as the speaker's voice could be. Two hundred years later, a worker can get up on the soapbox in the Boston Commons and say his or her pitch. But the big merchant can buy television time and reach millions of people. There is a decibel level quality to the exercise of our first amendment rights due to new technology. What is the tool? The tool is to recognize that we own the public airwaves. We're entitled to have our own network, let's call it the audience network. It could be chartered for legal purposes as a non-profit federal corporation (chartered by Congress the way the Red Cross and the Salvation Army is). It would be a private-sector corporation, chartered by Congress, open to any viewers and listeners, and the asset which would be returned to it would be one- hour of prime time TV and drive-time radio. Therefore we will become part of a communications commonwealth that will let us develop our electronic literacy, and let us put on television what we want to put on through a deliberative process that reflects great diversity among its membership, which is voluntary, from entertainment to politics to science to mobilization of the community. Doesn't cost the taxpayer a cent, voluntary to the viewers and listeners, and it's our property being returned. Now if we had that, and if we had a cable viewer's group--because cable is a monopoly and there's a reciprocity that should be accorded monopolies, and one of them should be the presentation of the cable viewer's address and telephone number and description at least ten times a day on all cable channels so the cable viewers can voluntarily band together and organize and have their own staff and begin feeding back the kind of programming they want. If we just had *that* tool, the political campaigns would never be the same again. We would be able to foresee and forestall problems instead of confront them after they've erupted volcanically and festered and damaged. We would be able to bring the best humane value systems together with the best evidence and the best technology to begin solving problems which we shouldn't have. Because the solutions have been frozen on the shelf and not applied, we really can't solve the housing problem in this country. Why are we the only country in the western world without universal health insurance? Why are we the only country in the western world without free pre-natal care? Why are we the only country in the western world without children's allowances? Even in the third world countries, they have certain social services that are ahead of ours. I was speaking to someone from Mexico recently from a town about eighty miles from Mexico City, and they were calmly saying how they went to the clinic when they were pregnant, and they got free care. We don't ordinarily think of Mexico as being ahead of us in social services. We better stop just thinking we're number one, and start looking into the areas where we're not number one, we're not number ten, we're not number twenty, in too many areas. We're 21st in infant mortality incidence for example. I certainly don't think we're number one in the way we manage our prisons. I don't think we're number one in the way we treat the elderly. Try the Netherlands, try Sweden, try West Germany, try Norway. That's the tool, the communication tool. How about voters? Your vote is diluted by money and politics-- campaign finance money, PACs. Your vote is diluted in a variety of ways. What would be the new democratic tools? It would be to consider public financing of campaigns, with a certain amount of free access to radio and TV time by all ballot-qualified candidates. That gets politicians off the auction block where they are now for sale or for rent, depending on their versatility. Not diluting the vote would also deal with the problem of the one-party district. In ninety percent of House congressional districts in this country, the elections are not competitive, as defined by the challenger having less than twenty-five thousand dollars for a campaign kitty to challenge the incumbent. Seventy- four congressional districts had no opponent on the ballot of the opposite party in the 1990 congressional elections. It would also deal with the question of limited terms. Whether we generically want to limit congressional, and other terms, as presidential terms are limited. It would deal with "None Of The Above," statutorily established. And above all it would deal with the direct democracy back-up when representative democracy is a mockery. That is the initiative referendum recall which is in over twenty-two states, and which together with electronic media access, can become a much more potent force and accountability for elected and appointed officials in terms of their *use* and their success of passage: the initiative referendum recall. The taxpayer rights--this tools of democracy--do you know that in the federal courts today, the taxpayer has virtually no standing to sue the government no matter how corrupt, fraudulent and wasteful the activity. The federal judges now say, `you are only a taxpayer, you have no standing to sue. Go home. You're not even going to be able to *try* to go through the courtroom door and prove your case.' The government buys almost everything we buy as a consumer. They buy energy, pharmaceuticals, clothing, food, insurance, telecommunications, and as the big consumer that they are, they can leverage safety and health standards for all the rest of the consumers in the country--get more value for the tax-procurement dollar, stimulate innovation, advance recycling, set models for pollution control, further critical markets for solar energy, etc., without adding any more to the tax burden. Indeed, it would tend to reduce tax expenditures by improving the efficiency of the tax- procurement dollar. You won't find that discussed very much in the campaign, even though, the procurement dollar by the U.S. Army many years ago, brought us generic drugs over the opposition of the drug industry; even though airbags broke through in cars, not due to the Department of Transportation (which was controlled by Reagan's anti- airbag White House--would you believe he campaigned against airbags in 1980? I guess it fit his definition of freedom: to give people freedom to go through a windshield.), it was the General Services Administration buying fifty-five hundred cars, putting out bids for airbag-equipped cars for federal employees that brought Ford back into airbags, then Chrysler, then the rest of them. One out of every five people in this auditorium, on the average, will be saved from death or significant injury some time in their life by an inflated airbag. That's an illustration of the break-through power of government procurement after eighteen years of log-jam under the regulatory structure, influenced by General Motors at the Department of Transportation. These are the kind of tools. How do you organize taxpayers? They should have a check-off on the 1040 return. I suggested that to the head of the IRS in the Carter administration. I said, "Look, don't you taxpayer input? Don't you want taxpayer feedback? Don't you want taxpayers to take an interest in the tax system and how money is spent?" So he said, "Well those are fairly regarded goals." I said, "Well why don't you put a square on the 1040 which says `taxpayers you can get a little pamphlet on how you can join the taxpayers group, and if you want to add to your tax bill and join it with the dues, the government has good computers and they can whisk it over into a trust fund that will fund the taxpayers group and you as a member will be the electorate for the directors and the staff. Why don't you do that? It's just printing. It doesn't cost virtually anything extra." And he said, "Well I'm opposed to that." And I asked him why, and he said because he thought it would add undue clutter to the tax forms. Those were his exact words: undue clutter. Now you can see where there are carriers that provide facility for us to band together at our choice. The true index of democratic rights is that they can be used by anyone--it doesn't matter who they are, how much money they have, what party they're registered by. The true spirit of a person who believes in democracy is to advance universally accessible rights and remedies. And we have all kinds of carriers which we are not using, and as consumers, here are some of the carriers. If we're going to give legal monopoly rights to utilities, what's the reciprocity? Recommended, that they be required to put a little postage-paid envelope inside their monthly bill, that they send to you. It falls out. It says it's not printed by the utility, it's printed by the consumer group chartered under the reform legislation. It says `Do you want to join this utility consumer group to deal with electric, telephone, gas, water, environmental and economic issues? If you do, send ten dollars and you'll be part of this group with a full-time staff to advocate, inquire, research, organize, and communicate.' Now that doesn't cost the utility anything--the insert is paid for by the consumer group. It doesn't cost anymore postage because they don't use up their one ounce. It's voluntary for anybody to join. And once they join, you have a countervailing pressure, a collective community intelligence, that can move forward on telecommunications and utility policies which involve everything from nuclear power to satellite communication use. Now this idea was proposed by us, and enacted into law in Illinois, Wisconsin, San Diego, and, by referendum, the state of Oregon. Along came the Supreme Court of the United States and ruled that requiring a monopoly utility to carry this envelope--even though it doesn't cost it a dime--violated the utilities first amendment right to remain *silent* and not succumb to an irresistible urge to respond to the polemic in this insert. Now next time you take anthropology course and you hear some of your classmates snicker about those primitive tribes in New Guinea who ascribe animistic qualities to rocks and trees and totems, you can stand up and say, `When it comes to ascribing animistic qualities to inanimate objects, no society in the history of the world has gone as far as our society has, in giving corporations these animistic rights.' The corporation is an inanimate institution--we're not talking about the executives or the employees, they have flesh-and- blood, human rights as any of the rest of us do. The *corporation's* first amendment rights was violated to remain *silent,* and here it is a monopoly, which contracts with lawyers, PR firms and advertisers to propagandize consumers into accepting higher rates and then is permitted by this same legal system to hand you, the ratepayer, the bill. Now this was too much even for Rehnquist who, in a brilliant dissent, ridiculed and excoriated Lewis Powell, a former utility lawyer from Richmond, Virginia, who wrote the majority opinion, five-three, the decision. That will be turned around I think, in the foreseeable future. But in the meantime, all of those government envelopes that go to you, can be carriers for these kinds of invitations so that we can band together, as bank consumers, as insurance consumers, as utility ratepayers, and develop a community intelligence and a countervailing force, to dissolve that plutocracy more closely to the level of a true democracy. What about workers? The NLRB is now a management tool. Those of you that may have read that great little book by a Harvard graduate called "Which Side Are You On?"--it just came out a few months ago-- it shows so clearly that, compared with other western countries, industrial workers have very little right to organize anymore. That workers can be fired in an industrial plant if they start showing they want to organize a trade union. They then can appeal through the NLRB, it takes an average of three and one-half years and is costly. And by the time that comes around there's not much left of the active worker's metabolism is there? Now in Canada and Western Europe if the workers sign cards and they vote--it's a majority vote--there's a trade union, that's the end of it. That's not the end of it in the United States, and that's one reason why the trade unions--apart from their often unimaginative leadership and too frequent corruption--are now down to sixteen percent of all workers in the United States are organized compared to Canada's thirty-two percent. That's a very important reason, just in terms of the right to organize. They should also have the right to be ethical whistle-blowers and have due process of law so they're not fired or ostracized or demoted. They should also have the right to have some sort of deliberative control over their pension money investments. It would of course be enough just to have their pension investments disclosed and what's going on by the banks, and insurance companies, and corporate employers--it's *their* money, they should want to decide whether they want to invest it to feed the RJ Reynolds-Nabisco merger, which was twenty-four billion dollars of capital, or whether they want to bring it back to their own community in Gary, Indiana, or Toledo, Ohio, in order to improve the conditions in their own community where *they* live and where their money was earned. There is also and finally the access to justice. We have now the Quayle-Bush-Reagan trilogy which is trying to federally pre-empt your right to have your day in court if you're injured--in state court-- against manufacturers of dangerous products: pharmaceuticals, flamable fabrics, toxics, unsafe cars. They don't say it that way. Notice the use of language. Mr. Quayle says, "There is too much litigiousness in our country." No data to support it, because the data contradicts it. He then says, "These suits are frivolous." And he then says, "They are damaging our global competitiveness." This is exactly the line of multi- national corporate goliaths who want to use the phrase "global competitiveness" and "international trade pacts" as a way to drive down our rights, remedies, and standard of living to lower foreign country denominations. Lloyds of London makes no bones about it. They want to destroy our tort law system and bring it down to the level of England where it's almost impossible to win a case against the manufacturers of a hazardous product, or even to get a jury trial, or to get punitive damages, or to get pain-and-suffering. Now most students--even law students--are not privy to this important pillar of our democracy. Democracies have basically three important pillars: civil rights, civil liberties, and safety rights, broadly conceived. And the ability of people to challenge powerful corporations and bring them down to a reasonable level playing field because they have to be judged by a jury of their peers, and by a judge subject to appellate review. And they have to disgorge some of their internal files and memorandums that expose the asbestos disaster, the Dalcon shield mutilation, among others--those weren't regulatory agencies, they don't have the *courage* to do that. But, an injured worker, with a contingent-fee lawyer, can take these companies on, and hold them accountable. That is what is being driven into the ground. And attack after attack by the Reagan-Bush regime is going unanswered by the Democrats in Congress. When Mr. Mitchell comes here you might want to ask him. Mr. Mitchell now has been politicized way beyond his fundamental intelligence. He is fundamentally one of the most intelligent and compassionate politicians on the scene. But he is now a prisoner of the very power structure that internally he would probably like to change. He was the architect of the pre-midnight pay grab last July for his Senators, who just couldn't make it on a hundred and one thousand a year plus pension benefits, housing allowances, and perks a mile long. Breaking the moral authority of the elected official at a time of recession, stagnant minimum wages, corruption, waste, unemployment, and instead of setting leadership-by-example they say, `O.K. folks we know you're all suffering there, and we're running a debt-broke government with four hundred billion dollar deficits, but we just can't make it on a hundred and one thou' plus perks and benefits.' This is the same Congress that froze the federal minimum wage a $3.35 an *hour* from 1981 to 1989, April, telling seven million Americans that they can make it on seven thousand dollars and change a *year,* but they couldn't make it on eighty-nine thousand dollars (which was their pre-pay grab level). That's how they produce cynicism, and turn-off, and revulsion. And they don't know that political leadership's greatest asset is example, setting example. And Senator Mitchell should be asked about access to justice because I know what he believes. He believes that people *should* have access to civil justice systems if they are injured. He doesn't want to federally pre-empt product liability law. And he doesn't want to restrict and regulate state judges and juries. And he doesn't want to cut back on pain- and-suffering like Mr. Reagan, who in May, 1986 proposed to the Congress, that all injured people in the country, who filed suit against the perpetrators of their harm be held to a *maximum* limit of $250,000 pain-and-suffering for their *lifetime*. He did not say that insurance company *executives* should be held to a $250,000 salary--the kinds of executives who are making a *million* dollars a year without *any* pain-and-suffering. He didn't put a cap on insurance premiums. He didn't put a cap on insurance company profits. He put a cap on the most *vulnerable* people of all--the political bully that he always has been--on the most vulnerable people in the country: paraplegics, quadraplegics, brain-damaged infants, who are trying to get a little compensation and whose cases would generate deterrents for greater care in the future by these perpetrators. Ask him about it. You should ask. You should ask yourself how little you know about the record of these candidates. How little you know about their voting records, other than that which they wish to tell you. The National Safe Workplace Institute, a citizen group, run by a man whose brother was killed in a construction accident, he was a Vietnam Vet, the head of this institute, he started it in Chicago, probably the chief monitor of OSHA. He put out a report two weeks ago ranking the fifty states on their occupational health and safety programs. Arkansas came in last. Mr. Clinton should answer to that. Harkin and Kerry raised their own pay after Harkin opposed it before he was re-elected in Iowa in 1990. He should be asked about that. Their records should be common parlance for anybody interested in participating in the civic culture. And it can't be done by relying on them. They'll put forth--obviously--the rosiest picture, and they'll tell you what they think they want you to know, and not discuss their other performances and records. Let me conclude on this point. No matter how well-intentioned these candidates are, they can't deliver, and they haven't been able to deliver once they're elected, because on one yardstick measurement after another, out country is declining. Problems are getting worse that were considered bad ten-twenty years ago. And they likely to get even worse. Read the papers. Whether you are concerned about fiscal deficits, health and safety, environment, worker rights, consumer well-being, housing, infant care, you name it. It's not getting much better. In many cases it's getting much worse. The unaccountability of government has become a complex and little-studied phenomena except a public grunt here and there. The unaccountability of government has gone to the point where the very use of the law is the instrument of illegality. The very use of the law is the instrument of illegality. The color of the law. And it has become so intricate, and so broad-based, that law schools don't even study it: government lawlessness. Not just Watergate. The challenge to you is two-fold as I see it. Do you want to participate in this experiment of a citizen's campaign in New Hampshire, and in Massachusetts, where there is a visibility given to the need for a "None Of The Above" option--a citizen agenda--bringing the tools of democracy up to the challenges that confront it, some of which I've elaborated this evening, and to develop more self- confidence among citizens so they can establish their citizen forums in their community and *summon the candidates* and begin shaping the campaign and vectoring out to the rest of the country in a more genuine and authentic manner, rather than on the most polished five- minute delivery of the leading candidate. So you can sign this and the people who are running the campaign, the citizens, many of them volunteers, will be in touch with you. The second is a little bit more long-range. Think of what you want to do in life, not from the point-of-view of the most available, lucrative opportunity that comes before you. You'll regret it. There are sixty-five and seventy year-old corporate lawyers in New York, Boston and Washington, who've made a ton of money, and been elected head of their bar associations, and have been described as pillars of their community, who look back on how they used their time with great sadness. Because they were using their time primarily as secondary human beings, animated and absorbed by their retainers. Not as primary human beings seeking justice under the law and shaping the justice system in our country. Every occupation and profession that you go into will give you that seductive opportunity to make a lot of money, and then to look back with sadness on what you might have been, and what you could have done. The next fifty years of your productive life, are going to witness either the most spectacular breakthroughs in establishing mechanisms of peace and justice and human fulfillment, or the most spectacular disasters of greenhouse effects, pestilence, famine and violence. You want to take your pick: you want to work for perpetrators, you want to work for victims; do you want to work for light, or do you want to work for lucre? This is the time for you to contemplate it. The dialogue on campuses today is disgraceful in terms of its priority, in terms of its importance. And while the dialogue may be of personal concern to you, remember the following: you're more than just a person absorbed with personal concerns, if you want to live in a world that spells humanity instead of brutality. Bring the sources of secular power into your deliberations. Ask yourself how corporatized has Harvard University become. Ask yourself why Harvard watches inquiries that corporate university contracts be disclosed. That the president of Harvard University have a State of the Student address every January followed by sessions with students in auditoriums to discuss the address which would be circulated in pamphlet form throughout the student body. Ask yourself why your roles are increasingly subordinated to other functions, commercial in nature, of the university's players and administrators. Ask yourself why you never have a day where you meet the University's rulers. Do you know who your rulers are? The last count was that there was seven of them. Can any of the students state their names? Why don't you have a day where you meet them? One would think they'd want to meet you. That's what they're meeting for up there in that nice conference room. If you don't know, if you don't desire, how to shape a university subculture in a more democratic way, when you have great leverage and great potential allies among alumni and faculty, it's doubtful whether you've prepared yourself for elaborating the democratic societies of the future which you would play a part. Thank you very much. some Question And Answers Q: Your critique of corporate control of American society has a loud ring of truth to it and I think by injecting it into the presidential campaign, you're performing a great public service. My question relates more to one of political strategy, especially for those people who agree with your views, than to the substance of your critique. As you know there has been some speculation that you're considering running as an independent candidate next November for president. And I'm wondering how you would respond to people who feel that by doing so, and by draining votes away from the Democratic nominee, you might very well, however inadvertently, turn the election over to Bush. RN: Well, I'm not running as a candidate--independent or otherwise--I've made that clear up in New Hampshire. We're running something that is described in my prior remarks as a citizen's campaign focusing very heavily on the citizen empowerment agenda, the tools of democracy, so we can enrich the quality of the campaign. You should know that if I ever decided to run for office there would be absolutely no ambiguity about it. The Massachusetts statute allows the Secretary of State to put non-candidate's names on the ballot, according to a very discretionary set of criteria (which we don't have to go into now), so that that was the basis of which I was put on the ballot. And I want to discuss these issues with people in Massachusetts in the sense that that slot on the ballot represents a certain set of principles and a certain agenda, and if it gets enough attention and support, the candidates on the ballot, whose principle quest is to get elected, will have to pay more attention. So that subsequently in Washington, when all these citizen's groups from around the country and their Washington headquarters go up on Capitol hill and say, "We do want an insert in the Savings and Loan Bill so that bank customers can organize and deal with mortgage funds, red- lining, and prudent banking," the politicians say, "What? What was that? We've never heard of that. We'll have to set that aside and deliberate it in the next decade." Q: First of all I want to say I've been an admirer of yours for over twenty-five years since the mid-1960s and I appreciate your comments about government lawlessness which I think is very widespread. One other comment before I ask my question--we *are* number one, we have a number one rating of the highest incarceration rate in the world, per 100,000 citizens. And finally what could you recommend to try to address the problem of government lawlessness and hold our government officials accountable? Accountability I agree with you is the issue. For example the FBI, police, CIA lawyers--how do you get to those groups? RN: You get to them from the top, from the bottom, and from the side. You get to them from the top by having new political movements, and parties. You get to them from the bottom by developing community-based advocacy units that can resist and expose. For example, the way the FBI got into the student files in the 1950s and 1960s: through university approval--there was no resistance, no infrastructure of resistance there to expose it and to do something about it which would have stopped it early on. And you get to them on the side, by allowing what we call "government accountability lawsuits" where people who have standing to sue can get the officials discharged, fired, fined, etc. The only law now that would prevent what permits that in a very modest way is the Freedom of Information Act where you could persuade the judge that the withholding of information was so outrageous by the government official that the government official could be suspended for thirty days without pay. That's about as far as the lateral challenge through the judiciary has gone. Q: I like your message very much and I support a "None Of The Above" option and thank you. There is a candidate who I do like who is also on the democratic ballot, and his name is Larry Agran, and I'd like to ask you what you think of him, of his candidacy, and especially what you think of the way his candidacy--and this is a way of getting into yours and other peoples--the way his candidacy is being handled both by the Democratic National Committee in terms of the debates, and by the press. I notice that the "New York Times" even in their editorials refer to--they don't even bother to use the subterfuge anymore of the six, now five, *major* candidates, they even said, the six *announced* candidates in a major editorial not long ago. RN: Well I knew Larry Agran just after he got out of law school and as some of you may know, he went to California and he was mayor for a number of years of Irvine, California. But he was a very unique mayor. He would develop agendas and connect with cities all over the world in terms of developing a constituency of mayors facing problems that everyone confronts and he was also always thinking, always innovating, in the mayors office. But notice what he's coming up against. In our country there is permissible pool of about five hundred people who are considered presidential candidates if they choose, themselves, to be. That is members of congress, governors, former governors, and president and vice president. That's roughly the pool. Anyone else is considered a futile wild card or a self-aggrandized egotist. To use a little redundancy. Now the question is, why can't a former mayor of a city, with an established record of some significance, be considered seriously? Well, the platform isn't big enough, the table isn't big enough for the debates. It's ungainly. Where do you draw the line? This is what happens when we have to get on our knees and beg the networks to give three or four debate opportunities for the candidates. So I sympathize very much with him, and I hope that if he persists he'll finally break through, at least on some of the televised debates, or someone taking up his cudgel. In past years people have said to me, `Who do you prefer for president?' And just to make the point I say, `Ken Stoffer' (sp?). They said, `Ken Stoffer?' I said, `Well, you asked me and I told you.' They said, `Well who's he?' And I said, `Well, he started out as a farmer in South Dakota, became a civic activist, ran for governor (unsuccessfully), became chairperson of the state utility commission, and has a lot to commend himself.' And then this silence--nobody wants to follow it up. You, what they're really asking you when they say, `Who do you favor for president?' is `Which of fifteen celebrities in the political sphere, do you favor?' Now, do you realize how much talent is being discounted with that attitude? Think of the people around the country who have proven records of achievement, who are solid, who are consistent, who are open minded. All the talent, and they're completely precluded from running for political office because they're not willing to go through this ladder from city council to mayor, to governor or to members of congress, and play the political game so that the politicians can support them. Or to be corrupted by political campaign money. So they go around with marbles in their mouth. So we really have got to challenge that convention that is stifling the talent. Q: Do you have any specific suggestions as to how that might be done in this situation to break the lock that they have? RN: Yes, well he did it by challenging the debate protocol, he got on the debate. Another way is to demand that the other candidates be given a debate themselves, even if they're not in with the major ones over cable. Q: And your name, I understand it, is not included by pollsters. That's another area: in polling they will not include certain people's names and I understand yours is not yet one they're willing to include. RN: That's not as important as mobilizing citizens and being able to write-in or getting on the ballot. The important thing is that the media has a very novelty orientation to covering the campaign. For example, Jerry Brown hammers again and again on money and politics and they get sick of it. `O.K. Jerry, you did it once, and it's *very* important, we know that politics are shaped by money, but, what are you repeating it so often for?' See they try to portray a candidate as a tired, one-note candidate. And we all know that most of the pioneering, social justice breakthroughs were repeated quite often, weren't they, in American history? You want to count how many times the case against slavery was made before it was heard? Q: Have you read B.F. Schumacher's, (sp?) "Small Is Beautiful"? RN: Um-hum. Q: I've taped you, Bernie Sanders and Jerry Brown here. You all read B.F. Schumacher's book, and I would assume that you found it interesting and in fact quite applicable. Yet what I don't understand is this: that if it's applicable to economics--small is beautiful--why isn't it applicable to government? And in that I ask this question: Would you support the bust-up of the empire, the United States of America empire, as we have witnessed in the Soviet Union, so that the ten or twenty or fifty nations of North America could finally emerge and be manageable? RN: Well, let's see. Would I want Maine to be dominated by the paper and pulp industry completely, instead of being able to be lent a hand from outside of Maine. Q: Sir, I'm from Maine, and for twenty years--from Augusta, Maine--I've been involved in politics up there, in fact I've served on the PERT (??) board, for twenty years we were 49th in per capita income. This past year we've slipped to 50th. What's the advantage of staying with the empire? RN: Larry, the reason why I raised that is the following: is that if you break it up politically and you don't break it up corporately, you are making it even worse. The corporate government runs the political government. And unless you deal first with the corporate power, you are basically setting the stage for company states and company towns, even worse than what you now see in Dupont and Delaware or-- what's the name of Muskie's home town?--Rumford, Maine. I mean--you know--the corporations control the *rivers* for heavens sake. The rivers. Riparian rights are in advance in Maine. These paper and pulp industries control the use, diversion, daming of the rivers. We did a book on this called "The Paper Plantation" a few years ago. By the way I might say that you're seeing more of these separatist movements in Canada and the West, Quebec, northern California counties now have organized to split off from California because they can't get their say. But you wouldn't agree with some of these people. You wouldn't agree with some of their reasons. Some of them represent some pretty powerful vested interests, natural resource- based vested interests. Q: Yes, you obviously have a lot of ideas and a lot to say. And you also have a unique opportunity--like you said only a very limited number of people can be taken seriously as a candidate, but you have the national recognition and national groundswell of support. Why don't you make yourself a full-fledged candidate and therefore get much more visibility for your campaign? RN: There's several responses to that. The easy one is that I'm a citizen advocate, not a politician. That means that I don't like to censor myself for my contributors, to begin with. The second is, let me give you a little organic metaphor: democracy is like a tree--branches, twigs, fruit, trunk, root. The people are the root and the trunk, the elected officials are the branches and twigs. If the root and the trunk do not provide the nutrients, the branches and the twigs become very brittle and don't produce fruit. I've spent all these years working at the root and the trunk, and I'm not at *all* persuaded that the root and the trunk is sending enough nutrients for *any*body to aspire to become a branch or a twig. For a copy of this casette tape please write to: Roger Leisner, P.O. Box 2705, Augusta, Maine 04338 Or call 207/622-6629 for a free copy of the Radio Free Maine tape catalog, please send a self-addressed stamped envelope--52 cents postage--to the aforementioned address. Thank you and good night. -- I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. . . . Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money-power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. --- Abraham Lincoln (quoted in Jack London's "The Iron Heel").