February 21, 2000

Washington, D.C.

In Spanish

Statement of Ralph Nader, Announcing His Candidacy for the Green Party's

Nomination for President

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

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

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

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

has increasingly dominated our political economy. This control by the

corporate government over our political government is creating a widening

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

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

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

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

seventies. At that time, informed and dedicated citizens powered their

concerns through the channels of government to produce laws that bettered

the lives of millions of Americans.

Today we face grave and growing societal

problems in health care, education, labor,

energy and the environment. These are

problems for which active citizens have

solutions, yet their voices are not carrying

across the democracy gap. Citizen groups

and individual thinkers have generated a

tremendous capital of ideas, information,

and solutions to the point of surplus, while

our government has been drawn away from

us by a corporate government. Our political

leadership has been hijacked.

Citizen advocates have no other choice but

to close the democracy gap by direct political

means. Only effective national political

leadership will restore the responsiveness of

government to its citizenry. Truly progressive

political movements do not just produce

more good results; they enable a flowering

of progressive citizen movements to

effectively advance the quality of our

neighborhoods and communities outside of politics.

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

incumbents and candidates daily extol their own inflated virtues, paint

complex issues with trivial brush strokes, and propose plans quickly

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

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

watch people dedicate themselves to improving their country while their

government leaders turn their backs, or worse, actively block fair treatment

for citizens. It is necessary to launch a sustained effort to wrest control of our

democracy from the corporate government and restore it to the political

government under the control of citizens.

This campaign will challenge all Americans who are concerned with systemic

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

consider themselves progressives, liberals, conservatives, or others.

Presidential elections should be a time for deep discussions among the

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

addressed because of the gross power mismatch between the narrow vested

interests and the public or common good.

The unconstrained behavior of big business is subordinating our democracy

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

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

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

lobbies and their law firms have produced a commanding, multi-faceted and

powerful juggernaut. They flood public elections with cash, and they use their

media conglomerates to exclude, divert, or propagandize. They brandish

their willingness to close factories here and open them abroad if workers do

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

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

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

escapes, enormous corporate welfare subsidies, federal giveaways, and

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

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

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

has warned about societies allowing excessive influences of mercantile or

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

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

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

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

Franklin Roosevelt, Supreme Court Justices Louis Brandeis and William

Douglas, among others, eloquently warned about what Thomas Jefferson

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

governments. The struggle between the forces of democracy and plutocracy

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

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

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

injustices and shortcomings proliferate.

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

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

there finally was a constructive responsiveness by government. Corporations,

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

affected constituencies, both directly and through their public representatives

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

safer, and with greater opportunities. The earlier nineteenth century

democratic struggles by abolitionists against slavery, by farmers against

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

against the brutal workplace conditions of the early industrial and mining era

helped mightily to make America and its middle class what it is today. They

demanded that economic power subside or be shared.

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

competitive markets, equal opportunity and higher standards of living and

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

businesses.

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

historical quests for justice. Harnessing political power to corporate greed

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

blocking ready solutions or improvements from being applied.

It is truly remarkable that for almost every widespread need or injustice in

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

businesses and farms that have shown how to meet these needs or end

these injustices. However, all the innovative solutions in the world will

accomplish little if the injustices they address or the problems they solve

have been shoved aside because plutocracy reigns and democracy wanes.

For all optimistic Americans, when their issues are thus swept from the table,

it becomes civic mobilization time.

Consider the economy, which business commentators say could scarcely be

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

measure the performance of the economy and go beyond the quantitative

indices of annual economic growth, structural deficiencies become readily

evident. The complete dominion of traditional yardsticks for measuring

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

weakened democracy to address how and why a majority of Americans are

not benefitting from this prosperity in their daily lives. Despite record

economic growth, corporate profits, and stock market highs year after year, a

stunning array of deplorable conditions still prevails year after year. For

example:

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

1979

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

decade, by far the highest among comparable western countries

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

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

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

time for family and community

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

buyer concentration and industrial agriculture

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

and clinics, library closings, antiquated mass transit and more

Corporate welfare programs, paid for largely by middle-class

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

continue to rise along with government giveaways of taxpayer assets

such as public forests, minerals and new medicines

Affordable housing needs are at record levels while secondary

mortgage market companies show record profits

The number of Americans without health insurance grows every year

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

deficits ($270 billion in 1999)

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

Personal bankruptcies are at a record level

Personal savings are dropping to record lows and personal assets are

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

the poorest 120 million Americans combined

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

be grossly inadequate

Motor vehicle fuel efficiency averages are actually declining and,

overall, energy conservation efforts have slowed, while renewable

energy takes a back seat to fossil fuel and atomic power subsidies

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

one percent of the wealthiest people have more financial wealth than

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

large western nation

Despite annual declines in total business liability costs, business

lobbyists drive for more privileges and immunities for their

wrongdoing.

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

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

recession or depression occur? One import of these contrasts is clear:

economic growth has been decoupled from economic progress for many

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

where impoverished assembly line workers suffering from carpal tunnel

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

where downsized white and blue collar employees are hired at lesser

compensation, if they are lucky, where the focus of top business executives

is no longer to provide a service that attracts customers, but rather to aquire

customers through mergers and acquisitions. How long can the paper

economy of speculation ignore its effects on the real economy of working

families?

Pluralistic democracy has enlarged markets and created the middle class. Yet

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

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

traditional countervailing forces that have saved American corporate

capitalism from itself.

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

strengthened these markets along with protecting consumers and investors.

Antitrust enforcement helped protect our country from monopoly capitalism

and stimulated competition. Trade unions enfranchised workers and helped

mightily to build the middle class for themselves, benefiting also non-union

laborers. Producer and consumer cooperatives helped save the family farm,

electrified rural areas, and offered another model of economic activity. Civil

litigation-the right to have your day in court-helped deter producers of

harmful products and brought them to some measure of justice. At the same

time, the public learned about these hazards.

Public investment-from naval shipyards to Pentagon drug discoveries against

infectious disease to public power authorities-provided yardsticks to measure

the unwillingness of big business to change and respond to needs. Even

under a rigged system, shareholder pressures on management sometimes

have shaken complacency, wrongdoing, and mismanagement. Direct

consumer remedies, including class actions, have given pause to crooked

businesses and have stopped much of this unfair competition against honest

businesses. Big business lobbies opposed all of this progress strenuously,

but they lost and America gained. Ultimately, so did a chastened but myopic

business community.

Now, these checkpoints face a relentless barrage from rampaging corporate

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

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

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

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

to curb corporate misbehavior would not even pass through Congressional

committees today. Planning ahead, multinational corporations shaped the

World Trade Organization's autocratic and secretive governing procedures so

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

proposals in member countries.

Up against the corporate government, voters find themselves asked to

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

takes the marching orders from their campaign paymasters and their future

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

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

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

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

ballot-qualified candidates.

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

unions stagger under stagnant leadership and discouraged rank and file.

Furthermore, weak labor laws actually obstruct new trade union organization

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

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

another and escaping national jurisdictions more and more. Under these

circumstances, workers are entitled to stronger labor organizing laws and

rights for their own protection in order to deal with highly organized

corporations.

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

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

degradation. Government research and development generated whole new

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

government can facilitate the voluntary banding together of interested

citizens into democratic civic institutions. Such civic organizations can create

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

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

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

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

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

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

Taxpayers have very little legal standing in the federal courts and little

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

scrutiny of these matters between elections is necessary. Facilities can be

established to accomplish a closer oversight of taxpayer assets and how tax

dollars (apart from social insurance) are allocated. This is an arena which is,

at present, shaped heavily by corporations that, despite record profits, pay

far less in taxes as a percent of the federal budget than in the 1950s and

60s.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

our expectations and resolve our society's deficiencies and injustices.

A few illustrative questions can begin to raise our expectations and suggest

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

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

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

our children?

Are we reversing the disinvestment in our distressed inner cities and

rural areas and using creatively some of the huge capital pools in the

economy to make these areas more livable, productive and safe?

Are we able to end homelessness and wretched housing conditions

with modern materials, designs, and financing mechanisms, without

bank and insurance company redlining, to meet the affordable

housing needs of millions of Americans?

Are we getting the best out of known ways to spread renewable,

efficient energy throughout the land to save consumers money and to

head off global warming and other land-based environmental

damage from fossil fuels and atomic energy?

Are we getting the best out of the many bright and public-spirited civil

servants who know how to improve governments but are rarely asked

by their politically-appointed superiors or members of Congress?

Are we able to provide wide access to justice for all aggrieved people

so that we apply rigorously the admonition of Judge Learned Hand,

"If we are to keep our democracy, there must be one commandment:

Thou Shall Not Ration Justice"?

Can we extend overseas the best examples of our country's

democratic processes and achievements instead of annually using

billions in tax dollars to subsidize corporate munitions exports, as

Republican Senator Mark Hatfield always used to decry?

Can we stop the giveaways of our vast commonwealth assets and

become better stewards of the public lands, better investors of

trillions of dollars in worker pension monies, and allow broader access

to the public airwaves and other assets now owned by the people but

controlled by corporations?

Can we counter the coarse and brazen commercial culture, including

television which daily highlights depravity and ignores the quiet civic

heroisms in its communities, a commercialism that insidiously

exploits childhood and plasters its logos everywhere?

Can we plan ahead as a society so we know our priorities and where

we wish to go? Or do we continue to let global corporations remain

astride the planet, corporatizing everything, from genes to education

to the Internet to public institutions, in short planning our futures in

their image? If a robust civic culture does not shape the future,

corporatism surely will.

To address these and other compelling challenges, we must build a powerful,

self-renewing civil society that focuses on ample justice so we do not have to

desperately bestow limited charity. Such a culture strengthens existing civic

associations and facilitates the creation of others to watch the complexities

and technologies of a new century. Building the future also means providing

the youngest of citizens with citizen skills that they can use to improve their

communities.

This is the foundation of our campaign, to focus on active citizenship, to

create fresh political movements that will displace the control of the

Democratic and Republican Parties, two apparently distinct political entities

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

heads of one political duopoly, the DemRep Party. This duopoly does

everything it can to obstruct the beginnings of new parties including raising

ballot access barriers, entrenching winner-take-all voting systems, and

thwarting participation in debates at election times

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

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

represents, involves motivated, informed voters who comprehend that

"freedom is participation in power," to quote the ancient Roman orator,

Cicero. When citizen participation flourishes, as this campaign will encourage

it to do, human values can tame runaway commercial imperatives. The

myopia of the short-term bottom line so often debases our democratic

processes and our public and private domains. Putting human values first

helps to make business responsible and to put government on the right

track.

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

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

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

worker, taxpayer, and consumer. Comprehensive reform proposals from the

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

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

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

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

war and violence, from foreseeing and forestalling future troubles to

journeying toward brighter horizons, will wither while power inequalities loom

over us.

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

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

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

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

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

leadership), Richard Grossman (on the American history of corporate charters

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

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

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

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

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

Hazel Henderson (on redefining economic development), Barry Commoner

and David Brower (on fundamental environmental regeneration), Wendell

Berry (on the quality of living), Tony Mazzocchi (on a new agenda for labor),

and Law Professor Richard Parker (on a constitutional popular manifesto).

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

but seldom get through the evermore entertainment-focused media. (Note:

mention of these persons does not imply their support for this campaign.)

Our political campaign will highlight active and productive citizens who

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

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

in Congress or other rights accorded to states. The scope of this campaign is

also to engage as many volunteers as possible to help overcome ballot

barriers and to get the vote out. In addition it is designed to leave a

momentum after election day for the various causes that committed people

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

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

focus on fundamentals of broader distribution of power is the touchstone of

this campaign. As Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis declared for the

ages, "We can have a democratic society or we can have great concentrated

wealth in the hands of a few. We cannot have both."

Thank you.

Nader 2000, P.O. Box 18002, Washington, D.C. 20036