Subject: Ralph Nader: Plutocracy and the Citizen Agenda for '92 and beyond
Status: RO

(i have postscript versions of files like this (and the rosalie bertell stuff)
for anyone who is interested (*and* has access to a postscript printer) in
a prettified hardcopy version.  just lemme know.)

Article: 774 of sgi.talk.ratical
From: dave@ratmandu.esd.sgi.com (dave "who can do? ratmandu!" ratcliffe)
Subject: Ralph Nader: Plutocracy and the Citizen Agenda for '92 and beyond
Summary: growing up corporate, we never think of what we own/is the commonwealth
Keywords: the plutocracy continues to take more and more control of what we own
Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc.
Date: Mon, 17 Aug 1992 15:11:20 GMT
Lines: 1267


  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").



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