Ralph Nader

“ 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. ”

“ Why, apart from your unconditional vote for the $700 billion Wall Street bailout, are these large corporate interests investing so much in Senator Obama? Could it be that in your state Senate record, your U.S. Senate record and your presidential campaign record (favoring nuclear power, coal plants, offshore oil drilling, corporate subsidies including the 1872 Mining Act and avoiding any comprehensive program to crack down on the corporate crime wave and the bloated, wasteful military budget, for example) you have shown that you are their man? ”

“ Giving a company a monopoly over certain products sold to the City means preventing better products from superior competitors coming along to demonstrate what free enterprise means. What will happen if your designated monopolist—say Snapple—or its parent conglomerate Cadbury-Schweppes (a British company) gets into trouble with the law—a criminal conviction, an Enron type scandal, a covered-up product defect? Does the secret agreement with Snapple have an "out" clause? Who pays to remove the stigmatized company logos and signs all over the Big Apple? ”

“ Without instant runoff voting or proportional representation—voting mechanisms that can allow smaller political parties to share in government—it is a task far more difficult than in any other Western democracy. The Republican and Democratic parties command the money and wield the power to exclude other candidates from the presidential debates, and to erect formidable statutory barriers against competitors trying to get on the ballot in many states. But perhaps the most insurmountable obstacle of all is the virtual lock enjoyed by the two major parties on coverage in the national media. ”

“ Nearly a century ago, the brilliant philosopher/mathematician Alfred North Whitehead declared that: “A great society is a society in which its men of business think greatly of their functions.” Today, those heeding the vision of Senator Daniel Webster, who, before the Civil War, said: “Justice, Sir, is the great interest of man on Earth,” will surprise their peers by moving from success to significance. They can begin this transition by connecting with advocates who have decades-long experience in seeking justice under dire conditions, with some success. ”

“ The defense of the "don't negotiate prices" provision in the Medicare bill is the familiar argument that any measure to protect taxpayers or consumers will undermine the development of new drugs. This argument is used time-and-time-again to justify an ever-expanding list of corporate welfare schemes and pricing abuses. Rather than simply accepting the notion that it is necessary to give unlimited pricing power to the patent holders and drug manufacturers (who spend more on marketing than on authentic research) Congress needs to explore more fiscally responsible alternatives. ”

“ The fact that these sports may bring in revenue (though some actually lose money) does not justify their bloated budgets, which take funds away from other men's sports as well as women's sports. Rather than sharing a little of what the football and men's basketball programs spend, the remaining men's and women's sports are forced to fight for the scraps, pitting the deprived against the deprived.
Despite the gains women have made under Title IX, resources for women's sports have never caught up to resources for men's sports at most colleges and universities. ”

“ A dozen men and one woman are making very risky consequential decisions sealed off from much muted dissent inside the Pentagon, the State Department, the CIA and other agencies that have warned the President and his small band of ideological cohorts to think more deeply before they leap. They are launching our nation into winning a war which generates later battles that may not be winnable—at least not without great economic and human costs to our country. ”

“ Senator Wellstone's desk in the Senate is now shrouded in black. His Senate colleagues unanimously passed legislation to apply $10 million to establish the Paul and Sheila Wellstone Center for Community Building in St. Paul, Minnesota. The Wellstones understood to their core the meaning of Jean Monnet's words—"Without people nothing is possible, but without institutions nothing is lasting." The essence of community is the banding together of people to do for themselves and posterity what they could not do alone—both in the civic society and in government. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The whole malpractice insurance premium business amounts to about what this country spends on dog food and is one half of one percent of health care costs in this country. Isn't it about time to focus on malpractice prevention first and foremost, instead of pounding on the rights of hundreds of thousands of Americans who leave their doctors far worse than when they greeted them? ”

“ Soon to join the bailout parade is the nation's insurance industry, which is lobbying the Congress to have the federal government pick up the tab for future losses like those stemming from the attack on the World Trade Center. ”

“ Rabel has diagnosed the state's economic, political and environmental ills through vivid descriptions rooted in irrefutable facts wrapped with irresistible rhetoric.
He shatters the myths that have kept the state in corporate servitude, saying: "In fact, the policies that would create sustained economic growth in West Virginia would also help families and improve healthcare and the environment. But, driven by the falsehoods, Republicans and Democrats want to slash spending where it hurts West Virginia most and change tax laws in ways that help West Virginia least." ”

“ Hundreds of billions of dollars of the nation's wealth-the people's resources-are being openly confiscated by corporate interests.
Government, the presumed protector of the public's property, has become, instead, the enabler of the plunder and theft. ”

“ By contrast, have you ever seen an ad for public transit showing people zooming to work in a modern transit train, while they were snoozing, chatting or reading the newspaper, and racing ahead of a parallel highway clogged with trucks, vans and cars moving in slow motion? ”

“ With the chicken hawk-driven war on Iraq in high gear, Bush and Cheney have learned that the best way to silence the Democratic Party, distract from their miserable domestic outrages and provide the corporate and rich classes with favors is to envelop our nation in fear. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Should you be elected President, it must be more than an unprecedented upward career move following a brilliantly unprincipled campaign that spoke "change" yet demonstrated actual obeisance to the concentration power of the "corporate supremacists." It must be about shifting the power from the few to the many. ”

“ Prior to Title IX, if a woman wanted to pursue a professional degree in college, she could be passed over for a law school or medical school program simply because she was a woman. Since then, the 30-year-old law has proven itself integral to women's rights. From the class rooms and playing fields to the executive suites, Title IX has been a vital tool in advancing equal opportunities for women and girls. ”

“ Everyday, today, tomorrow and the next day, millions of Americans find themselves on clogged, bumper to bumper commutes because there is no convenient mass transit or no mass transit at all where they live and work. ”

“ The increasing concentration of the media business ensures that standardized, homogenized material is squeezed into the narrow news slots on television. The decline in the quality of the networks' news coverage of the presidential campaigns has been unrelenting every four years, a slide that is not made up by their much smaller cable affiliates, such as MSNBC.
Whatever the desires of reporters and their editors, the top echelons of these companies are simply not eager to examine the consequences of concentrated corporate power in the context of political campaign coverage. ”

“ Progressive Democrats are almost as addicted to the "least worst" slumber theory of voter abdication as the forlorn liberals dreaming of Hillary and eight more years of corporate Clintonism and its overseas militaristic forays.
The political energy levels between the smaller number of Tea Partiers and the larger number of politically active progressives is stunning. Progressives wallow in a plethora of excuses for not taking on the Democratic Party establishment, pronounced moribund as long as 2001 in a crisp Washington Post opinion article by former Labor Secretary Robert Reich. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Most progressives express disbelief that the very wealthy would ever support fundamental changes that would shift the power from the hands of the few to the hands of the many and create a much more equitable and prosperous society. We could have a culture that focuses on prevention of problems through justice and not just reacts to the disasters and inequality caused by such problems through charity. ”

“ Don't think for a moment that restricting your court rights will reduce malpractice premiums for physicians. Not only have past restrictions not done so, but insurance industry and company spokespeople have openly said they will not do so and in some cases have raised premiums right after a state enacted restrictions.
There is an obligation for the many good doctors to speak out. Just a few weeks ago, nine of the doctors who walked out of Wheeling Hospital in West Virginia, had cost their insurers at least $6.3 million in malpractice claims. ”

“ Despite his vigorous criticism of the exploitation and neglect of the public's resources—"the commons"—Bollier remains optimistic that people can be galvanized to reverse the current trend.
"Americans have a long tradition of creating innovative vehicles for ensuring fair return to the American people on resources they collectively own," he writes. "It is time to revive this tradition of innovation in the stewardship of public resources and give it imaginative new incarnations in the twenty-first century." ”

“ 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. ”

“ After all, the US has a vital interest in achieving an Israeli-Palestinian peace that will allow it to find ways to the hearts of the Arab masses from Iraq to Morocco. Obama has harmed his image in the Muslim world and mortgaged his future— if and when he is elected president.," he said, adding, "Of one thing I am certain: Obama's declarations at the AIPAC conference are very, very bad for peace. And what is bad for peace is bad for Israel, bad for the world and bad for the Palestinian people." ”

“ Lots of people have little or no idea of all the flexible and super-modern modes of public transit that reach all the way toward something called "personal public transit" which would allow you and fellow passengers to call up a monorail car to take you to your destination in some future resurgence of public transit technology.
First, change must replace the dominant highway lobby imagery with sleek public transit imagery. For example, have you ever seen a television advertisement for a new car stuck in congested traffic? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”