Crashing the Party: Taking on the Corporate Government in an Age of Surrender

Crashing the Party

Also by Ralph Nader

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and Joseph Highland)

Whistle-blowing (with Peter J. Petkas and

Kate Blackwell)

Corporate Power in America (with Mark Green) You and Your Pension (with Kate Blackwell) Taming the Giant Corporation (with Mark Green and

Joel Seligman)

The Menace of Atomic Energy (with John Abbotts)

Who’s Poisoning America (with Ronald Brownstein

and John Richard)

The Big Boys (with William Taylor)

Winning the Insurance Game (with Wesley Smith and

J. Robert Hunter)

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The Frugal Shopper (with Wesley Smith)

Collision Course (with Wesley Smith)

No Contest: Corporate Lawyers and the Perversion of

Justice in America (with Wesley Smith)

The Ralph Nader Reader

Cutting Corporate Welfare

Ralph Nader

Crashing the Party

TAKING ON THE

CORPORATE GOVERNMENT

IN AN AGE OF SURRENDER

THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS

ST.MARTIN’S PRESS

NEW YORK

THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS

An imprint of St. Martin’s Press

CRASHING THE PARTY. Copyright © 2002 by Ralph Nader. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.stmartins.com

What I Voted For by Tim Robbins, from The Nation, August 6, 2001, reprinted with permission.

FDR Letter to the Democratic Convention reprinted from

Working with Roosevelt by Samuel I. Rosenman

(New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1952).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Nader, Ralph.

Crashing the party : taking on the corporate government in an age of surrender / Ralph Nader.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 0-312-28433-0 (hc)

ISBN 0-312-30258-4 (pbk)

1. Nader, Ralph. 2. Presidents—United States—Election—2000. 3. Political campaigns—United States—History—20th century. 4. United States—Politics and government—1993-2001. 5. Presidential candidates—United States Biography. 6. Greens/Green Party USA—Biography. 7. Political activists—United States—Biography. 8. Consumer affairs directors—United States—Biography I. Title

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3

To those who devote themselves to building self-renewing, democratic societies for the fulfillment of human possibilities through peace and justice.

And to Rose B. Nader and Nathra Nader, who taught me the difference between justice and charity and the importance of both.

CONTENTS

Preface To The Latest Edition

Preface

One

BUSINESS AS USUAL: THE BEST CONVENTIONS MONEY CAN BUY

Two

THE MORPHING OF THE DEMOCRATS

Three

CITIZEN CLOSEOUT: THE MORAL IMPERATIVE

Four

CAMPAIGN LIFTOFF:AMERICA, WE’VE GOT A PROBLEM

Five

FRIENDS, FUNDS, AND FORMIDABLE HURDLES

Six

HITTING THE ROAD

Seven

MOMENTUM: THE CAMPAIGN TAKES SHAPE

Eight

ON THE ROAD TO FIFTY STATES

Nine

WE, THE PEOPLE

Ten

THE MEDIA: AN ONGOING NON-DEBATE

Eleven

THE SUPER-RALLIES:NOT YOUR AVERAGE GARDEN PARTY

Twelve

THE COMMISSION ON PRESIDENTIAL DEBATES

Thirteen

WITH COLD FEET AND BIG HEARTS

Fourteen

THE ELECTION STRETCH DRIVE

Fifteen

CONCEIT AND CONFUSION

Sixteen

LOOKING AHEAD

APPENDIX A: CITIZENS’ COMMITTEE FOR NADER-LADUKE

APPENDIX B: SOME ORGANIZATIONS RALPH NADER FOUNDED OR HELPED START

APPENDIX C: ANNOUNCEMENT SPEECH

APPENDIX D: WOULDN’T PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH AND VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY HAVE DONE THE SAME?

APPENDIX E: THE NADERHOOD 2000

APPENDIX F: THE GREENS’ TEN KEY VALUES

APPENDIX G: CNA AD

APPENDIX H: FDR LETTER TO THE DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION

APPENDIX I: STEVE COBBLE MEMO

APPENDIX J: WHAT I VOTED FOR BY TIM ROBBINS

APPENDIX K: EAST LIVERPOOL MEETING

Suggested Reading

Index

PREFACE TO THE LATEST EDITION

Since the hardback edition of Crashing the Party went to press in late summer of 2001, two events occurred that demonstrate both how hard it is to predict even the short-range future and how important it is for our democracy to be at a high state of readiness and resiliency. Our country was jolted by the September 11 attacks, which left thousands dead and exposed our nation’s security vulnerabilities. Then the eruption of a corporate crime wave coupled with a sharp stock market decline made page one. There was also the sudden replacement of government surpluses as far as one can see with federal and state governmental budget deficits.

The media has explored a remarkable variety of stories about the heroics in the hellish firestorms at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. One of the most poignant stories concerned the fifty-five-year-old worker in New York who refused to leave his quadriplegic colleague when everyone else was rushing for the stairs; both workers perished. By contrast, the moves by public officials and the big business community in the months following 9/11 have yet to be sorted out by many Americans.

The Bush Administration confronted the age-old balance between national security and civil liberties by coming down hard on the latter. But by deed, not by rhetoric. In their statements, President Bush and his Cabinet spoke the language of freedom and liberty, which they said the terrorists and their backers attacked on September 11. They are attacking, the President declared again and again, our freedom of speech, our freedom of religion, and our freedom to disagree. But in a remarkable contrast between words and deeds, even for Mr. Bush, the government responded with both the most restrictive single law on our civil liberties since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 and, by creating a climate of repression, chilled dissent.

The chilling effect of President Bush’s words might as well have come from an unrestrained west Texas sheriff. Bush upset Laura Bush, among others, who, Bush admitted, tried to urge him to employ more Presidential language, which might have helped foster a more tolerant public dialogue. But what Bush and his advisors knew well was how to accelerate a groundswell for fast military action to destroy those whom the evidence deemed responsible for sending the hijackers to the United States. He declared war on terrorism without asking the Congress for a formal constitutional declaration against the Taliban regime. He sent massive military forces to Afghanistan without invoking available international law because he wanted no lawful standards by which he could be judged.

On the domestic front, Bush pushed through a stampeded Congress with huge Senate and House majorities the notorious USA Patriot Act—a 342-page attack on civil liberties that bolted through Congress with flimsy hearings, little debate, and no conference or committee reports. With loads of fine print conferring vast and unchecked powers to the Executive branch and diminishing the role of both Congress and our judiciary, the act flings open the police power gates. The Patriot Act removes external controls over either the definition of terrorism or the invasion of critical privacies through surveillance, sneak and peak searches, and many other breaches of basic American standards of due process and freedom to dissent reaching far beyond those involved in terrorist activities. The act portends the emergence of Big Brother activity that outrages some conservatives and liberals. But they were vastly outvoted by a Congress in wholesale fright from the White House and its bully pulpit. Unless substantially repealed, the Patriot Act will lead to law enforcement illegalities, excesses, and waste—some of which will eventually be exposed, but only after serious damage to innocent citizens and immigrants and our democratic traditions.

There was another motivation for the Bush Administration’s construction of an autocratic atmosphere—the diversion of attention from the immense failure of $30-billion-a-year intelligence agencies. Despite the latest technologies, manpower, and resources, alerted presumably by the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 and other attacks on U.S. installations overseas, these agencies did not follow up any of the tracks that the hijackers left all over the East Coast and some western states for four years. By demanding more powers, and more money, the Bush Administration was trying to camouflage what it and many observers knew— that they had enough authority, not to mention leads from their own field offices, to have detected and stopped the hijackers. Together with the FAA, they had ignored proposals long on the table (such as strengthening cockpit doors and latches) that could have prevented the use of airplanes as missiles.

Civil libertarians asked a question that was never answered: What civil liberty should we have given up before 9/11 that would have enabled the government to catch the attackers? In fact, former CIA Middle East Director Frank Anderson was one of several officials who rejected the need for the American people to forfeit any of their civil liberties. On September 16, 2001, Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes asked him, What civil liberties should Americans be asked to contemplate giving up in order to fight terrorism? Anderson responded: That’s easy. Absolutely none. If we can’t figure out how to begin and conduct and win the war on terrorism without supporting and defending the Constitution of the United States, frankly, I want to go somewhere else, and you can’t have my son for it.

In the weeks after 9/11, expressions of political dissent or the need for tolerance were frowned upon, condemned, or excluded from radio and television. People were shouted down at public gatherings, summarily cut off on cable television talk shows, fired from their jobs, or placed under surveillance or detention. President Bush made several attempts, by a visit to a mosque and meetings with Muslim-Americans, to shield them from verbal and more violent attacks. But at the same time his Attorney General, John Ashcroft, was trampling civil liberties (indefinitely detaining purported suspects without charges, and without access to attorneys) that are meant to protect both citizens and noncitizens in this country. Ashcroft and the FBI proceeded to use these new powers overwhelmingly against Muslims who Bush had said should be protected from discrimination. The Justice Department issued new guidelines for monitoring religious meetings, domestic political groups, and Internet Web sites, without any demonstrated indications of criminal activity—a measure sure to lead to wasteful, sloppy, and ineffective law enforcement. Rep. James Sensenbren-ner, Jr., the Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and a Bush supporter, questioned these guidelines. Given the fact that the FBI is stretched to the limit, why should they be investigating matters when there is no criminal activity suggested? he asked. He received no satisfactory answer. The Attorney General also contributed to widespread censorship and its corollary— fearful self-censorship—by asserting that his critics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America’s enemies and pause to America’s friends. They encourage people of goodwill to remain silent in the face of evil.

Whenever government limits inputs by the people—and there were certainly other alternative proposals, some by retired admirals and generals—about military strategy and military expenditures, the government is likely to make blunders and mistakes. This is one reason why open democracies often prevail over closed dictatorships, which drastically limit public inputs. A policy of burning down the haystack (bombing Afghanistan) to find the needles (Al-Qaeda) has not resulted in success thus far, but cost many innocent Afghans their lives. Rear Admiral John D. Stufflebeem, who briefs reporters at the Pentagon, said in the spring of 2002, The Taliban and Al-Qaeda have vanished. Maybe another more focused approach by a multilateral corps of commandos, equipped with knowledge of language and tribal cultures and utilizing bribes and spies, may have worked better to bring those culpable to justice. But neither the commercial media, nor the White House, nor the Congress, with few exceptions, encouraged such options. Nor was there any follow-up when at different times, Secretary Colin Powell, Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and President Bush himself declared that tyranny, poverty, disease, and illiteracy provide breeding grounds that tolerate such terrorists. The period after 9/11 was not a time to ask why there is such hatred and resentment against the United States by many in the Islamic world and elsewhere in the Third World. Asking the why questions, as some public figures did, was considered unpatriotic. It was also an effective way to control dissent and to say to skeptical Americans, shut up and get in line.

This kind of antidemocratic attitude feeds on itself. President Bush kept broadening the menu. In the spring of 2002, he unveiled an enormous new agency, called the Department of Homeland Security, demanding quick passage through Congress. If adopted, it could become another megalayer of bureaucracy, separate from the CIA, NSA, and FBI, heavily exempted from freedom of information obligations, civil service rules, and whistle-blower rights, and with other special immunities from the citizenry.

Harvard Law Professor Philip B. Heymann, who was a former deputy attorney general, wrote that a great danger for a democracy is that it may take self-destructive actions in responding to terrorism threats—precisely what the terrorists want.

While the relatives were burying their fallen or searching for their bodies, The Wall Street Journal editorial writers had a message to convey to their readers. In a lead editorial on September 19, 2001, the Journal told the corporatists and billionaires to go for it. Urging President Bush, whose polls were rising fast, to spend his windfall of political capital on windfalls for the rich and powerful, the editors showed what kind of unpatriotic coin they were peddling—more wasteful military contracts, more tax cuts for the wealthy, more unnecessary drilling for oil in Alaska, more autocratic trade agreements. At a time of national mourning and sacrifice, the Journal’s call to go for the gold at the expense of what the editors contemptuously called domestic matters (read everything from health, safety, housing, environment, energy conservation, and more) was taken up by legions of corporate lobbyists, even while the fires were still smoldering in lower Manhattan and the Pentagon.

One of the reasons why corporate lobbyists are well paid is that they are expected to follow orders, allow no internal wavering, and click their heels for maximum greed. The frenzy started with the airline industry—headed by the same company bosses who, year after year, rejected one proposal for airline security after another by our aviation safety group and safety-conscious aviation engineers and legislators, including the simplest one of all: toughening cockpit doors and latches. In one swoop on Congress and after announcing 80,000 layoffs, the industry came away with $5 billion in cash and $10 billion in loan guarantees. The workers got nothing; the top executives maintained their ample pay.

Other industries quickly lined up at the corporate welfare trough, either blaming or exploiting 9/11. The insurance industry demanded that Congress pass legislation capping their payments and absorbing the rest. Former federal insurance administrator and actuary J. Robert Hunter testified against this gigantic sweeping, one-way bailout. The big military contractors like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman dusted off their Soviet-era weapons systems, cranked up the scientifically discredited missile-defense boondoggle and swarmed over Capitol Hill, succeeding in pushing the military budget to half of the entire discretionary budget of the federal government. All this with no major enemy country in the world. The objections of the Center for Defense Information, run by former generals and admirals, and experts like the former assistant secretary of defense for Reagan, Lawrence Korb, scarcely slowed the budget-busting tidal wave of corporate pork. The drug companies stepped up their lobbying for lucrative patent extensions for drugs under cover of preparing for any threats of smallpox and anthrax while they rip off the government purchasers of these drugs for emergency storage. Even J. W. Marriott, Jr., the self-described conservative capitalist, urged a $500 tax credit for tourists willing to visit his and others’ hotels.

Backed by their corporate-funded policy and advocacy groups, the omnibus trade association lobbies, such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, had their member companies pour cash into Congressional coffers while pressing for immunities from the civil justice system, huge corporate tax cuts and rebates, a larger NAFTA, and a scuttling of any reform of dirty money in politics. The Republican-controlled House of Representatives, in the midst of a nation rife with child poverty, with over 40 million Americans without any health insurance, and with grossly inadequate unemployment compensation payments for the massive post 9/11 layoffs, repealed the Reagan-supported alternative minimum tax on corporations and made it retroactive to 1986. Can cartoons or satirists capture such consummate avarice? This corporate grab for cash would make companies eligible for $25 billion in tax refunds. IBM would receive $1.4 billion; General Motors, $833 million; General Electric, $671 million; Daimler-Chrysler, $600 million; Chevron-Texaco, $572 million; and even Enron would receive $254 million after having paid no federal income taxes in three of the past four years. In the nineteen twenties, the Oklahoman sage and humorist Will Rogers called Congress the best money can buy. Well, the fourteen biggest beneficiaries of this would-be refund extravaganza gave $14,769,785 in soft money to the national committees of the Democratic and Republican parties in recent years.

But never underestimate the ability of the Republican party to make the Democrats look good—this bill is going nowhere in the Senate. That it got this far in the post 9/11 era—when our political leaders were calling for shared sacrifice, patriotism, and community service—illustrates how profoundly unpatriotic many of these large corporations are in their relentless lust for profiteering, special privileges, and immunities on the backs of workers, consumers, small taxpayers, and the national interest. As Bill Moyers, author and national television journalist, declared: They [the corporations] are counting on your patriotism to distract you from their plunder. They’re counting on you to stand at attention with your hand over your heart, pledging allegiance to the flag, while they pick your pocket.

Citizen mobilizer and former elected Texas Secretary of Agriculture Jim Hightower wrote about the concentration of power in his newsletter, theLowdown:

Since September 11, the Powers That Be have told us to shut up, go shopping, and make no waves—they will look after us. Like they did before? You and I know that something has been BADLY wrong with the way America has been managed … for years!

I believe the crisis we face is both international and domestic. On the home front: Terrorists can’t destroy our democracy, but we can, simply by surrendering it, by keeping our mouths shut while Bush-Cheney-Ashcroft take away our rights for our own good.

It’s time for us to get on the side of the impoverished and oppressed peoples of the world, rather than continuing to plant our flag alongside dictators, monarchists, corporatists,and other elites that prosper on the misery of the increasingly angry Third World majority.

Hightower is organizing Rolling Thunder full-day outdoor rallies around the country to connect people with one another so as to take our country back from the greedheads and the boneheads of Wall Street and Washington.

It is not just populists such as Hightower who are worried. In the past year, there has been an astonishing escalation in the emphasis by the business press on corporate crime and avaricious corporate bosses who lie, cheat, and steal. The editors at Business Week, Fortune Magazine, The New York Times, and The Washington Post are worried about a collapsing of that minimum fabric of prudence, truth, and trust needed to hold together a rollicking capitalist economy. Business Week devoted several pages to a story affirmatively answering the cover’s headline question: Is Wall Street Corrupt? The March 18, 2001, issue of Fortune Magazine’s cover theme was: It’s Time to Stop Coddling White-Collar Crooks. Send Them to Jail. Inside, the pages rang with rage: White Collar Criminals: They Lie, They Cheat, They Steal and They’ve Been Getting Away with It for Too Long. Both magazines got down to details, naming names of big-shot crooks who are rarely prosecuted and, if so, rarely jailed. In an article remarking on the angry business press, The Washington Post called Business 2.0’s April 2002 cover story listing dozens of documented cases an acid portrait of colossal avarice and stupidity in America’s corporate suites. Big corporations are out of control, in large part, because they control government and its responsibility to defend the people. The financial scandals exposed the utter failure of the various expected private watchdogs or gatekeepers of accounting firms, corporate law firms, investment bankers, major credit rating agencies, and stockbrokers—all of whom receive direct compensation or large fees for not watchdogging the CEOs and their rubber-stamp boards of directors.

The owners of these corporations—shareholders—have been increasingly disenfranchised for a hundred years as the top executives split control from ownership. Imagine how far removed all this is from the cardinal capitalist tenet that what you own, you should control. Executive compensation packages have included clauses paying bosses millions of dollars if they are convicted of a felony or forced to resign. Other contracts provide remuneration by the company for all criminal or civil fines imposed—this after paying their legal fees. The CEO of Dynegy Corp. received far more money by stepping down eight months before his contract ended—a severance package worth between $18 million and $33 million—than if he had finished his term. Top executives who have run down their company (e.g., Lucent) to a fraction of its stock valuation when they began their work demanded and received from the board of directors huge retention bonuses to get them to stay on with their oh-so-valuable experience. What shareholders would agree to such looting if they had the democratic authority to approve compensation packages for the top managers who, after all, work for them?

The collaboration of autocracy and plutocracy is eroding our democracy—its institutions and processes. The critical separation of commercial interests from civic interests has been overrun. Elections, politicians, government, universities, our genetic inheritance, our childhood, our privacy are all having larger and larger for sale signs put on them. Civic sanctuaries nurturing health, safety, justice, art and culture, democratic processes, civic participation, family functions, protecting posterity, and peace have been assaulted by a tidal wave of commercialism. The unhealthy dependency of humans on ever-larger corporations is institutionalizing itself in a phenomenon that can be described as growing up corporate. Children see the world through corporate vistas and corporate values from food to toys, from overmedication to promotionally induced addictions, from not knowing what we own as a commonwealth to commercial determination of beauty standards, from entertainment to overwhelmingly vocational (as distinct from civic) education. When almost everything is for sale, those who have the money control the sale.

Possibly the most fundamental dimension of growing up corporate is how corporations have made themselves into persons under the law, giving themselves—artificial legal entities—almost all the constitutional rights of real people plus the immense privileges and immunities that their aggregate political/economic power and omnipresence make possible. There can be no vibrant democracy and equal justice under law when artificial persons, called corporations, are so supreme over real human beings. The question of corporate personhood and its instruments of subordination should be a major topic of political debate and action. Getting corporations out of politics, as Business Week editorialized in the year 2000, is one concrete proposal. Only humans can vote and only humans should participate in our political institutions.

Since the summer of 2001, a new group we started called Democracy Rising (www.democracyrising.org) has been conducting People Have the Power rallies in large arenas around the nation. At each gathering, there are about a hundred tables representing local and state citizen action groups. Most of them have never met each other for any cooperative initiative or for just plain civic conversations. This has to change and is changing. As Saul Alinsky, the great citizen organizer in Chicago, once said, The only way to beat organized money is with organized people.

About the same time we started another group called Citizen Works (www.citizenworks.org) which is networking and training individuals and groups and advancing fundamental corporate reform. With bipartisan denunciations in Congress of corporate crimes, frauds, and abuses being followed by a raft of modest or window-dressing reforms, the clarity with which legislators are seeing their choice as between voters on Main Street and campaign contributors from Wall Street is sharpening. Representing many rank-and-file Republicans, if not their leadership, Congressman David Drier, chairman of the House Rules Committee, said on television in July 2002: Anyone who is going to be soft on the issue of corporate crime will in fact lose votes.

How long this attitude lasts and whether, it will, in stages, lead to strong legislation that empowers shareholders and pensioneers and provides them full access to the courts, that funds adequate law enforcement budgets for prosecutions and convictions of crooked bosses, and includes other structural reforms to prevent huge losses of what Justice Louis Brandeis called other peoples’ money remains uncertain. Strengthening this attitude is the challenge for the American people to meet. Without the vigilance of an informed and aroused public, and the facilities to band together as financial consumers, law and order for the big boys will not be forthcoming. See www.essential.org for information on the Finan-cial Consumers Association (FCA). It is time for the FCA. Millions of Americans have lost trillions of dollars.

The global corporations have thrown down the gauntlet (see www.multinationalmonitor.org). All the flags, national anthems, and other symbols they and their political minions use to direct public opinion will not mask a genuine patriotism that activates our democracy and addresses our countrys’s needs. Unlike small business, multinational corporations have no allegiance to any country or community other than to control them; indeed, leading corporate executives have said they would prefer to have their companies be anational—belonging to no nation. This growing pattern of expedient transititus sees workers as temporary pawns, government officials as tools, consumers as pliant subjects, small taxpayers as suckers, and voters as necessary for pacification rituals. For such companies, ever merging into larger behemoths, the main event is the maturation of the corporate state, where they control government so it services them daily, socializes their risks and misconduct, and blocks the people from participating in power. Corporate socialism, or the big business takeover of governmental power, has been a long-term strategy pressed into occasional retreat or rebuff by valiant populist cycles of reform. Some of the older conservative economists in the first half of the twentieth century had a keen understanding of this reality. Among them no one was more famous than the Nobel Prize-winning Friedrich A. Von Hayek—author of the right-wing manifesto The Road to Serfdom. Here is what Dr. Von Hayek wrote in the American Economic Review in 1946: [M]arket capitalism will have the same inefficient, exploitative outcome as Soviet Communism if the ownership of resources becomes concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer large corporations; and if economic/business decisions come to be made by those relatively few individuals who own and/or operate large concentrated corporations.

A deliberative democratic society does not allow its symbols to be seized by autocrats and plutocrats. It makes these symbols reflect a committed citizenry regularly dedicating a decent amount of time to civic endeavors from the local to the global, keeping an open mind that is close to reality, and having a keen sense of both individual rights and the community or public interest.

The people do have the power; our history at its finest moments has demonstrated this fact. But more people need to have civic confidence. We can start by taking back the symbol of national unity—our flag—that has been so abused by oligarchs. Our flag, we must say repeatedly, was never designed to be a bandana or fig leaf; it was designed to stand for the last glorious words of the pledge of allegiance—namely, with liberty and justice for all. Let us all, in our unique ways, work for a deep democracy—one responsive to the necessities of people. A deep democracy foresees and forestalls oncoming perils and holds up for future generations the principle that the pursuit of justice is the condition for the pursuit of happiness.

For more information, contact us at:

Crashing the Party

P.O. Box 19312

Washington, D.C. 20036

www.crashingtheparty.org

PREFACE

Great societies must have public policies that declare which rights, assets, and conditions are never for sale. Such policies strengthen noncommercial values, which, nourished by public enlightenment and civic participation, can provide wondrous opportunities to improve our country. Guided by such values, we can better use our wealth and power to benefit all Americans. Applied beyond our borders, these values can help us astutely wage peace and address the extreme poverty, illiteracy, oppression, environmental perils, and infectious diseases that threaten to jeopardize directly our own national security as well as that of the rest of the world. Broad, humane values also advance the legitimate needs of workers and peasants who yearn for greater democracy and global stability.

Unfortunately, a working, deliberative democracy has few real champions in the Republican or Democratic parties. These parties see their self-perpetuation in the narrowest of dimensions—largely by allowing business interests too great a say in local, state, and national agendas. There is a relentless lobbying industry that enlarges the privileges and immunities of corporations as compared with individuals and makes sure that governments leave the people defenseless and feeling powerless. Everyone is afraid to talk about poverty, said historian and commentator Doris Kearns Goodwin after the 2000 election. There are many patterns of injustice and abuse of power that the investigative best of the major media have exposed—corporate crime, corporate welfare, anti-worker labor laws, giveaways of commonwealth assets such as the public airwaves, the domination of corporate executives over the shareholders who own the company. Nonetheless, most elected officials are afraid to address these abuses. The absence of public sector resistance is especially troubling because the public sector, led by Congress, the White House, and the state governments, has given away the store to corporations through deregulation, privatization, subsidies, reduced law enforcement, and limitations on civil lawsuits. Still, these coddled companies demand more, more, and more. Enough is never enough.

The convergence of our country’s two major parties is a widely noted phenomenon, even though the remedies of political competition from the outside are largely ignored. Third parties, which were the first to raise the seminal issues of our past—from slavery’s abolition to the status of women, minorities, labor, and farmers— are now deemed spoilers. Imagine, the defenders of the spoiled political-electoral system, which is rigged in favor of the two major parties, describe political participation by a new party in this derogatory way. There is little objection by otherwise sensitive reformers. Many would agree that nature cannot be regenerated without giving seeds a chance to sprout, nor can an economy be more innovative and efficient without giving entrepreneurs or small business a chance to compete. Somehow this axiom is not applied to the removal of the many hurdles to third parties wanting to regenerate politics.

A democracy gap discourages people from shaping a future for our country that is of, by, and for the people. It prevents us from sovereign participation in the decisions and directions that can provide the necessities, address the injustices, and solve the problems afflicting our country, domestically and in its relations with the rest of the world. What led to this condition is what our forebears Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Justices Louis Brandeis and William O. Douglas, among others, warned about—the excessive concentration of power and wealth. Brandeis argued that such concentration is incompatible with a democratic society.

Today, much of this economic, political, and technological power is in the hands of global corporations wielding immense influence over our government in very intricate ways. One industry after another, not the least being the mass media, is dominated by increasingly fewer giant companies. The trajectory of this power is to centralize control—using our own government, wherever necessary, against its own people—and advance short-term commercial interests at the expense of the elevated living conditions and realizable horizons that should be the just rewards of all people.

The democracy gap is associated with the corporatization of our society beyond any and all boundaries established by previous generations. Commercialism has permeated nearly every nook and cranny of our society. It conditions the corruption of politics by vested-interest money, it propels the diversion of public budgets from human need to corporate greed, and it distorts the declared purposes of our universities. It spills into formerly taboo regions of our society, including the planned seduction of childhood from parental authority and the invasions of privacy with unheard-of velocities in medical, financial, and genetic areas. It strips people of control over their commonwealth—the public airwaves, the public lands, the pension funds, and other commons inherited from their forebears. The corporate quest for sovereignty over the sovereignty of the people is an affront to our Constitution and our democracy. Indeed, in their largest and most transnational form, the global corporations reject allegiance to nation or community.

This flood of corporate power over government feeds the rationalization of futility among concerned citizens. Our campaign reminded people that corporations, which, in their modern form, were created by state charters in the early nineteenth century, should be our servants, not our masters. What is out of mind is often out of sight, even though the needs are there to be seen. And so our campaign stressed that putting people first means that elections should be first about the responsibilities of the voters to think about the full consequences of their votes. Our campaign also stressed that people should play active roles in shaping the electoral agenda and ensuring varied, open debates. In short, democracy is not a spectator sport.

Civil society advocates have been excluded from the corridors of decision making in Washington, D.C. Belatedly, I realized that an external political energy was required to replace the dashed hopes of genuine reform. I ran as the Green Party presidential candidate to broaden our political horizon, to produce more leaders, not more followers. The Green Party encourages people to develop a higher estimate of their own significance in their communities, states, nation, and world. During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln’s words transcended even that epic divide when he said: As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.

Small political starts start small, as did the Green Party. In a big country it is not easy to start small unless the starters are willing to work incrementally. Building a progressive party dedicated to liberty and justice for all has many collateral benefits—citizens taking heart to correct an injustice, recommend a solution, lend a helping hand that lifts the civic morale for a peaceful march, rally, or get-out-the-vote drive. The benefits come from a deeper understanding that daily democracy requires daily citizenship and that a society that has more justice needs less charity for social ills and deprivations.

Seeing the Green Party in this multidimensional manner is not difficult when one sees Greens between elections connecting with civic justice initiatives in one community and neighborhood after another. Reclaiming our democracy means, to Greens, displacing the concentrated commercial powers and intolerant attitudes that keep America down, as America has been kept down by the forces of greed and power in so many areas. Our country has more problems than it deserves and more solutions than it deploys. New political and civic movements are the two pillars upon which a better society can be built.

This book is my story of the campaign. It is only one lens on this effervescence of Green politics and its overall interaction with the presidential campaigns of 2000. It draws on the activities of many people who made this campaign possible: Winona LaDuke, vice presidential candidate, the staff of Nader 2000, the volunteers, contributors, and voters who helped launch a long-term political reform movement for a strong and just democratic society. A selected bibliography provides further documentation for interested readers.

I thank Tarek Milleron for his encouragement, patience, and exceptional intelligence with regard to the substance of this work. Special appreciation is also due Claire Nader, John Richard, Theresa Amato, Steve Cobble, Jay Acton, and Laura Nader for their support and critical commentary. Any deficiencies are my responsibility.

Crashing the Party

One

BUSINESS AS USUAL:

THE BEST CONVENTIONS MONEY CAN BUY

The seat next to me on the stage was reserved for George W. Bush, but on that afternoon of August 2, 2000, it remained empty.

For months, a nonprofit, nonpartisan group called Youth in Action tried to have that seat filled in Philadelphia’s Drexel University auditorium. The event was part of the National Youth Conventions, which involved thousands of high school students and other young people contributing to a National Youth Platform, and coincided with the Republican and Democratic national conventions. The platform covered ten subjects of concern to youth—political involvement, community involvement, education, human rights, health, drugs, juvenile justice, environment, violence, and poverty— and offered solutions in well-written, concise presentations.

As the presidential candidate for the Green Party, I was asked to listen to each youth panel summarize its points and then respond, which I did in some detail. Our interaction was one of the most stimulating exchanges in the campaign. I was pleased to hear young people in their teens and early twenties articulating a political agenda separate from the tactics, fund-raisers, and fluff and bluff surrounding the major-party candidates.

These Youth convocations were intricately planned and promoted. They were supported by major foundations, such as the Pew Charitable Trusts, and major nonprofits, including the League of Women Voters and the YMCA and YWCA. These conventions give young men and women a voice and involvement, when so often they are alienated from presidential campaigns that ignore their existence, except for the occasional scripted photo op.

By demonstrating a serious engagement with the presidential campaign of 2000, as well as their deep stake in America’s future, Youth in Action was hoping and desperately believing that it could lay claim to some personal attention by George W. Bush and Al Gore, just as large campaign donors had done throughout the year. Its schedulers made sure that there were no conflicts with the big events at the two conventions. Mr. Bush and Mr. Gore had their platform fights behind them and their nominations cinched, and they were more than capable of bringing their ever-hovering media a few blocks away for an hour to talk with a diverse group of fact-immersed, solution-oriented young people from all over the United States.

It was not to be. Mr. Gore matched Mr. Bush in declining to appear. The two candidates had more important events to attend— lavish parties where politicians shook down corporate lobbyists and fat cats, while the latter in turn were pleased to pay off their political friends for past and future favors.

The day after the gathering at Drexel, there were no stories in the major media, no mention of George W. Bush—the self-described education candidate who pledged to leave no child behind—being absent from an event that he could have turned into an advantage over Al Gore. Why? Because Bush and Gore’s supposedly savvy staffs had polls showing that young adults do not vote in large numbers and their interests are more universal, unlike elderly voters whose demands are more particular and insistent, such as prescription-drug benefits, preserving Social Security, and patients’ rights. Older voters have money. Older voters have influence. Younger voters tend to have neither. Then there are the less inhibited questions young people tend to ask and a risk of being caught off guard or being embarrassingly out of touch. Why should the candidates deviate from the carefully constructed script and emerge from the force field erected by their political consultants and handlers? How sad, empty, and shortsighted, I thought. Later I learned how disappointed the youthful panelists really were.

Leaving the Youth in Action event, I went to find NBC for an invited interview by Maria Shriver on the premises of the Republican National Convention. The area was like a military encampment without the tanks. Security personnel, police cars and vans, high fences, multiple checkpoints, and trailers with security equipment were omnipresent. Demonstrators were not allowed within a Hail Mary pass of the fenced encirclements.

Inside, I was driven in a golf cart to the NBC installation. I asked the driver where the interview was to take place, and he pointed skyward. There before us rose a forty-foot red scaffolding, slightly swaying from a vigorous wind. At the top were perilously perched Ms. Shriver and her camera crew. To reach them, I climbed the stairs of this rickety structure, greeted them, and asked why—why this Tower of Pisa? She pointed to the view of the Convention Center bathed in a spotlight as the one and only reason. A quick three-minute interview on MSNBC followed, allowing only for short answers to complex questions. I climbed down the narrow staircase, wondering how reporters like Shriver can take year after year of what they believe are shallow formats with ever shorter sound bites heading, it seems, for a future of sound barks.

Over at the Convention Center, the delegates were settling down to listen to Dick Cheney’s acceptance speech. I walked over to the entrance where crowds of reporters were milling about, jabbering with one another and anticipating nothing much to make their day less routine. The formal sessions of these conventions, with their foregone conclusions, seem simply practices in applause and bore reporters silly (as they’ve told me countless times). The mind-numbing routines of the campaign trail with a major candidate become a source of cynical jokes and tedious logistical small talk. The convention, however, takes media redundancy to new levels, as every four years the major parties turn out their robo-candidates. I asked one British reporter what could possibly occupy him hour after hour, and he replied, Well, you try and garnish the dullards a bit as best one can. At the Republican convention, the real action took place outside the main hall in the streets with the demonstrators and in the hospitality suites and parties in Philadelphia’s luxury hotels and Main Line mansions.

But for me there was a little excitement during Cheney’s mon-otonal address: I met Amy Goodman, arguably the most tenacious radio interviewer around (ask Bill Clinton, who called Pacifica and sparred with her in a memorable November 2000 exchange for twenty-six minutes). She invited me inside the building for a peripatetic interview. Amy presented our credentials, then we passed the typical bevy of security and were led down the runway to where the Florida delegation was sitting and restlessly listening to the vice presidential nominee. A score of reporters followed us down with mikes, cameras, and pads and began hurling the obvious questions about what I was doing there and what I thought of the goings-on. The Florida delegation was becoming more agitated at the commotion. But I managed to observe that while more than $13 million in taxpayer funding had gone to this convention because an