These two parties are largely engaged in electronic combat. They have no grass roots, no local organizing. They're fossils, ready to be replaced with the vibrant youth and energy of the future.

A second speech by Ralph Nader (see "The Citizen Agenda for '92" 1/15/92 speech transcript at Harvard Law School posted 2 weeks ago) given to students at S.F. University discussing the number one issue in this election year -- corporate power. Articulating numerous signs of decline that are manifestations of "that legal fiction we call `the corporation' [which] now control[s] the commonwealth that is owned by the people in this country," Mr. Nader describes "a proposed reformation and resurgence of our democratic system . . . called The Concord Principals, An Agenda For A New Initiatory Democracy [which] takes five of our roles: voters, taxpayers, workers, consumers and shareholders [and] gives them the toolbox, the mechanisms to get information, communicate, mobilize, organize and succeed." See the follow-on repost for the full text of "The Concord Principles".

--ratitor

Excerpts from the 5/9/92 speech (full text follows below) follow:

. . . the answer to the question "America, what went wrong?" was basically, abuse of power. Too much power. Too much of other people's money in too few hands in Washington and Wall Street. Too much abuse of power by corporations -- their influence over the political process, affecting people's jobs, affecting people's pensions, affecting the investment in public capital, inadequate housing. Too many abuses of power increasing the gap between the rich, the middle class and the poor. Too many factories closed down due to corporate looting, speculation, leveraged buy-outs, takeovers, acquisitions that don't create any new wealth or any new jobs, except make the few at the top staggeringly richer. . . .

Children today, have been delivered to the entertainment and addictive industries. Our generation doesn't have time for children. . . .

With that kind of problem you can see that when people grow up, they don't know the first thing about how tangle with city hall, how to get the laws that are there for their health enforced, they don't know how to write a simple effective letter to their senator. They don't know how to interact with the media and make the media serve them. In short, we are far more organized for bowling, bird watching and poker than we are for any of the serious problems confronting our country. We are very underorganized as citizens. . .

Another sign of decline occurs when you look at the public wealth in this country. The economy relies on the public wealth in this country. We hear it about streets and ports and bridges -- there's a lot more that your taxpayer's dollars built to make it possible for business and the private sector to make money. And we have not put the jobs and the money into it because we have spent trillions of dollars in overkill weapons. . . .

The other day an Air Force Colonel on an airplane told me that the people in the Air Force never really wanted the B-2 bomber -- they thought it was a white elephant -- but the brass went along with it because, you know, they want airplanes. But the analysts in the Air Force were down on it from the beginning. But they never went public. Well everybody now in Washington figures the B-2 bomber should not be built in its full numbers -- they were going to build eighty of them. So George Bush is going to cancel the program. But he's ordered twenty of them, just for ol' times sake. You know what they cost? A billion dollars a plane. And it doesn't work. And it was designed to attack the Soviet Union which no longer exists. And it was designed to evade radar and it's having trouble doing that. But you buy another twenty.
          Well they don't have enough money for schools, enough money for child health care, enough money for infant nutrition programs, enough money to rebuild the public wealth -- but plenty of money for these weapons of mass destruction that are piling up and piling up and piling up. Sign of decline, a sign of decline. A serious sign of decline. . . .

Now historically, we've had our ups and downs in democracy. We had our downs when slavery was there. We had our downs when women couldn't vote even though we called ourselves a democracy. We had our downs when labor was working for peon wages before trade unions organized -- the mine workers, the steel workers, the auto workers. We had our ups though. . . . There are periods in our history of reform.
          Probably the most fundamental period, although it isn't seen as such in our history books -- fundamental periods are the revolution, the constitution, the civil war. But the populist progressive period around the turn of the century -- early 1900s, late 1800s -- was engendered by farmers. Farmers had something very interesting: they controlled the property they owned, and they had a unified voting block. Now you ask yourself, how many people in this country have both of those at once today? Very few. And they used it, in those decades, to refurbish, revive our democracy. The initiative referendum recall, electoral reforms, farmers co-ops. It rolled across the praries, it affected the cities. Elected senators, governors -- almost elected a president -- before it ebbed. The New Deal came in to deal with the depression. Some structures strengthened our democracy.

. . . then we went into another dip. I have seen in Washington a remarkable resurgence of corporate power. Corporate power is the biggest issue in our country. To put it succinctly: the corporations are shaping our culture, increasingly raising our children, controlling most of our capital and wealth, controlling most of our jobs and where they're going to be or where they're going to be exported, shaping what goes on in Washington more than any other power group, influencing our education more than any other power group. The corporatization of the universities is enough to begin on that topic.
          The influence of corporations on media is more than influence -- they are the media. The media are the corporations. General Electric and NBC. And above all, they have managed in a brilliant portrayal of adjustment of their power -- and there's no institution that is more brilliant in adjusting to challenges to its power than that legal fiction we call "the corporation." They now control the commonwealth that is owned by the people in this country (more about that later). . . .

Now why is it that the headlines of the day are overwhelmingly headlines about people-to-people conflict? People-to-people conflict, racial conflict, gender conflict, worker conflict. Isn't that interesting. What we're seeing here is that the power brokers who shape the limitations that we operate in, who decide the job market, who decide whether they're going to put $27 billion dollars of your pension money into job producing entrepreneurship -- or they're going to put it into a leveraged buyout for RJ Reynolds Nabisco which didn't create any new jobs or new wealth. The corporations who've got the politicians up for rent, or for sale through their campaign contributions and the impact on people daily because too much money and too much power is in too few hands. Hey -- there are no headlines here.
          We're experiencing a corporate crime epidemic here in our country. Do you see any politicians being accused by other politicians of being soft on corporate crime? Corporate crime destroys more lives, produces more injuries and destroys more property by far than street crime, bad as street crime is. . . .

Talk about corporate crime. Who's talking about corporate crime? They want us to focus on people-to-people conflict. They want us to forget about their corporate power.
          Now we come to the elections. What are they talking about, these candidates? What are the issues? Well health insurance is in, energy's out -- its like we no longer have an energy problem. No longer have a nuclear power problem, radioactive waste problem, geopolitical wars, balance of payments problems, fossil fuel acceleration of the warming of the planet, acid rain, strip mines -- but we have no energy problem. No one's talking about it in 1992. In 1980 they talked about it a little bit. Its very, very rare. . . .

I can see that a binding None Of The Above initiative in California is a sure winner. Let the students at the University of San Francisco start the ball rolling. Youth organized politically can do wonders. You've got enormous energy up against these fossilized, no grassroot political parties. Don't ever think that you can't count. If you ever started a youth political party to lay the groundwork for these new mechanisms of democracy, you will succeed beyond your wildest dreams.
          These two parties are largely engaged in electronic combat. They have no grass roots, no local organizing. They're fossils, ready to be replaced with the vibrant youth and energy of the future. . . .

[The politicians have] got to talk about the proper distribution of power and the improper abuse of power from the top down. If they don't talk about that, they're not talking about the essence of what politics should be all about and what an election should be all about.
          Let me assure you that as discouraged as some of you may be about the prospects of the world and the nation, remember: we are starting from a base of knowledge, technology, and constitutional rights that are far more enabling than many more unfortunate people abroad. We can develop the mechanisms, the new toolbox of democracy, so that it impacts our politics and our economy and our social culture in a way that will produce turnarounds and changes and progress much faster than many of you can envision. We can solarize our entire nation. We can solarize our entire nation with passive and active solar energy and energy efficiency. And replace those horrible environmental and geopolitical and deficit problems in the next generation alone.
          And what we need to do is to conclude each day individually by saying, "we are never going to go through another day saying we don't count, saying you can't fight city hall, saying that we don't have time for our citizen duties." Because if we don't believe the pursuit of justice is really the pursuit of personal as well as social happiness, we have not learned the lessons of history.

---

The Decline of Democracy and The Concord Principles

Ralph Nader speaking at the University of San Francisco
May 9, 1992

The topic for tonight is obviously quite formidable. In any analysis of society we have to be very careful that we don't think we're the most despairing generation in history. And we must be very careful that we don't exaggerate our problems -- and yet pay adequate attention to their severity.

But back in October last year, the Philadelphia Enquirer newspaper issued a series of articles which they put in a series entitled: America: What Went Wrong? And it's a series of articles which are now part of a paperback which is a best seller in the United States. But when they put this reprint series out they casually said, `anybody who wants to drop by the paper can pick up a copy free.' Thousands of people lined up in front of the newspaper to get their copy. And when they did they learned that the answer to the question "America what went wrong?" was basically, abuse of power. Too much power. Too much of other people's money in too few hands in Washington and Wall Street. Too much abuse of power by corporations -- their influence over the political process, affecting people's jobs, affecting people's pensions, affecting the investment in public capital, inadequate housing. Too many abuses of power increasing the gap between the rich, the middle class and the poor. Too many factories closed down due to corporate looting, speculation, leveraged buy-outs, takeovers, acquisitions that don't create any new wealth or any new jobs, except make the few at the top staggeringly richer.

The topic tonight is the decline of democracy in the '92 elections. We have to ask ourselves how do we measure democracy before we determine if its advancing or declining? If someone were to ask you to set a series of criteria that would be applied to our 50 states to answer the question, "Which state is the most democratic, which is the least, and which states are in between?" What are the yardsticks that you would use? We don't study that very much in our political science courses.

We have a hunch what the yardsticks are once we get behind the generalizations of freedom and justice. A society is usually more democratic when the economy is decentralized. It isn't just one economy like a cotton economy, or a copper economy, or a textile economy in various parts of our country. Where you have a diversified economy -- not just one corporation that employs most of the people in the town.

A society's more democratic when it has cleaner elections. When it has adequate appeal to the courts -- for civil rights, civil liberties.

A society is more democratic when it has a free press and a diversified press.

A society, of course, is more democratic when it has aggressive citizens. Who take their citizen duties seriously. Who don't sit around and say `well whatever will be will be. It's they. It doesn't matter what we do. Can't fight city hall. Can't take on Exxon. Who cares? Just stick to our own little private lives, try to make the best of it.' It doesn't work that way.

Any country where people back down, and don't engage in their civic pursuits, is a country where you see more poverty, more brutality. Look at some of the countries around the world. These dictators just didn't happen. These plantation bosses just didn't happen. It was a long period of grinding people into the ground without these people fighting back, standing tall.

Well we know that there are other forms of government. In our country, the challenge to us in the future is whether our country is going to be more of a plutocracy or an oligarchy -- ruled by the rich and the powerful under the symbols of a democratic society, but not the reality -- or whether we are going to significantly change the way we spend our time so that we spend more time as public citizens, in order that our time as private citizens with our family, work, recreation, children, will be of a higher quality and standard of living.

Now unfortunately we don't grow up learning how to be citizens. The schools don't teach us citizen skills -- to the extent they teach us anything it's a civics book that's as dry as eating a ton of sawdust without butter. You know what they're like. The very word "civics" implies yawns.

If children were taught about citizen skills in the context of analyzing problems in their own community, working outside of school and inside of school, classroom and working on projects, they would grow up with a higher degree of self-confidence, a higher degree of steadfastness. They'd know what has to be done. They'd know that the political pyramid of democracy, ending up with the president at the top, is not built from the top down. Architects will tell you that. You can't build the pyramid from the top down. You've got to build it from the bottom up.

An elementary school teacher in Salt Lake City, with lower income kids, 4th grade, came back one day and they said, we found a dump three blocks from the school and it looks like it's all covered over with shrubbery. She got them involved in documenting that, and going to city hall. The city got it cleaned up. Then they joined the movement to get a Superfund bill through the state legislature. These ten-year-olds were holding news conferences. These ten-year-olds were called up by the press. The teacher was so impressed she puts out a book called Kids in Social Action.

Children today, have been delivered to the entertainment and addictive industries. Our generation doesn't have time for children. We're too busy with other things. Well guess who has time for children, beside the streets? The television screen, the Nintendo Games. Kindercare is raising the kids, McDonalds is feeding them, HBO-Time/Warner is entertaining them and on and on and on.

And then we wonder why they don't read, why they can't write, why they don't understand some of the things that children of their age could be very helpful in understanding and doing something about. Corporations are raising our children more and more and parents are raising the children less and less.

With that kind of problem you can see that when people grow up, they don't know the first thing about how tangle with city hall, how to get the laws that are there for their health enforced, they don't know how to write a simple effective letter to their senator. They don't know how to interact with the media and make the media serve them. In short, we are far more organized for bowling, bird watching and poker than we are for any of the serious problems confronting our country. We are very underorganized as citizens.

Now power is never stagnant. Those who have power tend to work on it every day. They constantly try to build it, insinuate it, make it pervasive, surround it with the flag and the symbols and the nice sounding phrases. They don't say -- the corporations who have such power in Washington -- they don't go around telling you, "Hey, we've succeeded tremendously folks!" Exxon, Dupont, General Motors -- they don't say, "We've got Washington right where we wanted it. We've got a government of the Exxons, by the General Motors for the Duponts." They don't say that. They say, "Well, we've got a government of, by and for the people." And they'll wave all the symbols to make us think that well they're in Washington really serving us. Well we all know that things in many ways are getting worse.

If you compare the 1960's with the 1990's, apart from the Vietnam war, and casualties on the highways, and a few other problems, most of the problems in the sixties are worse today, that we read about in the newspaper. If you're looking at child poverty -- worse. If you're looking at the decline of our ability to pay for health care -- worse. There are millions of people in this country who pay more for health insurance than for food.

Right today, the average four-person family in Washington, DC, with the parents in their late fifties, will pay $14,500 a year premium for full Blue Cross/Blue Shield coverage. There are millions of people who are uninsured -- forty million, and growing. That includes millions of children. Another thirty million underinsured -- and the rest they're wandering how long its going to last. They're afraid to change jobs because their asthma or other ailments are excluded -- "preexisting coverage." Even pregnancy by a married woman is considered a preexisting coverage and excluded for health insurance under some group plans -- that's a preexisting problem. It's like the only time you can get health insurance is when you're not sick. There are people who are being forced to pay more co-payments, they're confronting bigger exclusions, deductions, hassling with the companies to pay the claims. It's a nightmare.

The government just put out a report from the General Accounting Office. Guess how much they attributed to billing fraud in the health care area -- doctors, hospitals, clinics -- last year? Billing fraud, this is crime -- crime in the suites. Not just crime in the streets. Crime in the suites. $70 billion with a "b". $70 billion in billing fraud. You've seen some of these bills. You can't hardly decipher them, they charge you for services they don't perform, duplicative services, phony services, etc. If you're interested in it just write the General Accounting Office, Washington, DC. You paid for the study -- ask 'em for a copy. When you get it talk it up.

Housing: low income housing programs cut 80% under Reagan/Bush. Then they wonder why there are homeless. Single-room occupancy -- declining. That's what kept people off the street, at the margin -- single-room occupancy. The middle class according to the US census definition, in the last fifteen years, went from 73% to 63% of the population. Guess where most of them went? Didn't go up -- it went down -- the income ladder. Declining rate of home ownership.

New diseases coming up. Old diseases coming up. A resurgence of measles. Tuberculosis is coming back. The inoculation rate in Washington, DC's children is lower than the country of Botswana in Africa. The infant mortality in Washington, DC -- double the nation's average. Higher than Jamaica, Cuba or Bulgaria -- right within sight of the White House. This is the highest per capita income in the United States -- look at the scene.

Pensions: declining number of Americans getting private pensions. It's down to 40%, and declining.

Decay of streets, highways, bridges, schools, clinics. Decay of what's under the city streets that provide our utilities -- our water mains. Look what happened in Chicago the other day: downtown flooded, broken pipes, broken tunnels.

There are other ways to look at the decay as well. We don't control at all what we already own. The laws in Washington are almost uniformly not enforced when they are designed to serve the health and safety and economic well-being of ordinary people. But they are very well enforced when they are designed to bail out, subsidize, guarantee, or otherwise provide corporations with enormous numbers of welfare programs.

If I say welfare to you, what do you think of? Poor people -- don't you? Poor people. The welfare programs for corporations in Washington are three times more costly than the poverty programs coming out of Washington. We call these programs "Aid to Dependent Corporations."

We're recommending workfare for these corporate executives. Somehow these companies don't think that all this welfare ladled out to them is reducing their incentive to work. Where is this money going? It's going to substitute for the consequences of corporate speculation, corporate mismanagement and corporate crime.

Look at the S&L debacle. That was not done by accident. That was not an act of God. Out of three thousand S&L's two thousand are still in operation. They make money -- they're providing home mortgages. But about a thousand of these banks were riden into the ground by go-go speculators, who looted your savings, put them in very risky real estate syndications -- junk bonds and other hitherto prohibited investments -- until Reagan and the Congress deregulated the banks in 1982, so they could invest in almost anything. No matter how risky.

There's one fellow in Florida -- he used people's savings to buy himself a $9 million mansion, a $6 million yacht, expensive paintings. Where were the cops in Washington? Where were the federal cops under Ronald Reagan and George Bush? They took them off the business beat. And the result is a thirty year S&L bailout that's going to cost you and your children $1.3 trillion, including interest and principal. You are being required to pay for it -- even though you had nothing to do with it and didn't benefit from it.

Those are the laws that are enforced. But when you come to children's safety laws, to occupational health and safety laws, to food and drug laws, to meat and poultry inspection laws -- they are very rarely enforced now. You think you're being protected -- but you're not.

This regime is sitting on these laws even though they took an oath, under the constitution, to enforce them. Safe Drinking Water Act -- for six years they didn't do anything. Congress had to unanimously, in 1986, give them deadlines to issue controls on harmful chemicals in your drinking water -- and they missed the deadlines. And nothing's happened. That is certainly a sign of decline in our democracy: when the laws are written, passed, signed and systemically ignored when they benefit and defend the citizens.

Another sign of decline is an easy one. You can almost go in any society and use this measure: "Is the gap between the rich and the poor growing, and is the gap between the politician's remuneration and the taxpayer's growing?" The answer in the 1980's -- YES. Most definitely.

Workers salaries, adjusted for inflation, have gone nowhere since 1970. Chief executives of corporations salaries have gone up over 400%, adjusted for inflation. In 1981 the top boss of the 300 largest corporations in America was making forty-five times more than the entry level worker in the company. Now, depending on which study you rely on, its 120 to 157 times what the entry worker is making. In Japan and Germany, it's about twenty times. Funny, these executives in Japan and Germany got enough incentive to work -- twenty times.

That kind of gap and the gap between the Congressional/White House pay-grab -- imagine: here are these governors in Washington -- they're presiding over a debt-broke regime -- $400 billion in debt this year, extra. They went from $980 billion in 1981 to $4 trillion dollars in debt. What does that mean? It means that we're consuming more than we're producing. It means that you're going to be loaded up with this in higher taxes in the future, or inflation. And it means that in this year alone, you're sending $207 billion dollars in your tax money just to pay the interest on the national debt to the bond-holders, here and abroad. Not to do anything for the country, but to pay for the past profligacy.

Here's a group of politicians presiding over a broke government. Looking the other way at Pentagon scandals, and HUD scandals and corruption galore. Freezing the minimum wage for eight years at $3.35 per hour -- saying to seven million people in this country, `You can make it on $7,200 a year. But we, the politicians, can't make it on $90,000 a year plus health insurance, pensions, benefits a mile long -- we gotta go another forty thousand. That's why they've broken their moral authority to govern. Raising their salaries this way makes them indifferent, arrogant and remote.

Another sign of decline occurs when you look at the public wealth in this country. The economy relies on the public wealth in this country. We hear it about streets and ports and bridges -- there's a lot more that your taxpayer's dollars built to make it possible for business and the private sector to make money. And we have not put the jobs and the money into it because we have spent trillions of dollars in overkill weapons.

I wondered somehow when the people in the Pentagon got the word that they had enough weapons to blow up the world once. Then they got the word, a little while later, that they had enough weapons to blow up the world ten times. Then they got the word they had enough weapons to blow up the world fifty times. I wonder when they're ever going to say, "Let's stop we got enough."?

The other day an Air Force Colonel on an airplane told me that the people in the Air Force never really wanted the B-2 bomber -- they thought it was a white elephant -- but the brass went along with it because, you know, they want airplanes. But the analysts in the Air Force were down on it from the beginning. But they never went public. Well everybody now in Washington figures the B-2 bomber should not be built in its full numbers -- they were going to build eighty of them. So George Bush is going to cancel the program. But he's ordered twenty of them, just for ol' times sake. You know what they cost? A billion dollars a plane. And it doesn't work. And it was designed to attack the Soviet Union which no longer exists. And it was designed to evade radar and it's having trouble doing that. But you buy another twenty.

Well they don't have enough money for schools, enough money for child health care, enough money for infant nutrition programs, enough money to rebuild the public wealth -- but plenty of money for these weapons of mass destruction that are piling up and piling up and piling up. Sign of decline, a sign of decline. A serious sign of decline.

The Air Force has $11 billion of spare parts in warehouses and when they want spare parts you know what they do? They order new ones. They're just there in the warehouse, untouched, and they just keep ordering new ones according to a recent government report. There's other signs of decline.

How much time are parent's spending with children? How much time are children spending watching TV, video games, Nintendo? That shred their brains -- turns them into putty -- conditioned responders like Pavlov's creatures. Just think of it for a moment: You tell a teacher in 1900, "you know, in 1990? -- millions of pre-teenagers are going to be watching 30 hours-a-week of television."

These programs are conveying three basic values: violence is a solution to life's problems, addiction, and low-grade sensuality. And they're not conveying values of community, civic values, historical knowledge. Most of them don't convey anything but animated creatures. And these children are watching and watching this electronic babysitter. And they're not learning the art of conversation. They're not spending time with adults -- including their parents. They're not learning reading and writing. They're not learning their own creativity with their wonderful imaginations at those ages. They're just staring, staring. Sign of decline. A very precious resource: children. They've got a lot to teach us.

Now historically, we've had our ups and downs in democracy. We had our downs when slavery was there. We had our downs when women couldn't vote even though we called ourselves a democracy. We had our downs when labor was working for peon wages before trade unions organized -- the mine workers, the steel workers, the auto workers. We had our ups though. We had our ups though. There are periods in our history of reform.

Probably the most fundamental period, although it isn't seen as such in our history books -- fundamental periods are the revolution, the constitution, the civil war. But the populist progressive period around the turn of the century -- early 1900s, late 1800s -- was engendered by farmers. Farmers had something very interesting: they controlled the property they owned, and they had a unified voting block. Now you ask yourself, how many people in this country have both of those at once today? Very few. And they used it, in those decades, to refurbish, revive our democracy. The initiative referendum recall, electoral reforms, farmers co-ops. It rolled across the praries, it affected the cities. Elected senators, governors -- almost elected a president -- before it ebbed. The New Deal came in to deal with the depression. Some structures strengthened our democracy.

Then in the fifties we went into another corporate sink of neglect and then the sixties erupted. It certainly was a heightened consciousness. You don't have your innocence to cop out after the sixties. It was all there for people to see. In one dimension, then another: the Democratic National Convention '68, and the police, the inner city problems, corruption in government, militarism, the corporate profiteering. It was all there.

But then we went into another dip. I have seen in Washington a remarkable resurgence of corporate power. Corporate power is the biggest issue in our country. To put it succinctly: the corporations are shaping our culture, increasingly raising our children, controlling most of our capital and wealth, controlling most of our jobs and where they're going to be or where they're going to be exported, shaping what goes on in Washington more than any other power group, influencing our education more than any other power group. The corporatization of the universities is enough to begin on that topic.

The influence of corporations on media is more than influence -- they are the media. The media are the corporations. General Electric and NBC. And above all, they have managed in a brilliant portrayal of adjustment of their power -- and there's no institution that is more brilliant in adjusting to challenges to its power than that legal fiction we call "the corporation." They now control the commonwealth that is owned by the people in this country (more about that later).

The countervailing forces, what were they? The trade unions were countervailing forces. They are now weak and declining. Just think, in 1960: almost 30% of workers in this country were unionized. It's now down to 16% and dropping. Canada has twice the percentage that we do.

A second countervailing force were the churches. The churches now have been reduced largely to charity. We used to wonder about the power of the churches. Some people thought they were getting too powerful in the old days. Church/State separation being breached. The churches cannot even stop government-sponsored gambling anymore. All these lotteries that are designed to help education and elderly people -- yeah, look at Atlantic City and see how wildly it succeeded. It's the most regressive tax around. And the government's promoting and trying to get more and more people to learn the fun of gambling. I saw an ad on Washington, DC television the other day which said, Look even if you don't win, it's fun! Just try it! They're pushing government lotteries now to reduce deficits -- sign of decline, sign of decline.

Another countervailing force: the courts. One only needs to compare the Supreme Court of the United States and the Supreme Court of California in the sixties, with the Supreme Court of the United States and the Supreme Court of California today to see the difference. These courts are increasingly blocking the avenues of judicial redress. They are saying to millions of taxpayers, You can't sue your government for spending on boondoggles, because you don't have standing to sue. Out! You can't even plead your case. The courts are closing down.

There's a massive propaganda drive now trying to hoodwink us into thinking we're so litigious as a society. Why do we bring all these frivolous lawsuits? And Dan Quayle is leading the foray here. This is all part of a strategy to strip the rights that we have had as a heritage of two hundred years of common law. To have our day in court against the big boys. So workers can be able to sue asbestos makers in the future, not just in the past.

We lead the world in giving injured and sick people the right to sue the perpetrators of their harm. Whether it's toxic wastes, or defective home appliances, or dangerous cars, or hazardous pharmaceuticals, or flamable fabrics, or medical malpractice. And instead of being proud that we lead the world that regime in Washington, surrounded by their corporate lobbyists, are trying to drag us down to lower foreign country denominators of civil justice. By taking away our civil jury, by taking away punitive damages, by capping compensation.

Here we have Ronald Reagan in 1984 having the gall to propose to congress in writing that there should be a federal cap of $250,000 for a lifetime of pain-and-suffering for any injured person winning a case in court against a manufacturer of a dangerous product which injured that person. He wanted a $250,000 cap for a lifetime of pain-and-suffering. He wanted to regulate state juries and judges by Federal fiat. I noticed he didn't want a cap for the million dollar-plus year salaries of insurance company executives. He didn't want a cap on insurance premiums. He didn't want a cap on insurance corporate profits. But he wanted a cap on the most vulnerable people in the country. The paraplegics, quadraplegics and others who, after winning their case in court, would have to have their verdict reduced? Sign of decline.

Now why is it that the headlines of the day are overwhelmingly headlines about people-to-people conflict? People-to-people conflict, racial conflict, gender conflict, worker conflict. Isn't that interesting. What we're seeing here is that the power brokers who shape the limitations that we operate in, who decide the job market, who decide whether they're going to put $27 billion dollars of your pension money into job producing entrepreneurship -- or they're going to put it into a leveraged buyout for RJ Reynolds Nabisco which didn't create any new jobs or new wealth. The corporations who've got the politicians up for rent, or for sale through their campaign contributions and the impact on people daily because too much money and too much power is in too few hands. Hey -- there are no headlines here.

We're experiencing a corporate crime epidemic here in our country. Do you see any politicians being accused by other politicians of being soft on corporate crime? Corporate crime destroys more lives, produces more injuries and destroys more property by far than street crime, bad as street crime is.

A hundred thousand people are dying prematurely from the inadequate prescription of antibiotic drugs, according to a medical journal years ago. 400,000 people dying from tobacco-related diseases. That's an addiction -- who's hooking them? Who's spending billions of dollars trying to get youngsters to learn how to drink and smoke? The tobacco industry is losing 5,000 customers a day -- 4,000 are quitting, 1,000 are dying from tobacco. They got to get new customers. Our government sits around subsidizing the tobacco industry and letting them hook an entire new generation of Americans so they can die at the rate of 400,000 a year.

Corporate crime economically? Bank robbers stole $30 million dollars from banks last year. How many dollars do you think banks stole from their customers last year?

The auto companies held up the air bag for nineteen years before we finally overwhelmed them. Nineteen years. Now they're going into all cars. One-out-of-five Americans will be saved by an airbag in a crash from injury or worse at some time in their life. But 120,000 Americans died, and over a million were injured, in that nineteen year period.

Talk about corporate crime. Who's talking about corporate crime? They want us to focus on people-to-people conflict. They want us to forget about their corporate power.

Now we come to the elections. What are they talking about, these candidates? What are the issues? Well health insurance is in, energy's out -- its like we no longer have an energy problem. No longer have a nuclear power problem, radioactive waste problem, geopolitical wars, balance of payments problems, fossil fuel acceleration of the warming of the planet, acid rain, strip mines -- but we have no energy problem. No one's talking about it in 1992. In 1980 they talked about it a little bit. Its very, very rare.

Jerry Brown is, yes. But you know, he may be talking about it, but how much media is he getting now? See what I mean? It's not enough to talk about it. We have to get media access. And here's where we come into levers where we can really start getting something done.

First, the first resurgence for a democratic sequence to solve any problem is: get the information. We're able to get the information in a timely fashion. We're able to communicate it to one another. We're able to mobilize one another to action. We're able to implement the programs we produce. That's the sequence whether it's housing, mass transit, alleviation of hunger in America, or whatever.

The problem is in our minds -- you see? It starts in our minds. We grow up corporate. We grow up accepting the corporate assumptions of the way we look at products, the way we look at environments, the way we look at government, and the way we look at what we own. Yeah there are exceptions and probably a lot of them are in this auditorium. But I'm talking about the general percentages here. And maybe you're not an exception.

For instance someone says to you, We live in a free country -- you're watching a TV program. If you don't like it -- what are you free to do? Turn it off right? -- or switch to another channel. You don't like any programs? -- you close your TV down, you jump up and down and say, `ahhhhh! -- what freedom!' How many of us grow up to realize that under federal law -- under FEDERAL LAW -- we own the public airways? We are the landlords of the public airways. The radio and TV stations are our tenants. Our real estate agent is the Federal Communications Commission -- what a real estate agent! The radio and TV stations pay zero for their license to make money -- you pay more for your auto license. They decide who says what on TV and who doesn't, who says what on radio and who doesn't. In effect they're saying if we don't like the way they're using our property, we can get out -- turn it off. As a result what do we have? Radio and TV: 90% entertainment and ads, 10% redundant news, and 0% mobilization.

Now how many of you have thought we should have our own audience TV and radio network? Funded and controlled with one hour of prime time on every station coming back to the audience network. They've kept us from becoming electronically literate. And we grow up in effect saying, Well you've got a lot of channels, you got a lot of "choice." Yeah you got a lot of choice -- you've got the Playboy channel, the entertainment channel, the gaming channel, the game show channel, the movie channel and on and on. It's all sugar my friends. Very little nutrition. Why don't we have a 24-hour citizen action channel on cable, so we learn what other people are doing?

So if someone's solving a problem in Kansas City that we've got here in San Francisco, we can learn -- get the addresses right on the TV, the phone numbers. A citizen action channel, so we don't take twenty-five years to learn that someone solved the problem this way -- and we're just trying to find out how to deal with it now.

We've got to stop growing up corporate. That means we've got to think for ourselves much more! We go into a supermarket, if we grow up corporate we buy food based on its temporary taste, easy to chew, pretty to look at, easy to prepare. Example: the deadly pink missile we call the hot dog. If we grow up civic, if we grow up as independently thinking citizens, we go into the supermarket or a store, we buy food based on nutrition, sanitation, absence of harmful chemicals and competitive pricing. That's the difference. We grow up corporate as years ago, we got cars with style, with fins, with hood ornaments, technologically stagnant, gas guzzling, unsafe in crashes, unstable on the highway. Because we look at cars the way GM wanted us to look in all the ads.

You know how many ads the average 17 year old has seen in by the time they're seniors in high school on TV alone? -- 300,000. They've spent more time watching TV then they've spent in their classrooms. No wonder we grow up looking at things through corporate eyes. There's no countervailing criticism. The children on these kiddy programs -- look what they watch. Did you ever see a kiddy program criticizing kiddy programs?

Now, we've put out a proposed reformation and resurgence of our democratic system, which has been declining. Its called The Concord Principals, An Agenda For A New Initiatory Democracy, based on Concord, New Hampshire where it was released during the New Hampshire primary period earlier this year. It takes five of our roles: voters, taxpayers, workers, consumers and shareholders. And it gives them the toolbox, the mechanisms to get information, communicate, mobilize, organize and succeed. All of these proposals, 17 in number, do not cost the taxpayer anything. They are universally available to all of us. And we can choose whether we want to use these tools or not.

The voter reforms. Our vote should never be diluted -- except by another vote against it. It should not be diluted by money and politics. With well-promoted voluntary contributions on the tax forms, we can eliminate private money corrupting politics with a public financing system. Less than the cost of a B-2 bomber, half of the cost of one B-2 bomber will finance the federal elections every two years.

Second, limited terms, twelve years and out for members of the House and the Senate. Except for a few, if they don't burn out or tire out -- they sell out or rent out.

Thirdly, the initiative referendum recall in all 50 states. Not just California or Oregon.

Fourth, easy registration and ballot access requirements. We need more voters and more political parties to shake up tweedledee-tweedledum politics.

Next, we need a binding None Of The Above option on every ballot so if people -- right now if you don't like any of the candidates on the ballot, your only option is to stay home, not vote, and be called apathetic. With a binding None Of The Above you roar down to the ballot box -- you vote None Of The Above and if None Of The Above under a binding system gets more votes than the rest of the candidates, it cancels the election and sends the candidates packing. [thunderous applause]

I can see that a binding None Of The Above initiative in California is a sure winner. Let the students at the University of San Francisco start the ball rolling. Youth organized politically can do wonders. You've got enormous energy up against these fossilized, no grassroot political parties. Don't ever think that you can't count. If you ever started a youth political party to lay the groundwork for these new mechanisms of democracy, you will succeed beyond your wildest dreams.

These two parties are largely engaged in electronic combat. They have no grass roots, no local organizing. They're fossils, ready to be replaced with the vibrant youth and energy of the future.

Finally under voting reform, we need to send a powerful message of humility to the arrogant politicians by repealing the White House/Congressional paygrab right down to 1988 levels. The only language they understand is rejection and hitting 'em in the pocketbook. And this does both.

For the taxpayer, two simple reforms. One is open up the courts so you can sue our government. Two hundred and some years ago, our forebearers revolted for a number of reasons against King George, and one of them was that they couldn't use the courts against King George. Where have we come, two hundred-plus years later, guess what? We can't use the courts against our King George Bush. The judges, largely Reagan/Bush appointees now in the federal courts, throw us out saying we have no standing to sue, we're only taxpayers, we only pay all the bills in government. We have no standing to sue.

The second change is a simple block on the 1040 tax return: "Attention taxpayers, if you're concerned about the way your money is spent, you can join a national taxpayers watchdog group. Please fill out the coupon." That'll go to 130 million taxpayers and Washington will never be the same after that.

Workers: they've got to have more control over their three trillion dollars in pension funds. Instead of being reinvested in the community -- good jobs, productive output -- they're being controlled by a few insurance companies and banks and going into the most non-productive capital outlet you can imagine, including these huge leveraged buy-outs, mergers and acquisitions. Just imagine if workers could control more of what they own in terms of where the three trillion dollars of pension moneies are invested. Back into the community for a change. Back into the community.

Workers also need reform of the labor laws. It's almost impossible now for an industrial workforce to organize a trade union. Almost impossible. They'll fire them. Take three-and-a-half years to reinstate them. By that time the drive is over. It starts again: they'll fire 'em, three-and-a-half years to reinstate them if they last that long.

Workers also need much more control outside of their unions, outside of their workplace, over their health and safety. And there are mechanisms to accomplish that.

Consumers: rate payers, bank consumers, insurance consumers, all of these and others can be organized through a simple insert in the bill that you get. So that when you get your insurance bill, or electric, gas, telephone, bank statement -- look these are either monopolies or we're forced to bail them out. So we've got to require these companies to put something like this in the bill, inviting us, you know, "Dear customer, Are you fed up with high utility rates? You can join your own full time consumer action group, with full time consumer champions to take on these corporations." That's the least these corporations can do for the privileges and immunities that we have given them under our law.

And then there are the shareholders who own our corporations, but don't control them. That's why these executives are running them into the ground. Like General Motors -- imagine, General Motors announced a few weeks ago twenty-one plants close, 77,000 workers to be laid off -- they're market share is shrinking, they're now being disgraced even in the business literature -- and they didn't fire one top executive. But they closed twenty-one plants and 77,000 workers and their families without a job. That's because the worker pension trusts, who own a good share of these corporations, do not control them. We need those kinds of mechanisms.

I'm going to conclude on this note. We've got now the tools that we could put into effect. If these politicians can be compelled to talk about them, we can have a very exciting election year, a very exciting election year. They've got to talk about the proper distribution of power and the improper abuse of power from the top down. If they don't talk about that, they're not talking about the essence of what politics should be all about and what an election should be all about.

Let me assure you that as discouraged as some of you may be about the prospects of the world and the nation, remember: we are starting from a base of knowledge, technology, and constitutional rights that are far more enabling than many more unfortunate people abroad. We can develop the mechanisms, the new toolbox of democracy, so that it impacts our politics and our economy and our social culture in a way that will produce turnarounds and changes and progress much faster than many of you can envision. We can solarize our entire nation. We can solarize our entire nation with passive and active solar energy and energy efficiency. And replace those horrible environmental and geopolitical and deficit problems in the next generation alone.

And what we need to do is to conclude each day individually by saying, "we are never going to go through another day saying we don't count, saying you can't fight city hall, saying that we don't have time for our citizen duties." Because if we don't believe the pursuit of justice is really the pursuit of personal as well as social happiness, we have not learned the lessons of history. Thank you.

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).