MONTHLY MISSIVE

T H E M O N T H L Y M I S S I V E

JUNE/JULY/AUG 2000
..............
Editor............Morty Breier

August Bipolar Mantra: Humans are born with two pockets... out of one is pulled a note saying:
"You are Nothing but Ashes and Dust"
Out of the other, a note saying:
"The Whole World was Created for You"
From the old Rabbis

C U R R E N T C O M M E N T A R Y

OWNERSHIP STATISTICS TO PONDER

- - The financial wealth of the top one percent of households now exceeds the combined wealth of the bottom 95 percent.
  - The wealth of the Forbes 400 richest Americans grew by an average $940 million each from 1997-1999 while over a recent 12-year period the net worth of the bottom 40 percent of households declined 80 percent.
  - For the well-to-do, that's an average increase in wealth of $1,287,671 per day. If that were wages earned over a 40-hour week, that would be $225,962 an hour or 43,876 times the $5.15 per hour minimum wage.
  - From 1983-1997, only the top five percent of households saw an increase in their net worth while wealth declined for everyone else.
  - Anticipated Social Security payments are now the largest single "asset" for a majority of Americans. Funded by a levy on jobs, the Social Security payroll tax is now the largest tax paid by a majority of Americans (the largest for 90 percent of GenXers), funded with a flat tax of 12.4 percent on earnings up to $72,600.
  - What about the largest intergenerational transfer of wealth in history -- that $12 trillion in the hands of baby-boomers' parents? Current wealth patterns indicate that one-third of that pending transfer will go to 1 percent of the boomers ($1.6 million each). Another third will go to the next 9 percent ($336,000). The final slice will be divided by the remaining 90 percent (an average $40,000 apiece).
  A Boom for Whom?
  - In 1982, inclusion on the Forbes 400 required personal wealth of $91 million. The list then included 13 billionaires. By 1999, $625 million was required for inclusion on a list that included 268 billionaires.
  - The federal debt was $909 billion in 1980. At the close of the Reagan-Bush era, the debt was $4,202 billion. It currently hovers around $5,700 billion.
  - Government debt securities are owned dominantly by upper-crust households. The latest figures show that tax-exempt interest was reported on 4.9 million personal tax returns for 1997, about 4 percent of all taxpayers. Total tax-exempt interest income was $48.5 billion in 1997.
  - The combined net worth of the Forbes 400 topped $1 trillion in September 1999, up from $738 billion 12 months earlier, for an average one-year increase of $655 million each ($12.6 million per week).
  - Less than one-fifth of that increase ($48.4 billion) would have been enough to bring every American up to the official poverty line, leaving each of the Forbes 400 with an average one-year increase of $534 million ($10.2 million per week).
  - Eighty-six percent of stock market gains between 1989 and 1997 flowed to the top ten percent of households while 42 percent went to the most well-to-do one percent.
  In a Nation of Equals
  - In 1998 the top-earning one percent had as much income as the 100 million Americans with the lowest earnings.
  - Economist Robert Frank reports that the top one percent captured 70 percent of all earnings growth since the mid-1970's.
  - On an inflation-adjusted basis, the median hourly wage in 1998 was 7 percent lower than in 1973 - when Richard Nixon was in the White House.
  - The pay gap between top executives and production workers grew from 42:1 in 1980 to 419:1 in 1998 (excluding the value of stock options).
  - Executive pay at the nation's 365 largest companies rose an average 481 percent from 1990 to 1998 while corporate profits rose 108 percent.
  - Had the typical worker's pay risen in tandem with executive pay, the average production worker would now earn $110,000 a year and the minimum wage would be $22.08.
  - Business Week reports that in 1998 the average large company chief executive was paid $10.6 million, a 36 percent jump over 1997. That omits unexercised stock options.
  In the Pursuit of Happiness
  - The work year expanded by 184 hours over the past decade, an additional 4-1/2 weeks on the job for the same or less pay.
  - Household working hours reached 3,149 in 1998, roughly 60 hours a week for the typical family, moving Americans into first place worldwide in the number of hours worked, nudging aside the workaholic Japanese.
  - According to the Bureau of Labor statistics, the typical American now works 350 hours more per year than a typical European -- almost nine full weeks.
  - A 40-hour week at today's minimum wage of $5.15 per hour nets a pre-tax annual income of $10,300. That's $6,355.00 below the official 1998 poverty line for a family of four.
  - Had increases in the minimum wage kept pace with inflation since the 1960s, the minimum wage would now exceed the earnings of nearly 30 percent of U.S. workers.
  - According to the Census Bureau, the top fifth of households now claim 49.2 percent of national income while the bottom fifth gets by on 3.6 percent.
  - The national poverty rate remains above that for any year in the 1970's.
  - One in every four preschoolers in the United States now lives in poverty.
  - In 1973, the United States imprisoned 350,000 people nationwide. By 1998, the prison population was 1.8 million or roughly 674 people in prison per 100,000, while Europe-wide the imprisonment rate is 60 to 100 per 100,000.
  Whose Wealth of Nations?
  - In 1998, Disney CEO Michael Eisner received a pay package totaling $575.6 million, 25,070 times the average Disney worker's pay.
  - In the same year (1998) when one American (Bill Gates) amassed more wealth than the combined net worth of the poorest 45 percent of American households, a record 1.4 million Americans filed for bankruptcy -- 7,000 bankruptcies per hour, 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. Personal bankruptcy filings topped 1.3 million in 1999.
  - Nine years into the longest economic expansion in the nation's history, labor's share of the national income remains two to four percentage points below the levels reached in the late 1960's and early 1970's.
  - For 1999, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that the top one percent will report average before-tax income of $786,000 and average after-tax income of $516,000.
  - The top one percent pocketed, on average, an annual tax cut of $40,000 since 1977, an amount exceeding the average annual income of the middle fifth of households.
  - Federal tax law allows a personal income tax deduction on home mortgage interest costs up to $1 million. If that limit were reduced to $300,000, the CBO calculates that federal tax receipts would increase by $40.8 billion over nine years. In 1998, four percent of new mortgages exceeded $300,000.
  Minorities and Foundations
  - The percentage of black households with zero or negative net worth (31.3 percent) is double that of whites.
  - As of 1997, the net worth of white families was 8 times that of African-Americans and 12 times that of Hispanics. The median financial wealth of African-Americans (net worth less home equity) is $200 while that of Hispanics is zero.
  - The poverty rate among blacks, 26.1 percent, is 2.5 times greater than the rate for whites. For Hispanics, the rate is 25.6 percent.
  - Black applicants were granted less than one percent of total home mortgages approved between 1930 and 1960.
  - The United States has 18,000 black farmers, down from 925,000 in 1920. Less than one percent of farmers are black, and they are abandoning farming at three times the rate of whites.
  - In 1865, blacks owned 0.5 percent of the nation's net worth. In 1990, their net worth totaled 1 percent.
  - If your financial wealth is $225,000 (about 20 times the national median) and you give $1,500 to charity, how large a donation would be required for Bill Gates to experience a similar dent in his net worth? According to Wired magazine, $6.7 billion. That's almost seven times the amount he pledged in September 1999 to provide 20,000 minority scholarships over the next two decades.
  - If an entry-level Forbes 400 member gives away $1 million of their income, how much would a median-level household need to donate to make a similar financial sacrifice? A bit less than $60.
  - Making the World Safe for Plutocracy
  - The world's 200 richest people more than doubled their net worth in the four years to 1999, to more than $1 trillion, for an average $5 billion each. Their combined wealth (the top seven are Americans) equals the combined annual income of the world's poorest 2.5 billion people.
  - Microsoft co-founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen plus Berkshire Hathaway's Warren Buffet have a net worth larger than the combined GDP of the 41 poorest nations and their 550 million people.
  - The wealth of the world's 84 richest individuals exceeds the GDP of China with its 1.3 billion people.
  - The UN Development Program (UNDP) reports that 80 countries have per capita incomes lower than a decade ago. [Note 58] Sixty countries have been growing steadily poorer since 1980.
  - Three billion people live on less than $2 per day while 1.3 billion of those get by on less than $1 per day.
  - In 1960, the income gap between the fifth of the world's people living in the richest countries and the fifth in the poorest countries was 30 to 1. By 1990, the gap had widened to 60 to 1. By 1998, it had grown to 74 to 1.
  - In Indonesia, 61.7 percent of the stock market's value is held by the nation's 15 richest families. The comparable figure for the Philippines is 55.1 percent and 53.3 percent for Thailand.
  A Closer Look at Globalization
  - The world's 200 largest corporations account for 28 percent of global economic activity while employing less than one-quarter of one percent of the global workforce.
  - The World Bank estimates that $100 billion to $150 billion has flowed out of the former Soviet Union since the fall of the Berlin Wall. As of July 1999, one-third of Russians were living below the official poverty line of $38 per month.
  - Every jet fighter sold by a developed country to a developing country costs the schooling of three million children. The cost of a submarine denies safe drinking water to 60 million people.
  - What if those individuals who have captured the most wealth in the global economy were to bear this $35 billion development cost? An annual 3.5 percent levy on the $1 trillion in assets owned by the world's 200 wealthiest people would raise the requisite funds. Three-quarters of those people live in OECD countries; one-third of them reside in the United States.
  - Eighty percent of the world's people live in developing countries.
  - Ninety-five percent of the next generation's children will be born to women there.
  - Seventy percent of those women live on less than $1 per day.
  - Ninety percent of those women labor on average 35 hours more per week than the typical paid workman. None of their work is reflected in the GDP.
  - Women in developing countries produce 80 percent of the food and receive 10 percent of the agricultural assistance.
  - Seventy percent are illiterate.
  - For every year that women attend school beyond the fourth grade, the birth rate declines 20 percent.
  - Fifty percent of women over age 18 can neither read nor write.
  - Less than one percent of the world's assets are held in the name of women.
  - Taken from the web-site www.sharedcapitalism.org

A R T S Y O F F E R I N G S

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

Today I wish to explain why, after working for years as a citizen advocate for consumers, workers, taxpayers and the environment, I am seeking the Green Party's nomination for President. A crisis of democracy in our country convinces me to take this action. Over the past twenty years, big business has increasingly dominated our political economy. This control by the corporate government over our political government is creating a widening "democracy gap." Active citizens are left shouting their concerns over a deep chasm between them and their government. This state of affairs is a world away from the legislative milestones in civil rights, the environment, and health and safety of workers and consumers seen in the sixties and seventies. At that time, informed and dedicated citizens powered their concerns through the channels of government to produce laws that bettered the lives of millions of Americans.

Nader Announces His Candidacy, Feb. 21, 2000 - Washington, D.C.

Today we face grave and growing societal problems in health care, education, labor, energy and the environment. These are problems for which active citizens have solutions, yet their voices are not carrying across the democracy gap. Citizen groups and individual thinkers have generated a tremendous capital of ideas, information, and solutions to the point of surplus, while our government has been drawn away from us by a corporate government. Our political leadership has been hijacked.
Citizen advocates have no other choice but to close the democracy gap by direct political means. Only effective national political leadership will restore the responsiveness of government to its citizenry. Truly progressive political movements do not just produce more good results; they enable a flowering of progressive citizen movements to effectively advance the quality of our neighborhoods and communities outside of politics.

I have a personal distaste for the trappings of modern politics, in which incumbents and candidates daily extol their own inflated virtues, paint complex issues with trivial brush strokes, and propose plans quickly generated by campaign consultants. But I can no longer stomach the systemic political decay that has weakened our democracy. I can no longer watch people dedicate themselves to improving their country while their government leaders turn their backs, or worse, actively block fair treatment for citizens. It is necessary to launch a sustained effort to wrest control of our democracy from the corporate government and restore it to the political government under the control of citizens.

This campaign will challenge all Americans who are concerned with systemic imbalances of power and the undermining of our democracy, whether they consider themselves progressives, liberals, conservatives, or others. Presidential elections should be a time for deep discussions among the citizenry regarding the down-to-earth problems and injustices that are not addressed because of the gross power mismatch between the narrow vested interests and the public or common good.

The unconstrained behavior of big business is subordinating our democracy to the control of a corporate plutocracy that knows few self-imposed limits to the spread of its power to all sectors of our society. Moving on all fronts to advance narrow profit motives at the expense of civic values, large corporate lobbies and their law firms have produced a commanding, multi-faceted and powerful juggernaut. They flood public elections with cash, and they use their media conglomerates to exclude, divert, or propagandize. They brandish their willingness to close factories here and open them abroad if workers do not bend to their demands. By their control in Congress, they keep the federal cops off the corporate crime, fraud, and abuse beats. They imperiously demand and get a wide array of privileges and immunities: tax escapes, enormous corporate welfare subsidies, federal giveaways, and bailouts. They weaken the common law of torts in order to avoid their responsibility for injurious wrongdoing to innocent children, women and men.

Abuses of economic power are nothing new. Every major religion in the world has warned about societies allowing excessive influences of mercantile or commercial values. The profiteering motive is driven and single-minded. When unconstrained, it can override or erode community, health, safety, parental nurturing, due process, clean politics, and many other basic social values that hold together a society. Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Supreme Court Justices Louis Brandeis and William Douglas, among others, eloquently warned about what Thomas Jefferson called " the excesses of the monied interests" dominating people and their governments. The struggle between the forces of democracy and plutocracy has ebbed and flowed throughout our history. Each time the cycle of power has favored more democracy, our country has prospered ("a rising tide lifts all boats"). Each time the cycle of corporate plutocracy has lengthened, injustices and shortcomings proliferate.

In the sixties and seventies, for example, when the civil rights, consumer, environmental, and women's rights movements were in their ascendancy, there finally was a constructive responsiveness by government. Corporations, such as auto manufacturers, had to share more decision making with affected constituencies, both directly and through their public representatives and civil servants. Overall, our country has come out better, more tolerant, safer, and with greater opportunities. The earlier nineteenth century democratic struggles by abolitionists against slavery, by farmers against large oppressive railroads and banks, and later by new trade unionists against the brutal workplace conditions of the early industrial and mining era helped mightily to make America and its middle class what it is today. They demanded that economic power subside or be shared.

Democracy works, and a stronger democracy works better for reputable, competitive markets, equal opportunity and higher standards of living and justice. Generally, it brings out the best performances from people and from businesses.
A plutocracy-rule by the rich and powerful-on the other hand, obscures our historical quests for justice. Harnessing political power to corporate greed leaves us with a country that has far more problems than it deserves, while blocking ready solutions or improvements from being applied.

It is truly remarkable that for almost every widespread need or injustice in our country, there are citizens, civic groups, small and medium-sized businesses and farms that have shown how to meet these needs or end these injustices. However, all the innovative solutions in the world will accomplish little if the injustices they address or the problems they solve have been shoved aside because plutocracy reigns and democracy wanes. For all optimistic Americans, when their issues are thus swept from the table, it becomes civic mobilization time.

Consider the economy, which business commentators say could scarcely be better. If, instead of corporate yardsticks, we use human yardsticks to measure the performance of the economy and go beyond the quantitative indices of annual economic growth, structural deficiencies become readily evident. The complete dominion of traditional yardsticks for measuring economic prosperity masks not only these failures but also the inability of a weakened democracy to address how and why a majority of Americans are not benefitting from this prosperity in their daily lives. Despite record economic growth, corporate profits, and stock market highs year after year, a stunning array of deplorable conditions still prevails year after year. For example:

A majority of workers are making less now, inflation adjusted, than in 1979

Over 20% of children were growing up in poverty during the past decade, by far the highest among comparable western countries

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

American workers are working longer and longer hours-on average an additional 163 hours per year, compared to 20 years ago-with less time for family and community

Many full-time family farms cannot make a living in a market of giant buyer concentration and industrial agriculture

The public works (infrastructure) are crumbling, with decrepit schools and clinics, library closings, antiquated mass transit and more

Corporate welfare programs, paid for largely by middle-class taxpayers and amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars per year, continue to rise along with government giveaways of taxpayer assets such as public forests, minerals and new Medicines

Affordable housing needs are at record levels while secondary mortgage market companies show record profits

The number of Americans without health insurance grows every year

There have been twenty-five straight years of growing foreign trade deficits ($270 billion in 1999)

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

Personal bankruptcies are at a record level

Personal savings are dropping to record lows and personal assets are so low that Bill Gates' net worth is equal to that of the net assets of the poorest 120 million Americans combined

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

Motor vehicle fuel efficiency averages are actually declining and, overall, energy conservation efforts have slowed, while renewable energy takes a back seat to fossil fuel and atomic power subsidies

Wealth inequality is greater than at any time since WWII. The top one percent of the wealthiest people have more financial wealth than the bottom 90% of Americans combined, the worst inequality among large western nation

Despite annual declines in total business liability costs, business lobbyists drive for more privileges and immunities for their wrongdoing.

It is permissible to ask, in the light of these astonishing shortcomings during a period of touted prosperity, what the state of our country would be should a recession or depression occur? One import of these contrasts is clear: economic growth has been decoupled from economic progress for many Americans. In the early 1970s, our economy split into two tiers. Whereas once economic growth broadly benefited the majority, now the economy has become one wherein "a rising tide lifts all yachts," in the words of Jeff Gates, author of The Ownership Solution. Returns on capital outpaced returns on labor, and job insecurity increased for millions of seasoned workers. In the seventies, the top 300 CEOs paid themselves 40 times the entry-level wage in their companies. Now the average is over 400 times. This in an economy where impoverished assembly line workers suffering from carpal tunnel syndrome frantically process chickens which pass them in a continuous flow, where downsized white and blue collar employees are hired at lesser compensation, if they are lucky, where the focus of top business executives is no longer to provide a service that attracts customers, but rather to aquire customers through mergers and acquisitions. How long can the paper economy of speculation ignore its effects on the real economy of working families?

Pluralistic democracy has enlarged markets and created the middle class. Yet the short-term monetized minds of the corporatists are bent on weakening, defeating, diluting, diminishing, circumventing, coopting, or corrupting all traditional countervailing forces that have saved American corporate capitalism from itself.

Regulation of food, automobiles, banks and securities, for example, strengthened these markets along with protecting consumers and investors. Antitrust enforcement helped protect our country from monopoly capitalism and stimulated competition. Trade unions enfranchised workers and helped mightily to build the middle class for themselves, benefiting also non-union laborers. Producer and consumer cooperatives helped save the family farm, electrified rural areas, and offered another model of economic activity. Civil litigation-the right to have your day in court-helped deter producers of harmful products and brought them to some measure of justice. At the same time, the public learned about these hazards.

Public investment-from naval shipyards to Pentagon drug discoveries against infectious disease to public power authorities-provided yardsticks to measure the unwillingness of big business to change and respond to needs. Even under a rigged system, shareholder pressures on management sometimes have shaken complacency, wrongdoing, and mismanagement. Direct consumer remedies, including class actions, have given pause to crooked businesses and have stopped much of this unfair competition against honest businesses. Big business lobbies opposed all of this progress strenuously, but they lost and America gained. Ultimately, so did a chastened but myopic business community.

Now, these checkpoints face a relentless barrage from rampaging corporate titans assuming more control over elected officials, the workplace, the marketplace, technology, capital pools (including workers' pension trusts) and educational institutions. One clear sign of the reign of corporations over our government is that the key laws passed in the 60s and 70s that we use to curb corporate misbehavior would not even pass through Congressional committees today. Planning ahead, multinational corporations shaped the World Trade Organization's autocratic and secretive governing procedures so as to undermine non-trade health, safety, and other living standard laws and proposals in member countries.

Up against the corporate government, voters find themselves asked to choose between look-a-like candidates from two parties vying to see who takes the marching orders from their campaign paymasters and their future employers. The money of vested interests nullifies genuine voter choice and trust. Our elections have been put out for auction to the highest bidder. Public elections must be publicly financed and it can be done with well-promoted voluntary checkoffs and free TV and Radio time for ballot-qualified candidates.

Workers are disenfranchised more than any time since the 1920s. Many unions stagger under stagnant leadership and discouraged rank and file. Furthermore, weak labor laws actually obstruct new trade union organization and leave the economy with the lowest percentage of workers unionized in more than 60 years. Giant multinationals are pitting countries against one another and escaping national jurisdictions more and more. Under these circumstances, workers are entitled to stronger labor organizing laws and rights for their own protection in order to deal with highly organized corporations.

At a very low cost, government can help democratic solution building for a host of problems that citizens face, from consumer abuses, to environmental degradation. Government research and development generated whole new industries and company startups and created the Internet. At the least, our government can facilitate the voluntary banding together of interested citizens into democratic civic institutions. Such civic organizations can create more level playing fields in the banking, insurance, real estate, transportation, energy, health care, cable TV, educational, public services, and other sectors. Let's call this the flowering of a deep-rooted democratic society. A government that funnels your tax dollars to corporate welfare kings in the form of subsidies, bailouts, guarantees, and giveaways of valuable public assets can at least invest in promoting healthy democracy.
Taxpayers have very little legal standing in the federal courts and little indirect voice in the assembling and disposition of taxpayer revenues. Closer scrutiny of these matters between elections is necessary. Facilities can be established to accomplish a closer oversight of taxpayer assets and how tax dollars (apart from social insurance) are allocated. This is an arena which is, at present, shaped heavily by corporations that, despite record profits, pay far less in taxes as a percent of the federal budget than in the 1950s and 60s.

The "democracy gap" in our politics and elections spells a deep sense of powerlessness by people who drop out, do not vote or listlessly vote for the "least-worst" every four years and then wonder why after another cycle the "least-worst" gets worse. It is time to redress fundamentally these imbalances of power. We need a deep initiatory democracy in the embrace of its citizens, a usable brace of democratic tools that brings the best out of people, highlights the humane ideas and practical ways to raise and meet our expectations and resolve our society's deficiencies and injustices.
A few illustrative questions can begin to raise our expectations and suggest what can be lost when the few and powerful hijack our democracy:

Why can't the wealthiest nation in the world abolish the chronic poverty of millions of working and non-working Americans, including our children?

Are we reversing the disinvestment in our distressed inner cities and rural areas and using creatively some of the huge capital pools in the economy to make these areas more livable, productive and safe?

Are we able to end homelessness and wretched housing conditions with modern materials, designs, and financing mechanisms, without bank and insurance company redlining, to meet the affordable housing needs of millions of Americans?

Are we getting the best out of known ways to spread renewable, efficient energy throughout the land to save consumers money and to head off global warming and other land-based environmental damage from fossil fuels and atomic energy?

Are we getting the best out of the many bright and public-spirited civil servants who know how to improve governments but are rarely asked by their politically-appointed superiors or members of Congress?

Are we able to provide wide access to justice for all aggrieved people so that we apply rigorously the admonition of Judge Learned Hand, "If we are to keep our democracy, there must be one commandment: Thou Shall Not Ration Justice"?

Can we extend overseas the best examples of our country's democratic processes and achievements instead of annually using billions in tax dollars to subsidize corporate munitions exports, as Republican Senator Mark Hatfield always used to decry?

Can we stop the giveaways of our vast commonwealth assets and become better stewards of the public lands, better investors of trillions of dollars in worker pension monies, and allow broader access to the public airwaves and other assets now owned by the people but controlled by corporations?

Can we counter the coarse and brazen commercial culture, including television which daily highlights depravity and ignores the quiet civic heroisms in its communities, a commercialism that insidiously exploits childhood and plasters its logos everywhere?

Can we plan ahead as a society so we know our priorities and where we wish to go? Or do we continue to let global corporations remain astride the planet, corporatizing everything, from genes to education to the Internet to public institutions, in short planning our futures in their image? If a robust civic culture does not shape the future, corporatism surely will.

To address these and other compelling challenges, we must build a powerful, self-renewing civil society that focuses on ample justice so we do not have to desperately bestow limited charity. Such a culture strengthens existing civic associations and facilitates the creation of others to watch the complexities and technologies of a new century. Building the future also means providing the youngest of citizens with citizen skills that they can use to improve their communities.

This is the foundation of our campaign, to focus on active citizenship, to create fresh political movements that will displace the control of the Democratic and Republican Parties, two apparently distinct political entities that feed at the same corporate trough. They are in fact simply the two heads of one political duopoly, the DemRep Party. This duopoly does everything it can to obstruct the beginnings of new parties including raising ballot access barriers, entrenching winner-take-all voting systems, and thwarting participation in debates at election times

As befits its name, the Green Party, whose nomination I seek, stands for the regeneration of American politics. The new populism which the Green Party represents, involves motivated, informed voters who comprehend that "freedom is participation in power," to quote the ancient Roman orator, Cicero. When citizen participation flourishes, as this campaign will encourage it to do, human values can tame runaway commercial imperatives. The myopia of the short-term bottom line so often debases our democratic processes and our public and private domains. Putting human values first helps to make business responsible and to put government on the right track.

It is easy and true to say that this deep democracy campaign will be an uphill one. However, it is also true that widespread reform will not flourish without a fairer distribution of power for the key roles of voter, citizen, worker, taxpayer, and consumer. Comprehensive reform proposals from the corporate suites to the nation's streets, from the schools to the hospitals, from the preservation of small farm economies to the protection of privacies, from livable wages to sustainable environments, from more time for children to less time for commercialism, from waging peace and health to averting war and violence, from foreseeing and forestalling future troubles to journeying toward brighter horizons, will wither while power inequalities loom over us.
Why are campaigns just for candidates? I would like the American people to hear from individuals such as Edgar Cahn (Time Dollars for neighborhoods), Nicholas Johnson (television and telecommunications), Paul Hawken, Amory and Hunter Lovins (energy and resource conservation), Dee Hock (on chaordic organizations), James MacGregor Burns and John Gardner (on leadership), Richard Grossman (on the American history of corporate charters and personhood), Jeff Gates (on capital sharing), Robert Monks (on corporate accountability), Ray Anderson (on his company's pollution and recycling conversions), Johnnetta Cole, Troy Duster and Yolanda Moses (on race relations), Richard Duran (minority education), Lois Gibbs (on community mobilization against toxics), Robert McIntyre (on tax justice), Hazel Henderson (on redefining economic development), Barry Commoner and David Brower (on fundamental environmental regeneration), Wendell Berry (on the quality of living), Tony Mazzocchi (on a new agenda for labor), and Law Professor Richard Parker (on a constitutional popular manifesto). These individuals are a small sampling of many who have so much to say, but seldom get through the evermore entertainment-focused media. (Note: mention of these persons does not imply their support for this campaign.)

Our political campaign will highlight active and productive citizens who practice democracy often in the most difficult of situations. I intend to do this in the District of Columbia whose citizens have no full-voting representation in Congress or other rights accorded to states. The scope of this campaign is also to engage as many volunteers as possible to help overcome ballot barriers and to get the vote out. In addition it is designed to leave a momentum after election day for the various causes that committed people have worked so hard to further. For the Greens know that political parties need also to work between elections to make elections meaningful. The focus on fundamentals of broader distribution of power is the touchstone of this campaign. As Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis declared for the ages, "We can have a democratic society or we can have great concentrated wealth in the hands of a few. We cannot have both."

Thank you.

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

P O E M S & P O L T E R G E I S T S

It's the same old merry-go-round
Which one will you choose this year
The donkey and elephant go up and down
on the same merry-go-round

Theme song for the third party candidacy of Henry Wallace in the 1940s

S A G E R E M A R K S

- - VOTE FOR NADER
    By Barbara Ehrenreich <barbeh@aol.com>
    It must be some playful new postmodernist form of politics: First you spend years ranting about the plutocracy that has supplanted American democracy and is rapidly devouring the planet. You complain about the growing numbers of Americans who can't afford healthcare or housing; you rant about the inadequacy of wages and the arrogance of the corporate overclass. Then, just as large numbers of people start tuning in and even getting excited to the point of supporting the one presidential candidate who's making the exact same points you've been trying to get across all this time -- you whip around and shout, "Only kidding, folks. Get out there and vote for Gore!" Normally I'm more responsive when summoned to help save a drowning man. But none of the lefties for Gore are arguing that Gore has said or done anything recently to earn progressive support. He's going down, is all, and going down so quickly and inexplicably that no one can call him "wooden" anymore -- there's a question whether he's even carbon-based. Here he is, faced with the frothiest Republican presidential hopeful since Dan Quayle, and Gore can ignite no sparks, cannot even rise above his own fundraising scandals or apparently grasp wherein the scandal lies. As recently as late June, for example, he praised an audience of African-immigrant Americans for their contributions to his campaign, promising that the money would be "helping to focus the attention of our country on issues in Nigeria or Ethiopia or Ghana or Cameroon or South Africa."
    
    We are being summoned to save this inveterate bribe-seeker because "a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush." That in itself is a disturbingly Orwellian proposition, easily generalized to "Don't challenge the system, you'll only make it worse." But leaving that aside, let us acknowledge that Bush is indeed scarier than Gore on several discernible issues, abortion the most prominent among them. Hence the familiar plea of the pro-Gore leftists: Keep W.'s pudgy little fingers off the Supreme Court.
    
    Ah, the Supreme Court! Never mind that pro-choice Justice O'Connor was a Reagan appointee or that Clinton's man Breyer is one of the most economically conservative Justices around -- the Supreme Court gets dragged out every four years to squash any attempt to escape the Democratic Party. So it has been and so it will always be until we have a Court consisting entirely of pro-choice teenagers.
    
    Abortion, which is the issue I am most frequently Gored with by the political "realists" of the left, deserves a closer look. Note first that the prominence of this issue in the Gore/Bush race above all reflects the loving concordance of the candidates on almost everything else -- militarization, incarceration and the necessary immiseration of working people everywhere in the service of global capital. Note second that what has vitiated abortion rights on the ground is not so much the legal whittling away of Roe v. Wade though quite a bit of that has gone on too, at the state level) as the relentless pressure from antichoice groups on abortion providers. And aside from reining in clinic picketers, there's not a whole hell of a lot the Supreme Court can do to fix that.
    
    It should be recalled, too, that we didn't get legal abortion in the first place because nine men in black robes were kind enough to allow us to have it. Women fought for it by every means possible, illegal as well as legal. Surely the anti-Naderites of the left can agree that Roe v. Wade wasn't the author of women's liberation, just as Brown v. Board of Education did not create the civil rights movement. Deep social change is made by deep social movements, not by edicts.
    
    But the left-wing Gore-ites often seem oblivious to the dynamics of real social change. They say we have to build an alternative politics -- only just not yet. Wait until we replace "winner take all" elections with something more democratic, they urge. Fine, only where is the energy to reform the electoral process going to come from unless we start challenging that process with attractive third-party candidates now? Or they say wait until we have a real party -- who are these Greens, anyway? But parties don't just grow by accretion. Sometimes they have to do things -- grand, noble and, from a "realistic" point of view, surely foolish things -- like stepping into the fray and duking it out with the bullies and their designated surrogates.
    
    What I fear most about a Gore victory -- yes, I said victory -- is its almost certainly debilitating effect on progressives and their organizations. During the Clinton years, many a feminist, enviro and labor leader was so charmed by the crumbs of "access" thrown their way and the occasional low-level progressive appointment that they bit their tongues whenever Clinton showed his true DLC colors, e.g., with welfare reform. And every time I would sputter, Dump this creep!" someone would whisper soothingly, "But he's pro-choice (and so much more pro-labor and pro-tree than the other guy)." Is this what we're going to hear when it comes time to protest the war in Colombia or any other Gore-perpetrated horror? At the very least, the progressive Gore-ites ought to explain how they intend to avoid getting into another hostage situation should their man win.
    
    But I can't get really mad at the Gore-ites of the left -- there is such a becoming and altogether seemly diffidence about them. To my knowledge, none of them are sporting Gore buttons or bumper stickers, and I don't expect any of them to invite me to a Gore house party anytime soon. While they may firmly believe that "a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush," they seem also to understand that a vote for Gore is a vote for the system as it stands -- and specifically for the DLC-dominated Democratic Party. Like it or not, that's how the Gore votes will be counted, and that's how they'll be spun.
    
    Here's how generous I am: I'll tell them what they can do if they'd like to save Gore. They should stop flacking for him -- stop all this carping about "spoiling" and "vote stealing" -- and explain to their man what he'd have to do to start taking votes away from Nader. Like renouncing the substitution of bribery for the democratic process. Like pledging to spend the budget excess on such daily necessities as universal health insurance and childcare. Like embracing a worker-friendly approach to world trade.
    
    I doubt Gore could ever become Nader-like enough to steal my vote from the original, certainly not after his choice of DLC leader Lieberman as Veep. But it sure would be nice to see him try.
    
    Barbara Ehrenreich's forthcoming book, Nickel and Dimed, on
    low-wage work in America, will be out in the spring of 2001.

M I R T H & M A N I A

A FUNNY THING HAPPENED IN TEXAS WHILE GEORGE W BUSH WAS GOVERNOR

- - - In reference to your comment on going conservative if Bush is elected,
      can we short the US? I got the following e-mail from a friend.
      The state of Texas, under the leadership of
      Governor George W. Bush is ranked:
      - 1st in Children without Health Insurance...US Bureau of Census
      - 1st in percentage of poor working parents without insurance
      - 5th in Highest Teen Birth Rate...US Dept. of Health & Human services
      - 3rd in Highest number of children living in poverty...US Bureau of Census
      - 5th in percentage of population living in poverty
      - 1st in Toxic Air Releases... EPA and TNRCC (Texas Natural Resource
      Conservation Commission), also AP article in Houston Chronicle
      - 1st in poorest counties(3)...US Bureau of Census
      - 3rd in Hunger...
      - 41st on what it spends on kindergarten thru 12th grade education...
      - 41st in per-capita spending on public education
      - 42nd in child support collections
      - 45th in Mothers Receiving Pre-Natal Care...Childrens Rights Council
      - 46th in Public Libraries and Branches...Statistical Rankings by State
      - 46th in High School Completion Rate...US Dept. of Education
      - 46th in Water Resources Protection... EPA
      - 47th in Delivery of Social Services...
      - 48th in Literacy... Texas Workforce Commission and others
      - 48th in Per Capita Funding for Public Health...
      - 48th in Best Place to Raise Children (29th before Bush became
      governor)...Children's Rights Council
      - 48th in Spending for Parks and Recreation...Texas Observer
      - 48th in Spending for the Arts...Texas Observer
      - 49th in Spending for the Environment...Texas Observer
      - 50th in Teachers' Salaries plus Benefits... Nat'l. Education Agency
      - 1st in DWI deaths... Texas Department Of Public Safety
      - 2nd in 18-wheeler accidents... Texas Department Of Public Safety
      - 1st in gun-related child injuries and deaths...
      - 1st in the number of prisoners executed since 1976...(avg.1 every 2 weeks
      for Bush's 5 years)
      - 2nd (behind Louisiana) in number of people incarcerated...
      - 9th on what it spends on prisons (prisons are big business)...
      - Only one accredited child-care center exists for every 2,637 children in the state...
      - A fourth of children still are not immunized by age 2..
      And more, much more:

P H O T O G A L L E R Y

Karen:

M I S S I O N S T A T E M E N T

- - This E-Zine of sorts is being started with no expectations. I need not earn a living so my time is my own and I elect to play with some of that time by launching this MONTHLY MISSIVE. It is a creative act inspired by Rabbi Zalman Schechter-Shalomi, my guru once removed, who said "It's time to download our wisdom on the hard drive of humanity." He was speaking to those of us who prefer sageing to ageing.
    The idea is to get a bunch of hip contributors, secret sages, to comment on the passing scene, to offer creative work and to wax philosophical about perennial issues. The tribe's elders, and I count myself among them, need a forum and at least this is a start. To begin with, I hope that my dear friends become this E-Zine's regular contributors. The trouble is that they are, as is perfectly appropriate for this mission, iconoclasts to the core and getting them to cooperate is like hearding cats.
    
    And that's just the part that tries filling these electronic pages... trying to get readers is an entirely different proposition. I remember an actor telling me that it's better to be in a play with a large cast because then all the family and friends of the cast are at least sure to help fill the seats. The start of this E-Zine readership will be like that. Friends have friends and family. And who better to make contact with than our friends and family.
    
    Even though we now have had only three other contributors, my cousin and dear friend Marcus Uzilevsky, my old buddy, the wonderful poet Rose', and posthumously, the legendary Tony Price, the rest being my stuff, I hope these pages might inspire others to join in. I will be sending email messages to those I particularly want to contribute but everyone is welcome to try their hand. I hope to have several different views on a particular topic that needs addressing and I'll let you know each month what those topics are.
    
    Feel free, of course, to submit anything you want. I would like your submittal to be accompanied by your photo and an autobiographical piece. I can read attachments in Microsoft Word or in Corel WordPerfect and I prefer JPEG formatted images. My email address is morty@aloha.net. Let's see what we can do together. Remember:
    
    POWER TO THE PEOPLE.
    SHALOHA
    MORTY BREIER, Editor

H I P S O U R C E S

Marcus Uzilevsky: We are proud to have as a contributor distinguished California artist and musician Marcus Uzilevsky. Talk about hip, he's in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, for his 1965-68 group The Third Bardo, (he jammed with Dylan in the Cafe Wah). Under his present name Uzca, he has two world music CDs Slice of Light and Gypsy Dreams, this last he calls Nouveau Klezmer. Klezmer, the Jewish music of Eastern Europe with its weeping and laughing clarinets and violins has always been in Uzca's heart and soul and his latest CD blends Gypsy guitars, African talking drums, Middle Eastern belly dancing rythms, Klezmer violin and clarinet and hypnotic vocals in his intuitive universal language. We are invited to join in the dance of life to celebrate our common humanity. As an artist Marcus is well hung in permanent collections and 50 one man shows, selling over a half million lithographs. Born in Brooklyn, migrating to California in the late sixties he is now esconsed in an old railroad building on the fringes of Marin. Uzilevsky has long been a spiritual journeyer, creating his poetry in both the visual and musical arts. The man is out there and be here to tune in on his poetic offerings..

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Rose': Rose' was born deep in the Bronx in 1934. He began crafting his poetry attending a number of colleges during the 50's. After a stint in the army he bounced around working as a lifeguard, masseur and astrology writer. He saw his heaviest combat duty teaching High School English in New York. In the early sixties he assiduously pursued Ancient Greek while dining on Mexican beaches, toping in European cafes and slumming in Moroccan dives. Between a stint of acting, including the movie "The Edge", he published a book of drawings and launched skin diving trips throughout the Yucatan and the Florida Keys. His "School of the Night" specialized in occult classes and his "Liquid Wedge Gallery" made media history with sculptor Tony Price's first "Atomic Art Show" in NYC in 1969. Struck with what he calls his "Man-o-pause", Rose' started his epic poem "The Pearl in the Crown", still a grand work in progress. He performs as a stand-up poet in salons, homes, theatres, clubs, sushi bars, on radio and television in New York, Los Angeles, Miami and Santa Fe. Rose' now lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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Tony Price, 1937-2000: Thomas Anthony Price wa born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1937. He began his art career in the Marine Corps, painting sixty-foot murals and portraits of generals. After his stint in the marines, 1955-57, he painted and illustrated books, poetry and magazines in New York City and Mexico. Price then worked from 1962-3 as an art director and set designer in films and television for Studio 30 in New York and Brazil. In 1963 Price left for Paris and Rome to paint. His European work is held by collectors in Italy, France, Holland, Germany and Spain. In 1964 he returned to New York and began sculpting in stone, metal and electronic materials. Since his move to New Mexico in 1965, Price has worked with nuclear scrap materials exclusively from Los Alamos from which he has created icons of world religions. Tony died in early 2000 after a yearlong battle with a stroke that had left him partially paralyzed. *
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