Aug/Sept 2002

Deep Sustainability
Roar Ramesh Bjonnes

Community Owned Enterprise
Ron Phillips

Police State Measures Will Not Make Us Safe
Kayla M. Starr, MPH

Can Democracy Survive Endless War?
Edited by Eli Pariser

A Popular Revolt This November
Ted Glick

Turning the Trolls to Stone: Strategy for the Global Justice Movement
Starhawk

Navigating the Tides of Change
David LaChapelle

Dispelling the Myths About Smallpox
Michael Framson

Observations Of A Medical Revolutionary
Doug Falkner

The Emergence of Mind-Body Medicine
Robert Newman

A Childhood Stolen and Redeemed
John Darling

Healing Hints
Peter Moore, MFCC, CGP

Flax Seed
Rebecca Wood

The Yearly Round
Richard Moeschl

The Movie Mystic: "Beautiful Mind"
Stephen Simon

BACK TO TOP

A Popular Revolt This November?

By Ted Glick

Who would have thought it? Proposed legislation to somewhat re-regulate corporations passing Unanimously in the Senate? And yet that’s what happened last July. Think political earthquake, or at least warning tremors.

Of course, expecting the Democratic-led Senate to get to the bottom of the corporate fraud and crime scandal is truly wishful thinking of the highest magnitude. After all, as reported in the New York Times, 41% of the soft money, $449 million, given by corporations during the ’90s was given to the Democratic Party. The “party of the common man” has thoroughly and voluntarily joined itself at the hip with big money.

It’s time for the progressive third party movement, and all those who consider themselves genuine progressives, to come forward with a clear program to address this crisis. Such a program must be coupled with renewed energy and activism so that on election day, November 5th, a message is sent loudly and clearly that a popular revolt is underway against the choices of evil, whether worst or lesser, usually given to the voters by the two-party duopoly.

Below is my contribution to the process of developing such a program:
• There must be vigorous criminal prosecution by state and federal pro-secutors and the Securities and Exchange Commission of criminal corporate executives like Ken Delay and Jeffrey Skillings of Enron. Corporate-cozy SEC Chair Harvey Pitt should be replaced with someone who will be serious about corporate oversight. People like Delay and Skillings must be put away in prison for years. They must be made an example to their corporate colleagues.
• We call for the enactment of state and federal legislation to establish “clean money,” voluntary public financing of elections, as is currently practiced in Maine, Arizona, Vermont and Massachusetts. We must end the domination of government by corporate interests through large campaign contributions and other legal bribes.
•  State laws which charter corporations must be reformed so that corporations which betray the public trust can have their right to operate in a state revoked. Corporations are not persons; they are not entitled to Constitutional rights, and they should be subservient to the people’s needs and will.
•  Stronger whistleblower protections and inducements must be enacted to reward those from within corporations who come forward to provide evidence of illegal activity. Whistleblowers are heroes; we should treat them as such.
• The SEC needs to be given the responsibility to assign licensed, non-indicted auditing firms to conduct comprehensive and accurate audits of major corporations. No company should be able to select its own favorite auditor.
• The SEC and Justice Department budgets for prosecution of corporate crime should be significantly increased. Funding for these budgets should come in part from penalties imposed upon convicted corporate executives.
• There should be a public exposure of the identities and individual assets of the ten largest corporate shareholders and the ten highest paid corporate executives whenever a corporation cannot pay its lawful debts due to bankruptcy. Laws must be reformed so that these assets can be used to pay the debts. All corporate tax returns must be made public, and the tax returns of the ten most highly compensated individuals at any publicly traded company must be made public.
•  Corporations must include on their governing boards democratically-elected representatives of their workforce and consumer representatives. Without some chickens to watch the foxes, there will be even more carnage in the henhouse.
•  The federal government must enact labor law reform, including repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act, to strengthen the power of workers. Unaccountable CEO and corporate management power is at the root of the corporate crime wave. Unions at the corporate workplace are one way to balance this power.

 Progressives must seize the time! Most of us have been saying for decades, since at least the Ronald Reagan era, that corporate welfare, ideologically-driven privatization, huge tax cuts for the wealthy and widespread deregulation of business are fundamentally wrong. Their deeper roots lie in the absurd belief that “pure,” unregulated greed, the pursuit of great power and wealth regardless of human or environmental consequences, will somehow benefit everyone. This belief has been exposed for the lie that it is.

Only a comprehensive and wide-ranging set of reforms can begin to reverse the tremendous damage caused by this legally-sanctioned lie. But these reforms will not happen unless the American people rise up and demand them.

Instant Runoff Voting

The November elections have the potential to become a referendum on two-party malfeasance in office. One and a half years after the five not-so-Supremes selected George Jr. to be President, there are still echoes of the bitterness expressed by some Democrats over Ralph Nader’s Green Party Presidential campaign. And as Green Party and other independent candidates move toward this year’s November elections, we can expect those echoes to become louder and stronger. This will especially be the case in those situations where independents and Greens are running for the US House or Senate, risking Democrats’ hopes of maintaining control of the Senate and winning back control of the House.

Forget the fact that virtually the entire U.S. House and Senate, Republicans and Democrats alike, continue to give the Bush oil-and-war-men a green light to pursue their so-called “war on terrorism,” a war that is having major negative impacts around the world. Here at home it is bad for the economy, and it is being used to further undercut basic civil and Constitutional rights.

The Democrats can’t even get it together to move to repeal the Bush tax cuts, 50% of which will be going to 1% of the population in future years. A real party of working people, that one! Don’t get me wrong: I am not in support of the Republicans controlling all three branches of government, executive, legislative and judicial. As a defensive strategy, it is valid to favor Democratic control of Congress so that there is somewhat of a brake on the most extreme plans of the Republicans. There is something to be said for going 30 miles per hour toward the cliff rather than 50 or 60 miles per hour.

But this defensive strategy alone, this approach of constantly supporting Democrats no matter how bad they are, will never, ever get us out of the dangerous series of crises we are facing in this country and world today. Under Bill Clinton and “environmentalist” Al Gore, nothing, virtually nothing, was done about the crisis of global warming, not even making it a major talking issue. What happened to the “peace dividend” after the end of the Cold War? It was Clinton who wheeled and dealed to get NAFTA passed after it looked dead and gone under Bush Sr.

We can all add to this list.

Which is why, as someone actively involved in the progressive third party movement for over 25 years, it is difficult to take the attacks on us when we decide to run as candidates truly about progressive politics and do so as independents.

We are aware of the risks. But we know that the bigger long-term risk is if we continue with a strategically bankrupt approach toward our undemocratic, two-party, corporate-dominated, winner-take-all electoral system. We believe, based on some very concrete, empirical evidence, that it is essential that the progressive movement build an independent electoral arm to complement all of the other non-electoral tactics we use. This has to be a central strategic objective if we are to come to a halt before we get to the cliff and reverse course.

But I’ve got an idea that might deal with this problem, might even lead to some joint work on the part of progressive Democrats, on the one hand, and Greens and independents, on the other, and perhaps even some Republicans.

We need a new national organization, Democrats for Instant Runoff Voting.

Seriously.

Such an organization would be a way for Democrats who are critical of independent candidacies to channel those worries in a positive direction. Instant runoff voting, a fast-growing, grassroots movement, is a concrete way to deal with this problem.

Under IRV, voters number their preferences, 1, 2, 3, etc., instead of voting for just one person. If no candidate wins 50% plus one #1 votes, then the #2, and possibly, other votes come into play. In this way, people can vote for the candidate they like the best without worrying that their votes will help elect the candidate they like the least (go to www.fairvote.org for more information).

The city of San Francisco recently passed a referendum to establish IRV as their system for electing people to office. In August there will be a statewide referendum in Alaska to do the same. 51 out of 55 Vermont towns supported IRV at town meetings in March. The Nation, Newsweek, Time, USA Today and many other mainstream news sources are reporting on and/or supporting this development. If there was ever a time for this growing movement to become a big deal, this is it.

Come on, progressive Democrats. Don’t gripe and complain. If you’re truly scared of us progressive independents, don’t attack us, join with us to build a strong pro-IRV movement in states and localities all over the country. Let’s deepen democracy!

Ted Glick is the National Coordinator of the Independent Progressive Politics Network (www.ippn.org) and the Green Party of New Jersey’s candidate for U.S. Senate (www.glickforsenate.org). He can be reached at futurehopeTG@aol.com or P.O. Box 1132, Bloomfield, N.J. 07003.