Money and Politics; Money and Policy

The Similarities in the Gore and Bush Support of a Corporate Agenda

Campaign Finance Reform: Failure of Lobbying and the Need for Political (Third Party) Action

The "Risk" of a Bush Election Pales by Comparison to Former Political Risks

Power in Your Hands

I agree that this is not intended to be a political rally.  It's intended to be a thoughtful discussion. But we can't really ignore the fact that there is, after all, an election coming up next Tuesday, in case you hadn't caught that in the news.

You may have seen the statistic that 30 percent of those between the ages of 18 and 24 can't name the two major party candidates, but I'll bet all of you can.

I would like to get some sense ahead of time, simply for purposes of bringing everybody into discussion.  There is no need to put up your hand on these questions.  If you prefer not to indicate, that's fine.

How many of you are now thinking of, or leaning towards, voting for Governor Bush?  Okay.  And how many of you are thinking of, or leaning toward, Al Gore?  Okay.  And how many are thinking of, or leaning toward, Ralph Nader?  Okay.  So that give's us a sense of where we are.

Actually, the subject I want to talk about really is a non-partisan subject that's perfectly suitable for a crowd made up of representatives all across the political spectrum.  I view it as a major crisis.  The reason I say it's non-partisan is because there are a great many other people of all political stripes who agree.

It is the domination of our political and governmental process by large corporations and big money.

It's something that Republican McCain has made the centerpiece of his political career and his campaign in the Republican primary.  Al Gore says this will be the first piece of legislation he'll send to Congress if he gets elected.  Obviously, it's the heart and soul of Ralph Nader's campaign.

It's a subject that is talked about by many journalists and academics.  I think it is widely agreed that this truly is an evil of substantial proportions that is eating away at the core of American democracy.  Something has to be done about it.  The questions are, "What can we do? Who can do it? What is the best strategy to follow?"

I should begin with my own self-disclosure.

For those of you who don't know, I have supported every Democrat for president from Harry Truman to the present.  I have received three presidential appointments in Washington from two presidents who were members of the Democratic Party.  I have run for Congress from Iowa as a Democrat. I've worked in every level from Precinct Captain to Task Forces with the Democratic National Committee.  I have been a Democrat all my life.  Frankly, I am going to vote mostly for Democrats for the local offices in Iowa City as I also have in the past.

And I am this year supporting Ralph Nader.

So this is a major decision for me.  I am losing lots of friends over this.  It is not a decision I've come to casually.  So I simply say that, not to persuade you of anything, but just to let you know where I'm coming from in making these remarks. I don't want to mislead you in that regard in any way.

I first came upon this relationship between money and policy and the formulas that are used in one of my earlier appointments.  Actually, I was Maritime Administrator at the time.

The maritime industry got some economists to review the maritime subsidy program, assuming they would come to the conclusion that this was a wonderful expenditure of taxpayers’ money.  The very last sentence of the very last paragraph of the very last chapter was, "and thus we find there is no economic value of the American merchant marine."  In short, this was nothing but a transfer of the taxes paid by the middle class to the wealthy ship owners and ship operators for which the American people received nothing in return.  Everything accomplished with the program could be done cheaper in some other way.  You could create jobs cheaper in some other way, move cargo, improve the balance of payments, contribute to national defense.

Why was this program continued year after year after year?  Last time I looked, they added another one billion dollars to it.  I was kind of curious.  I was a 29-year-old kid from Iowa. I didn't know anything about this stuff.

Then I noticed one day in the paper that the milk producers had gone to the Department of Agriculture and asked for an increase in the support price of milk.  The Agriculture department said, "We'd really like to help you guys because we consider that our mission is to help farmers.  But you know there is no way we can come up with any rationale for doing it.  We've already given you a price hike and you haven't had any increase in your costs.  And it is going to have an awful impact on mothers with children and people who need to get milk.  We don't see how we can do it.”

And then the report came out that they had given Richard Nixon $200,000 in cash.  The next week I noticed the price of milk went up, the support price of milk, so that the American consumer paid an extra $400 million dollars the next year for milk.

Well, I went into law, rather than science, because I didn't want to become a math expert. And the alternative, "Do you want fries with that?" didn't appeal to me.

But I was able to divide $400 million by $200,000 and discover that they were getting back $2,000 for every dollar they put in.  I thought, "Oh, wow, what an investment.  This is better than the most raging bull market on Wall Street as a return on your money."

Then I started looking across the board.  Is this just unique to milk price supports? Maybe there's something here also with special tax benefits and defense contracts and use of public land and creating wealth out of nothing like when you get a license for an FCC station and you've got a million dollars worth of property but once you get the license it's worth 100 million dollars.  Maybe we ought to look at some of the rest of this.

Here were some the examples that I came up with.

This is from something I did some years ago, today it is much worse than this.  This was the early stages of it.

• The mining industry contributed $17 million dollars from 1987 to 1994 and got $26 billion from public lands in return.  All right?  $17 million in, $26 billion out.  Sometimes it's only 1000 to 1.  It varies between 1000-to-1 and 2000-to-1.

• Timber industry executives contributed $6.9 million during the same period and it was roughly during the years the forest service was losing $7.2 billion selling them our trees.  All right?  $6.9 million in, $7.2 billion out.  1000 to 1.

• ADM, whose chief executive was indicted but acquitted for a $150,000 cash contribution to Hubert Humphrey, and his $25,000 check was found in Watergate burglar Bernard Barker's account, gave Bush $652,000 in soft money.  Bush provided ADM an ethanol subsidy worth $3.4 billion.  I mean $652,000 in and then you get back $3.4 billion.  That is much more obviously than the 2000 to 1.  Occasionally, you get them sort of out of range.  But the range is that.

• Doctors kicked in 14 million over 10 years and got Gingrich to change the Republican Medicare plan to eliminate billions of dollars in fee reductions.

• Real estate developers gave $7.9 million to George Bush and the Republican National Committee and got back $2.5 billion in one little tax break.

What is a tax break?  What a tax break is is an increase in your taxes.  If the corporations are not paying their fair share, we don't spend that much less on government programs.  We just raise your taxes to cover what they're not paying.
 
• UPS, the delivery service, pays out one million dollars a day in worker's compensation.  What would it be worth to have its lobbyists write House legislation weakening safety standards?  They wouldn't have to pay this money.  There was enough to make UPS the number one political action committee contributor at $2.4 million dollars; $2.4 million is nothing if you have $1 million dollars a day at stake, right?

• Gallo has given over one million dollars to Bob Dole's campaign and foundation.  Dole returned millions in inheritance tax savings and agricultural subsidy programs and helped with champagne labeling.

It is not the case that there is no difference between Bush and Gore.  There are all kinds of differences.  But on issues that affect big business there is very little, if any difference.

Neither one wants to do anything meaningful about the growing gap between the very rich and the poor which is now the greatest in this country of any industrialized nation in the world and growing.  It used to be corporate executives were earning 10 to 40 times what their workers were earning. Then it became 100 times and 200 times. It is now over 400 times.  This has been going on awhile. Adjusted for inflation workers’ income is declining over this period.

This is strictly non-partisan. I am not just talking about Reagan/Bush, I am talking about Reagan/Bush and Clinton/Gore.  The pattern is the same.  The funders are the same.  That's an interesting thing.

Boss Tweed in New York used to say, "I don't care who does the electing just so long as I get to do the nominating."  And that's what these major corporations are doing.  They don't really care whether Bush or Gore wins.  It makes no difference to them.  That's why they give in such enormous amounts to both candidates.  There are 66 corporations that have given over $50,000 in cash to both of them.

• Why should they care who wins?  Both candidates agree on not doing anything about the income gap.

• They agree that they don't want to do anything to curtail corporate welfare.  Corporate welfare programs just overshadow by any conceivable measure what we think of as welfare -- those little payments per month to mothers who are trying to raise kids all by themselves.  Many multiples of that.  Nobody wants to touch corporate welfare in the two major parties.

• They don't want to prosecute for corporate crime.  They are very concerned about crime in the streets, which has declined. "Crime in the suites," as Ralph Nader calls it, has continued to accelerate.  There is very little prosecution of that.

• They both agree on increasing defense spending, which means increased money flowing to defense contractors.

• They both agree that they oppose the livable minimum wage.  They quibble over how long it is going to take to increase the minimum wage by a dollar.  But that still leaves, I don't know the percentage, maybe 40% of working Americans in poverty.

• They both agree on reducing welfare. The Clinton/Gore administration really gutted welfare to the core, even though most of the recipients are young children, obviously, rather than their mothers.

• They both believe that the way to fight drugs is with increased military expenditures in Columbia.  They both oppose doing anything meaningful to help with drug rehabilitation centers that drug addicts can go to for help.

• They both oppose repeal of Taft-Hartley, or doing anything meaningful to help the unions.  They both agreed to steam roll it over the unions with regard to the World Trade Organization, NAFTA and GATT.

• They also happen to agree about the death penalty.

• They also happen to agree, for the most part, about the regulation of guns, although the NRA is trying to make a big issue out of it, and say there’s a difference there.

I usually speak for entire semesters at a time but I am going to wrap this up very quickly.

One can almost feel sorry for, particularly Gore, in this sense.  Imagine; how would you deal with it?

A reporter went up to the Chairman of the Democratic National Committee at the convention and asked the Chairman of the National Democratic Committee about these parties the big corporations were throwing.  Half-million dollars for a party!  At least twice what was spent on this event this evening.  Parties from which the press was excluded, members of the public were excluded.  Asked about the multi-million-dollar soft money contributions what was the response from the Democratic National Committee Chair?  "Shut up and listen.  We have to win!"

Well, that puts it out there on the line.  You have to win.  And if you're going to win when the other guy is raising a hundred million dollars and spending it mostly on television, you best get out there and get your 100 million dollars however you have to do it.  And if you have to get it from the same people he is getting it from, so be it. "We have to win."

That's what politics is about with the two major parties.  It is not about issues. It's not about philosophy. It's not about morality.  It's about "we have to win."  That is what we're seeing played out over this next weekend with a new set of campaign commercials that are being run.

So what do you do if you're Al Gore?  Here you are taking your millions of dollars from the employers, and now you want to go campaign in front of the employees.  You want to appeal to the employees, and how you are going to fight for them. But you can't take a stand that is going to turn off the employers that have been paying you the money.  So you come across as bland and compromising, and sounding like George Bush.

But Gore is locked in. He can't do anything else.

The question is what do we do about this?

Thirty years ago John Gardner created an organization called Common Cause and he and I talked about it at the time. Later, at Ralph Nader's insistence, I served on the Common Cause national board for a couple terms.  That organization, for 30 years, has tried to bring about campaign finance reform.  As a member of the national board, I will confess to you, we were unsuccessful.  I walked the halls of Congress lobbying for this. You just don't get anywhere.

The reason is because the two major parties are simply incapable of changing this system.  They are dependent upon it. Even those who are willing, like McCain and Feingold, can't do it.

Al Gore says, "The first legislation I am going to send to Congress is going to be campaign finance reform."  Well, what were you doing the last eight years?  And after you send it up to Congress, what next?

Unless Gore has some secret plan he hasn't shared with us -- on how you pass legislation without it going through the House and the Senate first -- that is a pretty empty promise.  The question is not whether the legislation gets sent up to the Hill.  The question is, "Is it going to pass?"  It hasn't passed for 30 years and I don't understand from anything Gore has said why it's going to pass next year if he's in the White House.

Some people are concerned, "Gee, if I support Ralph Nader, I support a third party,  Maybe George Bush will win."  Let me say a word about third parties and about that.  Because historically this is not the first time our country's confronted this kind of thing.

After the Civil War the Democratic Party was concerned with the takeover of its party by big money interests.  What did we do?  Here in Iowa, we were the leaders on this. The disgruntled Democrats, the small farmers who were being abused by outrageous bank rates and railroad charges to ship their crops to market, split off from the Democratic Party.  They gave up on the Democratic Party and said, "You are never going to represent our interests and we understand that now."

They started the Populist Party; they started the agrarian movement.  James B. Weaver of Iowa was their candidate in 1892.

Same thing happened to the Republicans in 1912.  Their party was taken over by big money and the Republicans who thought that was inappropriate split off and started the Progressive Party.

What did those parties get?  Just the woman's right to vote, regulation of banking and railroads, social security, minimum wages, the right to unionize, child labor laws.  Most of the progress in this country during the 19th and 20th century started with third parties.

Norman Thomas was the Socialist candidate for president.  He ran over a period of 20 to 40 years, however long it was.  He usually got about two-tenths of one percent of the vote. He was asked, "What was your greatest contribution?" Do you know what he said? "The theft of my platform by the Democratic Party."

It was Norman Thomas who proposed Social Security.  We debate today about who is going to do the best for Social Security. Should we privatize it?  George Bush just discovered today that it is, in fact, a federal program, as some of you may have heard on the news.  But we not only wouldn't be arguing about the details we wouldn't even have a Social Security program to argue about if it wasn't for Norman Thomas.

Why was Social Security rejected when he proposed it? Because it was a socialist program. The Democrats opposed it. That is, until FDR stole it from Norman Thomas and it became a Democratic program. Now Republicans and Democrats and everybody thinks it’s a great program. It’s referred to as “the third rail” in politics -- touch it and you die.  But social security came from third parties.

So we have a proud tradition of third parties in this country.

If anybody here tonight can come up with an alternative strategy to the use of third parties as a way to do something about the big money domination and corruption of our political and governmental systems, I am more than open to it.  As a lifetime Democrat, I am not anxious to throw my energy and support behind a third party movement if it can be avoided.  I just don't see how it can be avoided.

Some of my Gore supporter friends tell me, "Oh, be patient, Nick, be patient."  I say, "Hey, look, I am 66 years old.  I have been patient for 30 years.  I want to see something done before I die.  I think 30 years is long enough to be patient."

The only strategy I know that will work is the strategy of our great-grandparents and our grandparents. It is a third party that gets the attention of the two major parties.

Even within the last 36 hours, Al Gore has started talking a more populist line.  But there is nothing he can do to execute it once he gets in office because of the way the system is structured now.  He might even like to do it if he had a system that would enable him to, but he can't.  But at least he's talking that line.

Why is that?

Because Ralph Nader is there.  Otherwise, the Democrats would have continued their drift to the right, taking money from the same corporations as the Republicans.  Trying to out-Republican the Republicans with the legislation that Bill Clinton introduces in the Congress -- much to the distaste and anger of the Republicans who realize that their programs are being stolen by him just so he can get something enacted.

The Democrats have turned their back on the progressive wing of their party and the unions.  So their support is withering away as they go after this big money.  But there they are.

So what else can we do?

Some people say, "Well, gee, you know, I'd like to do it but it's kind of a risk.  It's close in Iowa, in Illinois.  We’d better vote for Gore or we may end up with Bush.”

I would remind you that what we're doing this evening in this living room has a historic, honorable place in American history.

• People gathered in a living room like this 225 years ago and we talked about another problem we had with big business control of our lives.  It happened to be the big business interests that came our way across the Atlantic Ocean from England.  Crown corporations, created by the King, dominating and taking away the freedom of American colonists. We sat in living rooms and explored,  "What can we do about it?"  And most folks, who were perfectly rational, they may even have had the better of the argument, said, "Let's not tamper with it.  We're going to get something worse.  We may even get a war.  And if we get a war, we may lose that war."  And you know what?  They were right. They did get a war. And they could have lost that war.  Big risk!  Big risk!  Nothing like four years under George W.  Bush.  Big Risk!

• And people gathered in their living rooms again 140 years ago. The issue was slavery.  The abolitionists said, "This is an evil.  We must remove slavery from our country."  I am confident there were people there, and not just the slave owners, who said, "Look, that is a wonderful idea theoretically. But if you are really going to do something about abolishing slavery, you have no idea the hostility that is going to create on the part of slave owners.  We may actually have a Civil War in this country.  Do you realize that?  Do you realize the price you are going to pay for your idealism?  People are going to be killed."

 

 

And you know what, 640,000 people were killed.  More than killed in all the wars in American history up to the time of Vietnam War.  Was that risk worth it?  I suspect there are people who say today that risk was not worth it.  Nothing is worth 640,000 lives.  But there were people willing to take that risk.  A much bigger risk than living under George W. Bush for four years.

• In the 1920s and 1930s we met in living rooms once again. This time the issue was the right of workers to organize into trade unions. Workers were earning a nickel an hour. They had to bargain one-on-one with employers who could fire them at any time, work them any number of hours a week in unsafe working conditions.  Those workers were beaten, they were killed, they were thrown out of work with no way to support their families.  Was that a risk?  You bet it was.  Was it worth it?  I'm sure there are people who thought it wasn't.  But they took that risk and they got the right to unionize and we finally got a minimum wage law, 30 cents an hour.  They were in tall cotton, and it was the beginning of getting a living wage to workers in this country.  But a price was paid.

• World War II.  A lot of people said, as some politicians are saying now, "It's none of our business what's going on in Europe.  Let the Europeans take care of Europe.  What does it really mean to us?  When Hitler starts coming into Maine or Pennsylvania, or the Japanese invade California, call me back.  Right now, no thanks, I have no interest in your war.” We went into that war.  We took that risk.  Lost 400,000 lives.  Was it worth it?  People differ about that.

So, to me, that's the issue I confront.

I've been in this battle for 30 years.  I've lost it 30 years in a row.  I am thinking I've got to try something else.

Ralph Nader is not about Ralph Nader.  Ralph Nader is about you.  There was a rally at which he walked onto the stage and people were saying, "Go Ralph Go, Go Ralph Go, Go Ralph Go,” and Ralph quieted them down.  He said, "You got it all wrong. It's not 'Go Ralph Go,' it's 'Go We Go, Go We Go.'"  He's about creating additional leaders.  He's not looking for followers.  He wants to build a new party movement that will recapture some of these values and give us hope.

I will close reading from a piece I got in an e-mail today or the day before.  It goes like this:

“A message to my friends who want to vote for Ralph Nader but are afraid of wasting their vote by allowing Bush to beat Gore.

You wasted your vote on Adlai Stevenson and you got Eisenhower and you survived.  But very little changed and you ended up with no voice and no power.

You wasted your vote on Hubert Humphrey and George McGovern and you got Nixon.  You survived.  But very little changed and you ended up with no voice and no power.

You wasted your vote for Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale and got Ronald Reagan.  You survived.  But very little changed and you ended up with no voice and no power.

You wasted your vote on Mike Dukasis and you got George Bush and you survived, but very little changed and you ended up with no voice and no power.

You voted for Bill Clinton and he won, but in a sense it was a wasted vote because he turned out to be the most successful Republican president of the 20th Century, but you survived.  Very little changed and you ended up with no voice and no power.

When will you wake up to the fact that it is time to have a voice in your own destiny?  It's time for you to seek power for yourself.  It is time to get the twin monkeys of the Democrats and the Republicans off your back.

It's time to establish a new party, and in doing so you will not be any the worse off than you were under Nixon, Reagan, and Bush.  You will survive.  And you will survive with the possibility of eventually ending up with the power in your own hands."