Ralph Nader & Winona LaDuke launch presidential campaign

Ralph Nader & Winona LaDuke launch presidential campaign
July 2000

At their convention in late June, Green Party members selected Ralph Nader as their presidential candidate and Winona LaDuke as their vice-presidential candidate. Following are excerpts of Nader's acceptance speech:

The worsening concentration of global corporate power over our government has turned that government frequently against its own people, denying its people their sovereignty to shape their future. Again and again, the will of the people has been thwarted and the voice of the people to protest has been muted...

...Over the next four and one half months, this campaign must challenge the campaigns of the Bush and Gore duopoly in every locality by running with the people. When Americans go to work, wondering who will take care of their elderly parents or their children, irritated by the endless traffic jams, stifled by their lack of rights in the corporate workplace, ripped off by unscrupulous sellers and large companies, put on telephone hold for the longest times before you get an answer to a simple question--so much for this modern telecommunications age--beset by having to pay for health care you cannot afford or drug prices you shouldn't have to suffer, aghast at how little time your frenzied life leaves you for children, family, friends and community, overcome by the sheer ugliness of commercial strips and sprawls and incessantly saturating advertisements, repelled by the voyeurism of the mass media and the commercialization of childhood, upset at the rejection of the wisdoms of our elders and forebears, anxious over the ways your tax dollars are being misused, feeling that there needs to be more to life than the desperate rat race to make ends meet, then think about becoming a part of a progressive movement of Greens, of this citizens' campaign, to change the political economy so that healthy environments, healthy communities, and healthy people become its overwhelming reason for being...

...What is so normalized now must now be defined as intolerable and unworthy of this great country of ours...

...What about the bragging about the economy's nearly ten straight years of spectacular performance? Try applying people's yardsticks instead of the measures of record GDP, corporate profits and stock exchange prices. A very different picture emerges. Because the benefits of this boom have accrued to the wealthier and especially wealthiest classes, the majority of Americans are left behind. There is over 20 percent child poverty, 25 percent for pre-school children. This is by far the highest percentage among comparable countries in the western world. There are about 47 million workers, over one-third of the workforce, making less than $10 per hour, many at $5.25, $6.00, $7.00, with no or few benefits. The majority of workers still, after ten years of overall economic growth, make less today, in inflation adjusted dollars, and work 160 hours longer per year than workers did in 1973!...

...Today, that concentration of wealth and its political power has reached stunning intensities. In large companies, people who work in the same enterprise are now earning $1 for every $416 that the CEO takes away. In 1940, it was $1 for every $12. Today the financial wealth of the top 1 percent of households exceeds the combined wealth of the bottom 95 percent of American households. Earlier this year Bill Gates' wealth was equal to the combined wealth of the poorest 120 million Americans. Whatever this enormous imbalance says about the Great software imitator from Redmond, Washington, it means that about tens of millions of Americans, who work year after year, decade after decade, are nearly broke. What democracy worth its salt would have led to this profound inequity?...

...The percentage of union members in the private economy has just dropped below 10 percent, the lowest in 60 years and the lowest percentage in the western world. This indicator of people's plight explains much more about why many workers do not earn enough to support their families, why they have to bear more of the health insurance premiums, if they receive any from their employer, and why they go without or endure shrinking retirement benefits...

...This country has more problems than it deserves and more solutions than it uses...

...At home our criminal justice system, being increasingly driven by the corporate prison industry that wants ever more customers, grossly discriminates against minorities and is greatly distorted by the extremely expensive and failed war on drugs. These prisons often become finishing schools for criminal recidivists. At the same time, the criminal justice system excludes criminally behaving corporations and their well defended executives...

...One of those critical responsibilities is to ensure that our children are well cared for. This is an enormous undertaking because our children are now exposed to the most intense marketing onslaught in history. From the age of 9 months to 19, years of precise corporate selling is beamed directly to children separating them from their parents, an unheard of practice formerly, and teaching them how to nag their beleaguered parents as unpaid salesman for companies. There is a bombardment of their impressionable minds...

...Through television, the Internet stores, samples and mailings, these companies convey their message to the little ones. They teach them how to crave junk food, thrill to violent and pornographic programming, interact with the virtual reality mayhem. The marketeers are keenly aware of the stages of child psychologies, age by age, and know how to turn many into Pavlovian specimens powered by spasmodically shortened attention spans as they become ever more remote from their own family...

...Conditioned to become gazers and spectators for an average of 30 hours a week, youngsters now register as more obese and out of shape than any previous generation since 1900 when such records began to be collected. Their teachers see the results of this addictive commercial exploitation, the rat pack product conformity, the intrusion of commerce into the schools themselves. This does not prepare the next generation to become literate, self-renewing, effective citizens for a deliberative democracy. Instead, this commercial traffic makes them even more vulnerable to the streets...

...A just and decent society is the dream of all those good citizens across our land who fight the good fight daily, it is the dream of the Green Party, it is the dream of a growing number of people seeking to involve themselves more actively in reclaiming this democracy of ours...

...A progressive political party is most authentic when it connects with or arises from citizen movements and does not forget where it is coming from or the reason for its being. Major changes for the betterment of human beings start with major changes of direction. Such changes start with small steps taken by each individual and their community together with other individuals and these small steps evolve into ever larger steps which are thereby more tested and surefooted....

...Do we want to say to the 70 million non-voters, the Greens want to help you build a new beginning? Here is your chance to come forth and support what you have long wished for, a progressive movement that is for the people because it is of the people...

...To the youth of America, I say, beware of being trivialized by the commercial culture that tempts you daily. I hear you saying often that you're not turned on to politics. The lessons of history are clear and portentous. If you do not turn on to politics, politics will turn on you. The fact that we have so many inequalities demonstrates this point...

...Democracy responds to hands-on participation. And to energized imagination. That's its essence. We need the young people of America to move into leadership positions to shape their future as part of this campaign for a just society. Let's prepare to take the politicians and the lobbyists on a tour of the People's America...

...With a new progressive movement, we the people have the ability to vastly improve our lives and to help shape the world's course to one of justice and peace for years to come.

The Green Party in Alachua County meets Mondays at 6 p.m. at the Civic Media Center, 1021 W. Univ. Ave. For more information contact Zack Finley at 337-1608 or email him at zackfinley@yahoo.com