=======================Electronic Edition========================
RACHEL’S ENVIRONMENT & HEALTH WEEKLY #460
—September 21, 1995—
News and resources for environmental justice.
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A HIGH-WAGE, LOW-WASTE FUTURE–PART 3:
A DEMOCRACY CAMPAIGN?
Ronnie Dugger (founding editor of the TEXAS OBSERVER) recently
summarized our situation eloquently: [1]
“We are ruled by Big Business and Big Government as its paid
hireling, and we know it. Corporate money is wrecking popular
government in the United States. The big corporations and the
centimillionaires and billionaires have taken daily control of
our work, our pay, our housing, our health, our pension funds,
our bank and savings deposits, our public lands, our airwaves,
our elections, and our very government. It’s as if American
democracy has been bombed. Will we be able to recover ourselves
and overcome the bombers? Or will they continue to divide us and
will we continue to divide ourselves according to our wounds and
our alarms, until they have taken the country away from us for
good?
“…The Northern Europeans who were our country’s founders
exterminated or confined millions of Native Americans whose
ancestors had been living here for 30,000 years.
African-Americans were enslaved until the Civil War; women were
not allowed to vote for 131 years, until 1920. But after the
abolitionist, women’s suffrage, farmers’, union, progressive,
civil rights, environmentalist, feminist, and gay and lesbian
liberation movements, and much more immigration, the question now
is whether we can found the first genuinely international
democracy. If we cannot, the corporations have us.
“…It’s no coincidence that within the same historical moment we
have lost both our self-governance and the Democratic Party. The
Democratic Party, on which many millions of ordinary people have
relied to represent them since the 1930s, has been hollowed out
and rebuilt from the inside by corporate money. What was once
the party of the common man is now the second party of the
corporate mannequin. In national politics ordinary people no
longer exist. We simply aren’t there. No wonder only 75 million
of us eligible to vote in 1994 did so, while 108 million more of
us, also eligible, did not….”
Dugger goes on: “What is government about?… Ernesto Cortes,
Jr., the exceptionally important organizer who helps people in
communities in the Southwest to act together in their own
interests, once exclaimed: ‘Power! Power comes in two forms:
organized people and organized money.’ To govern ourselves,
power is what we need. To get it we must want it and organize
for it.
“This is a call to hope and to action, a call to reclaim and
reinvent democracy, a call to the hard work of reorganizing
ourselves into a broad national coalition, a call to populists,
workers, progressives, and liberals to reconstitute ourselves
into a smashing new national force to end corporate rule.”
Dugger goes on to urge that everyone should come to St. Louis in
November to create this new coalition. We think this is not a
good idea –only because it’s too soon. The ground hasn’t been
properly plowed for such a meeting to bear sustainable fruit.
Dugger himself reportedly does not want to build the new
coalition; without some minimal infrastructure, seed money, and
committed organizers, such a meeting seems likely to waste
resources, frustrate people, and not accomplish its goal. [2] But
the impulse is right –ordinary Americans have had their
democracy taken from them, right before their eyes, chiefly by
corporations and by government officials (of both parties) who
are financed and owned by corporations. We desperately need to
get organized. Ernesto Cortes is on target: to govern ourselves
once again, power is what we need, and, since we don’t have
money, organized people is the only way to get power.
Stepping back, the question before us is: how best to plow the
ground for seeding a new progressive national coalition? In our
opinion, the deepest thinking on this question has been done by
Joel Rogers at University of Wisconsin and by Joshua Cohen at
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In dozens of articles
during the past 5 years, Rogers alone, or Rogers and Cohen
together, with help from many activists, have analyzed the
conditions in the U.S. that have led us to our present decline
(see REHW #458 and #459). And they have
suggested how we might
climb out of the deep hole we find ourselves in. [3]
As Rogers and Cohen see it, we need large organizing projects
that (a) can bring already-in-motion progressives into coherent
alignment for further movement TOGETHER; (b) can draw into the
movement many sympathetic people who are presently standing on
the sidelines; and (c) can provide real material benefits for
movement adherents AND for the larger society. Rogers has
outlined 3 such organizing projects, emphasizing that they are
not the only ones possible: (1) the New Party (which we described
briefly in REHW #445), which is now perking along in 12 states;
(2) Sustainable America –a project to rebuild democracy and
political strength by rebuilding cities and inner-ring suburbs
(the heart of the high-wage, low-waste option); and (3) a
Democracy Campaign, developed with Ralph Nader.
According to recent polls, an astonishing 75 percent of Americans
think government is “run by a few interests that don’t care about
me.” Given such broad awareness of the breakdown of
representative government, why not put democracy itself on the
table?
Rogers writes: Imagine a Democracy Campaign –initially targeted
to states, eventually providing the basis for federal reform
–aiming to equip all citizens with the rights, remedies, and
organizational resources they need to practice democracy in
late-twentieth-century circumstances. An immediate focus for the
Campaign might be reform of our corrupt system of campaign
finance and voter and party rights to allow free and fair
exercise of formal self-governing powers. [See REHW #426, #427 and #433.] But the new infrastructure
would need also to support
us in other important social roles –as workers, consumers,
taxpayers, and shareholders in social and private wealth
–allowing the effective exercise of power on which we know any
working democracy depends.
How might the Campaign’s reforms be framed? Perhaps as a new
bill of rights for each of the roles mentioned above, with the
explicit background expectation throughout that the state
encourage the exercise of the rights elaborated. Thus:
** The right of voters to participate freely and equally in an
electoral system where candidacy is not determined by money;
party competition is open and fair; and referendum, recall, and
initiative are fully available… to be enhanced by universal or
same-day voter registration; an election-day holiday; voting
systems accurately weighing minority electoral sentiment; a
revival of the fusion option in party politics; [4] lowered
barriers to third party qualification and maintenance
requirements; universal referendum, recall, and initiative
rights; and, of course, democratically-financed elections. (As a
practical matter, until we get democratic funding of elections,
no progressive electoral politics can flourish beyond the local
level.)
** The right of workers to form associations in the workplace
free from interference by employers… to be extended by simple
“check-off” certification; severe penalties for employers who
interfere with organizing; explicit supports for good employer
practices; and protection of the rights of “minority union”
members. In all likelihood, the organization thus enabled would
take a variety of forms, extending beyond today’s “exclusive
bargaining representative” model. What is important within this
variety is that the organizations be truly “worker-owned”
–independent of employer domination –and that unions in this
sense grow wildly again.
** The right of consumers of goods and services to monitor,
bargain over, and lobby for the regulation of their quality and
sale… to be implemented, for example, by an extension of the
Nader-inspired Consumer Utilities Board model to agencies like
the U.S. Post Office, Social Security and Veterans
administrations, public housing authorities, insurance companies
and banks, and other government agencies and private producers.
** The right of taxpayers to shape the priorities of the public
purse and the management of public assets… to be established
through such things as set-asides of public revenues from private
use of public lands to fund citizen watchdogs on such use; the
requirement that data collected by the government be made
available, for free and in accessible form, to citizens; vastly
increased taxpayer standing rights in administrative and judicial
proceedings bearing on the disposition of public assets or
monies; and a restoration of public regulation of the airwaves.
The right of shareholders to effective control of their assets…
to be asserted against the prevailing separation of ownership and
control, which is responsible for much failure of corporate
accountability –most urgently in the case of private pensions,
whose $3 trillion in assets lie beyond the control of their
worker-owners. Reforming current pension law to permit greater
control and direction by those who want it would be a natural
place to start, and a fine way to drive the bankers crazy.
If Americans had these rights and supports, what might result?
The honest answer is that nobody knows for sure, since they have
never had most of them in the past. But it seems likely that the
results would include a much livelier and more engaged civic
culture; almost infinitely higher rates of voter participation; a
significant reduction in corporate and government fraud, abuse,
and waste; a more disciplined and programmatic approach to
problems affecting the public welfare; a stronger and more
effective party system for the processing of citizen demand into
effective governance; and better, less bureaucratic enforcement
of statutory commands.
And the appeal to progressives of all kinds is obvious. We who
believe in democracy are most advantaged by the capacity to
exercise it. Whether our wish is to form unions, organize
communities, create new producer co-ops, launch feminist
solidarity councils, green the use of federal lands, limit
corporate abuses, hold politicians accountable to promises,
mobilize our own scattered resources in economic reconstruction,
get our views expressed in the media, or do almost anything else
that’s worthwhile, some increase in our capacity to organize
would obviously be welcome. Given an opportunity to change the
rules, we should grab it.
[Next week: Sustainable America.]
                
                
                
                
    
–Peter Montague
===============
[1] Ronnie Dugger, “Real Populists Please Stand Up,” THE NATION
Vol. 261, No. 5 (August 14/21, 1995), pg. 159.
[2] Communicate YOUR ideas directly to Ronnie Dugger via E-mail:
Rdugger123@aol.com, or write him c/o THE NATION, 72 Fifth Ave.,
NYC, NY 10011; enclose SASE.
Descriptor terms: Descriptor terms: strategy; environmental
movement; vision; mass movements; social change; civic culture;
solidarity; ideology; ralph nader; democracy; new party;
sustainable america; democracy project; political parties;
fusion; referendum; recall; labor; consumer rights; taxpayer
rights;