=======================Electronic Edition========================
RACHEL’S HAZARDOUS WASTE NEWS #349
—August 5, 1993—
News and resources for environmental justice.
——
Environmental Research Foundation
P.O. Box 5036, Annapolis, MD 21403
Fax (410) 263-8944; Internet: erf@igc.apc.org
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RALPH NADER’S DEMOCRACY TOOLBOX–PART 2
[Continuing from last week, here is the second part of Ralph
Nader’s suite of proposals for strengthening our democracy.
Nader can be contacted at the Center for Study of Responsive Law,
P.O. Box 19367, Washington, DC 20036.]
SEVENTH, the new democracy tool box for working people contains
rights of bringing one’s conscience to work without having the
risk of being unfairly fired or demoted. Ethical whistle-blowers
have alerted Americans to numerous abuses in the workplace that
damage workers’ health and safety, contaminate the environment,
and defraud consumers, taxpayers, and shareholders. However,
they often pay the penalty with the loss of their jobs. The
exercise of conscience needs simple, effective legal protections
which will build inside the corporation, government, or other
large bureaucracies the incentives for care, prudence, and
accountability that foresee or forestall larger harms.
EIGHTH, working people, who own over $3 trillion in pension
monies, need a reasonable measure of control over where these
monies are invested. Presently, a handful of banks and insurance
companies control and make these decisions. During the 1980s the
use of pension monies for corporate mergers, acquisitions,
leveraged buyouts and other empire-building maneuvers showed what
does happen when ownership is so separated from control. Control
by the few often left economic wreckage behind in many
communities, and such capital draining takeovers did not produce
employment or new wealth.
Pension monies are gigantic capital pools that can be used
productively to meet community needs, but not when their owners
are excluded from any organized participation or even the right
to know and review what has been decided.
NINTH, the new democracy tool box applies to recognizing
shareholder democracy as well. Whether large, small or
institutional shareholders (such as pension or other trust
funds), the separation of ownership (of the company) from control
has been documented impressively, starting with the celebrated
study by Berle and Means fifty years ago. [See Adolph A. Berle
and Gardiner C. Means, THE MODERN CORPORATION AND PRIVATE
PROPERTY (N.Y.: The Macmillan Co., 1933).] The business press is
filled with reports of executives of large corporations
repeatedly abusing shareholder assets and worker morale with huge
salaries, bonuses, greenmail, and golden parachutes (untied to
company performance), self-perpetuating boards of directors, the
stifling of the proxy voting system and blocking other
shareholder voting reforms such as cumulative voting powers and
access to relevant shareholder lists and information. The owners
of corporations should be able to prevent their hired executives
from engaging in what BUSINESS WEEK called casino capitalism that
often ends with mass layoffs, loyal shareholder losses and
communities undermined.
TENTH, the new democracy tool box needs to be taught in its
historic context and present relevance as part of an engrossing
civic curriculum for our country’s schoolchildren. Involving all
students during their later elementary and secondary school
education in practical civics experience so as to develop both
their citizen skills and the desire to use them, under the rule
of law, can enrich schools, students, and communities alike.
Where teachers have made such efforts, the children have
responded responsibly and excitedly, to the frequent surprise and
respect of their elders. Schooling for informed and experienced
participation in democratic processes is a major reservoir of
future democracy and a profound human resource to be nurtured.
[Nader has subsequently published a first-rate textbook:
Katherine Isaac, RALPH NADER PRESENTS CIVICS FOR DEMOCRACY; A
JOURNEY FOR TEACHERS AND STUDENTS (Washington, D.C.: Center for
Study of Responsive Law, 1992); $17.50 from Essential Books, P.O.
Box 19405, Washington, DC 20036.]
In conclusion, these tools for democracy have fairly common
characteristics. They are universally accessible, can reduce
government and other deficits, and are voluntary to use or band
together around. It matters not whether people are Republicans,
Democrats, or Independents. It matters only that Americans
desire to secure and use these facilities or tools.
Without this reconstruction of our democracy through such
facilities for informed civic participation, as noted above, even
the most well-intentioned politicians campaigning for your vote
cannot deliver, if elected. Nor can your worries about poverty,
discrimination, joblessness, the troubled conditions of
education, environment, street and suite crime, budget deficits,
costly and inadequate health care, and energy boondoggles, to
list a few, be addressed constructively and enduringly.
Developing these democratic tools to strengthen citizens in their
distinct roles as voters, taxpayers, consumers, workers,
shareholders, and students should be very high on the list of any
candidate’s commitments to you. Unless, that is, they just want
your vote, but would rather not have you looking over their
shoulder from a position of knowledge, strength and wisdom.
–Ralph Nader, Feb. 1, 1992
INVESTIGATION FINDS MORE THAN 100 ASSAULTS ON
ENVIRONMENTALISTS HAVE OCCURRED SINCE 1988
A study by the Center for Investigative Reporting in San
Francisco[1] concludes that there has been “a wave of recent
attacks” against environmental activists. In late 1992 the
Center reported that a four-month investigation had “uncovered a
pattern of death threats, firebombings, shootings and assaults
targeting ‘green’ activists across the nation.” The Center has
confirmed more than 100 reports of attacks and harassment since
1988 and has investigated 54 of them in detail.
The Center says, “The incidents read like an Amnesty
International report, but instead of accounts of terror in some
distant land, these attacks are being planned and executed in
places like Portland, Oregon; Junction City, Georgia; and Mobile,
Alabama.” Amnesty International is an independent organization
that monitors torture and other abuses of human rights around the
world.
Environmentalists have received death threats in at least 9
states. Wilderness advocate Scott Groene returned to his Moab,
Utah home to find a death threat taped to his porch: “Paper and
wood products are no longer available: wipe your ass on a spotted
owl. Southern Utah will have harmony when Scott has a FATAL
accident in the environment!”
Betty Ball at the Mendocino Environmental Center (Ukiah, Calif.)
received a letter calling her a “sleazy dike [sic]” and promising
to “hunt down each and every member like the lesbians you really
are.”
Shots have been fired at environmentalists in Arizona, Colorado,
Kentucky, Texas and West Virginia. In Hedgesville, W.V., Hilda
Kettering was fighting a landfill that threatened her drinking
water supply. In July, 1990, someone fired a shotgun into a
pickup truck driven by her 25-year-old son, Steve. He was struck
by 8 pellets; his passenger, Holly Folden, 18, received 30
pellets in her face and ears.
In January, 1992, a suspicious fire, which authorities call a
likely arson, totally destroyed the home of environmentalist
Michael Vernon in Solon, Maine. Vernon’s home and environmental
library were a total loss. We have previously reported (RHWN #233) that the
Arkansas home of Pat Costner, director of research
for the Greenpeace toxics campaign, was torched in March, 1991,
by an arsonist who left behind a gasoline can. Costner lost 30
years’ worth of books, papers and computer files, along with
everything else she owned. Suspicious fires have destroyed the
homes of green activists in Arkansas, Maine, Montana, New
Hampshire, New Mexico, and New York.
Bruce Hamilton of the Sierra Club believes much of the violence
is being fostered by the heads of cor-porations who pit neighbor
against neighbor by “blackmailing” workers with scare tactics.
[For a discussion of this tactic, see Richard Kazis and Richard
L. Grossman, FEAR AT WORK; JOB BLACKMAIL, LABOR AND THE
ENVIRONMENT (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1991).]
Former logger Gene Lawhorn describes mandatory anti-environmental
workshops given to workers at his mill. “It scared the hell out
of you,” he says. “For an hour they made you sit while they
described environmentalists as preservationists, as tree-hugging
pagans trying to overthrow Christianity. They said the
preservationists were going to take your job.”
The Center for Investigative Reporting says “The sharp increase
in attacks against environmentalists parallels the growth of the
pro-development coalition known as the Wise Use Movement.” Ron
Arnold, a leader of the Wise Use anti-environmental movement says
he is committed to non-violence, but he speaks of “destroying”
environmentalists and organizing “to kill the bastards.” Arnold
calls Charles Cushman, another Wise Use leader [see RHWN #335],
“our top bomb thrower” and says Barry Commoner should be “utterly
destroyed.”
Stephanie McGuire runs a fishing camp on the Fenholloway River in
Florida. For years Proctor and Gamble [P&G] legally dumped 50
million gallons of dioxin-contaminated water into the Fenholloway
each day. In 1991 McGuire became active with a local group, Help
Our Polluted Environment, and petitioned P&G to reduce their
toxic discharges. McGuire received a chilling phone call: “Keep
talking,” a man’s voice warned, “and we’ll cut your tongue out.”
On April 7, 1992, several weeks after P&G announced it was
selling the plant, three men arrived at McGuire’s camp dressed in
fatigues and proceeded to torture her. Two of the men wore
masks. They held McGuire down and burned her chest with a cigar.
When she broke loose and punched one in the mouth, he stomped on
her hand, crushing it. They then held her down and cut her face
and throat with a straight razor–not deep enough to kill her,
just deep enough to leave permanent scars, and nightmares.
–Peter Montague, Ph.D.
Descriptor terms: ralph nader; democracy; whistle blowers;
whistle blower protection; pension funds; shareholders; civics;
curriculum; teaching; schools; children; violence; job blackmail;
wise use movement; environmentalists;