Tulsa Junior College, Ralph Nader Speech Video, c.1991

A video of Ralph Nader speaking to an audience at the Metro Campus of Tulsa Junior College, circa 1991. The speech centered on environmentalism, democratic duty, and corporations. This lecture took place during the Issues and Ideas Lecture Series.

Introduction:

Ralph Nader is synonymous with consumerism. He and his consumer agencies have made progress in auto safety and environmental protection and have pioneered studies on the educational testing service, nuclear power industry, and the US postal system among many other reports. In 1966, Mr. Nader became a household name by testifying in front of a congressional committee about General Motors in his investigation into the sub normal and safety conditions of the Chevrolet Corsair and other unsafe cars. Currently, Mr. Nader is traveling the country lecturing about the pitfalls of growing up corporate and the need to strengthen our democracy and its citizens to produce needed improvements in business and government. His lecture promises to be an insightful look into the safety of the American citizen in the corporate world. Now, please join me in welcoming Mr. Ralph Nader. Applause.

 

Ralph Nader Speech:

Thank you very much Diane, ladies, and gentlemen. This evening the topic is growing up corporate and it’s a rather strange phrase, maybe you haven’t heard about before. I want to explain it because my first experience in growing up corporate was in the fifth grade when I went into my class and the teacher said, “Would you please pass out some brochures, the auto industry is the topic of discussion today.” So dutifully, I passed out the brochures and they were colorful brochures with the current model cars delivered to the school by the local auto dealers and they also described the auto companies in the most positive of terms with no mention at all of the contribution of automotive engineering deficiencies to casualties on the highway or air pollution or anything dealing with any fish and gas consumption. There was nothing about that just a heralding of the corporations products and that’s what we focused on, the wonders of the automobile industry straight from the automobile dealers themselves. Three years later, I had an occasion to reflect on that because when I started studying traffic safety, it became quite clear that the entire emphasis was on the driver who obviously has an important role but there are other 2 other roles that were ignored and that is the rule of the highway [condition of the highway] and the roles of the vehicles. The role of the vehicle was in 2 subareas. One, to produce cars with adequate handling brakes, tires, etcetera, and visibility to minimize the likelihood of an accident. Second, much more dominantly, to protect people in a crash in a so called crash worthy vehicle, so if you and your family are driving down the highway obeying all laws and some drunk comes and smashes into you, that is not just the drunk’s culpability. The drunk is definitely culpable, but if you are not protected in the car because the steering column rams back into the driver, there were no seat belts, there are sharp edges on the dash panel that could crush your skull at 20 mile per hour impact. The doors would open, the fuel tank would rupture Sarah far below the kind of engineering standards that the engineers and the auto companies could have provided if the executives let them. Then clearly, the automobile company has a responsibility as well. I recall my experience in the fifth grade at all the times the National Safety Council would give us the statistics on Memorial Day weekend, Labor Day weekend deaths and injuries on the highway and their principle response was to exhort us to drive more carefully. They never focused on the tremendous gap between auto safety possibilities and auto safety realities in terms of the engineering of the car. And of course they ignored the role of the highways. Highways are not just pavements that should be smoothed so we don’t have potholes and go out of control. There are ways now to build highways with guard rails where if you crash into them, your car is maneuvered right back on to the highway rather than crashing into the rail or crashing through the rail. So there's a lot of things that can be done for highway engineering to make barriers more crash worthy and see some of the crush-crushable structures near abutness, time just before you go off the highway on a ramp. That’s an example of cushioning the collision if the car goes out of control -- goes into the abutment. Well now if we all grow up audible corporate, you would not pay attention to the auto safety devices that are kept on the shelf. We’d concentrate on the driver in a very superficial way at that by exhortation, sporadic fines without any attention to driver’s skill education mostly just reading a book learning the questions and getting a license. We wouldn’t be paying attention to all kinds of very cost efficient ways to build cars to save life. Now, after nineteen years we finally one the air bag fight. Air bags will be standard equipment full front seat within 2-3 years. There are three million cars this year which will be produced air bags for drivers’ side. Several hundred thousand will be produced with drivers’ side and passenger side. That air bag was ready to go over twenty years ago, the president of  General Motors in 1970 Ed Cole engineer told the Department of Transportation in Washington that all GM cars will have airbags full front seat standard equipment including cars, light trucks, and vans by the fall of  1974.  Unfortunately, he reached 65, the mandatory retirement age and he had to retire in ’73 and his successors reversed the policy and came out against it and the rest of the industry followed. Hundreds of thousands of injuries could've been prevented and tens of thousands of deaths, just in the United States alone. Now, with air bags coming in, look at the TV, why you’d think they were for airbags all of this time. Have you seen some of the ads? They’re fighting over each other over who has air bags in the right front seat and air bags on the driver’s side and they're showing off the air bag. The air bag, once it’s standard equipment in cars, 1 out of 5 Americans will be saved sometime in your life from an injury or worse by an air bag. Not to mention the billions of dollars of hospital costs, medical costs, lawyer costs, insurance costs, garage repair costs, and funereal services costs which will be prevented by this. Now growing up corporate can be expressed in many different ways, for example, the Corporation is the dominant institution in our country. The head of- the vice president of the Ford Motor company Mr. Gossit once wrote an article elaborating that many years ago and the dominant institution in our country tends to have a heavy influence on what information we get and what information we don't get. For years, we got no information on crash worthy auto engineering and of course that served the uses and purposes of the auto companies because they didn’t want the spotlight on themselves being pushed to build safer cars. They wanted the spotlight on the driver as they called it but not behind the wheel. We’re subjected to this number this in a number of areas and it takes a while for the environmental movement, worker safety movement, consumer movement, and others to break through with information that gives a different picture. A broader and deeper picture of a problem and its solutions. But just to quickly describe how we grow up corporate unless we think for ourselves, our definition of beauty is corporate. It's the cosmetic industry and the fashion magazines and they define it in a way that it gives people a desire to buy 34 billion dollars worth of cosmetics. The definition of beauty is skin deep and body shape, that’s the corporate commercial definition of beauty. By definition, most people can attain it except the models but they can hope to attain it and that’s what cosmetics are. They’re selling hope and unfortunately, a lot of people are pained by this. They’re hurt, they’re anxious, they’re depressed when they don’t think they measure up. They’re discriminated against if they don’t measure up as much as others. You just look at the occupational classifications in our country, you look at the receptionist at desks and the looks of people who clean the train station and airports, and you'll see the kind of discrimination there is on the basis of looks and looks are defined by commercial corporations. We don't have our own definition of beauty which could be character, wit, compassion, wisdom, caring. Those are more genuine definitions of beauty. One can say, mother Teresa is a very beautiful person, but not by Vogue’s standard not by Mademoiselle’s standard. So we have surrendered our cultural embellishment of what beauty means in a human being to commercial corporations who are making a lot of money off their defining and getting us to accept it. Growing up corporate. Food if you go into a supermarket growing up food corporate: you’ll be like Magoo, the traditional comic figure Magoo, going in the supermarket looking for food – looking for bread, sees the bread says aha that’s the loaf I want. I saw two similar loaves chatting and grinning with one another on TV the night before. Pick up the loaf knows it’s Wonder bread because the fingers and thumbs collide when he picks it up. Growing up food corporate means you buy food based on instant taste gratification, easy to chew, easy to prepare and pretty to look at.  Example is the hot dog, America's deadly missile. It's easy to prepare, it’s kinda easy to look at, got a nice aroma and taste and it’s pretty easy to chew. What else is it? It’s 29% fat and 12% added fillers, coloring agents, tenderizers, debris (laughter), and the rest low protein meat products and by products  such as crushed bone and rope strings which are the latest U S Department of Agriculture approved entries into your meat supply under the Reagan administration. Rather controversial whether there should be crushed bones and rope strands in our meat products. I guess Reagan had a very efficient concept of how to use meat products. There they are, in your pork sausage and bologna and hot dogs. Now if we think for ourselves let’s say we grow up consumer or civic-civically instead of corporately.  We'll go for nutrition, sanitation, absence of harmful additives, and competitive pricing as more and more people are. More and more people are cooking from scratch to the extent that they’re cooking at home because fresh fruits and vegetables are increasing in demand and the canned food industry in California is not the best shape. People want more fresh produce and red meat per capita is declining, chicken is up, fish is up except it’s getting more expensive but there's a way to buy and a way not to buy  and if you just listen to what the corporation want you to buy you’re gonna buy one way.  Peculiarly, a distinctive example of growing up corporate is when we sign printed contracts. We have grown up so corporate that we would never think of doing the following thing even though it's common sense. We go down to Sears and we buy home appliance on time so the clerk gives us the installment loan contract and says well we checked out your credit etcetera here it is uh okay and sign. You say no, I wanna read it first. You got a chair I can sit down? The clerk says, a chair? No one’s ever done this before. Well, everything has to start with one. They give you the chair and you sit down and get out your magnifying glass and you start carefully reading the contract and there are things you don’t like about it. You cross out a paragraph here and double the warranty there, take it back to the clerk and say I think I’ve got it where I want it. I’ll give you some time to read it quickly and sign on the dotted line.

Imagine going down to your auto dealer and doing that. It’s unheard of. Why is it unheard of? Don’t we agree that the market system is supposed to cater to the customer, consumer sovereignty, the customer is always rights. But you see we’ve been so nurtured in our corporate culture that we don’t even think of it, much less dare to do it. Now I admit, the first time you do it, you’re going to get a raised eyebrow or two behind the counter at the auto dealer. We wrote a book once called Eleven Owner’s Manual and we had a draft car purchasing agreement in the back which people could take down to their dealer pursuant to their buying a car and the people who did that wrote us back amazing stories. Some of them were pushed out the door. The cops were called on one or two instances. They were called communists because they gave the auto dealer a printed contract that they wanted to deal it – the sales person to sign.  Multiple choice standardized tests, that’s an example of growing up corporate. We all trundled to these tests on October April morning in high school and we take the multiple choice standard test the SAT  and we cross our fingers and hope that we do well and we  never think of asking what do these tests measure and why do we have multiple choice standardized test. Is life a multiple choice standardized life?  What about the writing the English language essay tests? What about letting us figure out creative answers instead of A B C D and none of the above? Which I admit gives us more than the politicians give us to at the present time. We studied the multiple choice standardized tests and we learned that that they do not measure the most important features of your personality and character that spell success in life. Nor do they purport to measure in fairness to them. Their test scores are given too much significance by college and graduate school licensing people. About 80 occupations and trades, you have to take multiple choice test to become licensed: Foreign Service officer, insurance agent, real estate agents, and so on. Here’s what they do not measure. They do not measure your judgment, wisdom, experience, creativity, imagination, idealism, persistence, or determination. Otherwise, the measure everything important about you I assume.  Now when you grow up corporate, the producer of the test is a corporation the educational testing service incorporated Princeton, New Jersey. You grow up corporate, you never think of asking these questions and so you’re often pigeon-holed, you're depressed.  You internalize your test scores as a measure of your self-worth and self-esteem and you pretty much say I can't do this life that I wanna do because I didn’t test out for it in a multiple choice test. Ridiculous! Growing up consumer, growing up citizen, thinking for oneself would produce a different kind of testing after a while. They’d test what you know, they’d give you chance for creative responses and they’d broaden out the test. So if you’ve got certain skills now and certain experience that don’t fit the questions on standardized tests you’re out of luck. The test should recognize that there are multiple intelligences in human beings, not just one intelligence measured by a multiple choice test. There are multiple skills, multiple experiences, and multiple intelligences that need to be given a fair shake. So, growing up even is penetrated in the political sphere you see we’re used to being told by a political candidate that we just sit there as passive bystanders and listen to them and watch their ads and we go to the polls, they encourage us to go to the polls to choose between Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Dee.  In as sense we’re passive consumers of the political process and here’s how it goes: someone decides to run for office and drops their hat in the ring and goes and raises money from the fat cats, then parades before you with various promises and you're supposed to figure it out which one is better A vs. B and go to the polls.  Well as proper consumers of the political process we plunge in long before the polls. The polls is just the conclusion. There just conclusions. It’s the months before the Election Day that really come in terms of our shaping the campaign. They are summoning the candidates to auditoriums and are asking them to react to our priorities, our agenda, our issues, our needs local, state, national, and international. That isn’t the way it's done. You know how someone runs for president. They give you the same old speech after a while and you wonder if you’re in a giant ditto machine. My fellow Americans, I'm here to announce that I'm a candidate for the President of the United States. Our country's in trouble. You know it and I know it and I have a five point program to turn our country around to make America work again. To clean our environment, improve our schools, make our streets safe. I want to assure you my fellow Americans that if you should elect me to this office, you're were to elect me to this August office, when I go to the White House I will never forget you. I will never forget you.  Thank you and good luck.  What is the citizen movement all about, it’s thinking for yourself. Here’s a man who thought for himself. Now you’re all in Oklahoma, let’s see how much you know your history. Anybody ever hear of Michael - Dr Michael Shadid in Elk City, Oklahoma? Anyone else? See that, he’s one of the great figures in American medicine. He’s the first pioneer in pre-paid medicine in the United States. 1929, Elk City, started a hospital owned by the farmers – owned by the farmers and the doctors and nurses worked for the farmers. It was about thirty dollars per family per year for surgical, other hospital procedures except for pharmaceuticals and anesthesiological services.  30 dollars a years, quaint isn’t it?  That would hardly buy you 4 bic razors in intensive care today. He was a doctor in a poor area in California and Oklahoma and he found that the farmers and their families couldn't afford medicine. He used to go on the horse and buggy through rain and snow on house calls. He finally said this is no way to do it. Let’s establish a well-equipped, professionally staffed hospital and have it be built by contributions by the farmers who then become the owners. Cooperative organized medicine here in Oklahoma attacked him, vilified him, forged checks  to the Communist Party in his name and tried to strip him of his license, try to make sure he and his associates couldn’t be part of medical societies and if they weren’t part of medical society, they couldn't get malpractice insurance. They couldn’t qualify for this and couldn’t qualify for that and get referrals or anything like that and he fought them off. Right up to the governor's office in the legislature and he beat it. He went all over the United States and Canada preaching the importance of prepaid medical clinics which inspired the Kaiser Permanente plan out in the West Coast, the Puget Sound up in Seattle and all over and yet nobody knows about this man. You can talk to 10 million American children and nobody's ever heard of this man. Among 10 million American children, probably even in Elk City, Oklahoma but ask them about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. They’ll tell you chapter and verse. This is the kind of heroic figure who shows what one person can do and that's what democracy has to believe in. If it doesn't believe in every one's heart and minds that each individual has the ability to make a signal difference in their community, state, nation, world, then the Achilles’ heel comes in. Millions of people say to themselves in their own privacy, I’m just one person. I don’t count. I can't make a difference, are you kidding? Me fight City Hall? Me take on this power and that power? If they all say that they’re drop-offs from democracy and they’ve handed the biggest power tool to the oligarchs and the plutocrats, namely the abandonment of the level of self-confidence the citizens need to make a democracy benefit this society to make it a democracy in reality not just in forum. This, by the way, is a book that’s just reissued. It’s his autobiography just reissued by the University of Oklahoma Press in Norman, Oklahoma. It’s called Crusading Doctor: My Fight for Cooperative Medicine. I hope you’ll have the chance to read it. You’ll see what doctors were who practiced medicine as if only people that you’ll see some old values that we need to resurrect in developing a new national health insurance system that will focus on preventive medicine getting people to stop smoking, stop becoming alcoholics and better exercise better nutrition as well as compensating people for their bills as a national right. We the only country in the western world that doesn't have national health insurance.  As well as make sure there's quality medicine and we have to play a part on this- in this in terms of the clinics who’s on the boards consumers who specialize in healthcare matters on behalf of-other citizens to benefit from but it's a good idea to to get some some history under our belt so we can grow up other than health industry corporate and taking the outrageous the outrageous level of the gauging and fraud and malpractice that is going in the country today. Half a million unnecessary hysterectomy and caesarian section operations a year clearly aren't necessary by the peer review determination of the more careful doctors. Hospitals that are almost criminal in terms of their incompetence and ghost surgery unnecessary surgery and reckless use of prescription drugs. The New York Times has had some articles recently on hospitals in New York City which were quite appalling. Not to mention, levels of pricing that are not only exorbitant and are going to break the system but are based on profiteering that comes from drugs which you as taxpayers developed so the national institutes of health and grants to medical school and those developed drugs are then given free to the drug companies and then they gouge it and those of you who can’t pay it go on Medicaid so taxypayer pays to develop the drug like AZT and then taxpayer pays a third of the price because people can’t afford to pay the 8 thousand or 6 thousand or 4 thousand dollars a year that the British company burrows welcome is selling AZT at per patient per year and your tax dollars developed a clinical application of AZT for AIDS that was given away by Mr Reagan free. That was his practice. Giving away taxpayer assets to a British drug company under a seventeen year monopoly patent which they then turned around without any price restraints without any royalties to you the taxpayer and socked the first AIDS patients for 8 thousand dollars a year. Stocks shot up bonuses to the executives shot up and then you have to turn around pay a third of that through Medicaid. That’s what’s going on in Washington. That's just one example of many and because we don't develop the kind of information that would put some pretty old fashioned census of rights and wrongs in to practice here and stop it we just go along paying through the nose the latest is the Yew tree-the Yew tree is a weed tree they used to call it out a weed tree now it has a substance that’s quite effective for ovarian cancer and perhaps breast and lung cancer. And the Yew tree grows primarily on the federal lands out west so what is our Bush administration do? They give a complete monopoly par to a squib corporation, the drug company to extract from the tree and sell it instead at a staggering price and it’s our tree. By the way, this illustrates what next time you hear somebody ridicule snail gardeners and spotted owls and various trees and song we have just barely scratched the surface of extracting medicines and other valuable derivatives from any number of species of plants all over the world and learning things from animals all over the world. We learned a great deal about radar from bats-studying bats years and years ago. The periwinkle plant which grows only in Madagascar near extinction produced a very effective cure for childhood leukemia and we’re losing thousands of thse species every year all over the world at an accelerating rate because of clear cutting, deforestation, soil erosion or just not collecting the old seeds that are forberries use to use for the plants. 80% of the varieties of CERN widely produced food plants in our country are gone and they’re just now developing seed laboratories to keep the seeds before they are rendered extinct. Growing up corporate also affects the way we value in our own government. Let me give you an illustration, if I say the word-the following word you tell me what immediately comes to your mind-the first word that comes to your mind when you hear this word. Welfare. What else? Huh. Poor.  Would it surprise you to learn that three times more than the poverty welfare budget out of Washington is the corporate welfare budget? There are over a hundred programs that we have titled aid to depended corporations. That corporate welfare payments made up of your tax dollars are pouring out every day to big companies, middle-size companies of all kinds in terms of subsidies grants giveaways the drug giveaway that they’re pouring out terms of loan guarantees in terms of inflated government contracts to McDonnell Douglas cause it’s mismanaged and about to go bankrupt so it’s being bailed out by contracts that wouldn’t deserve otherwise by the Pentagon. The agribusiness 27 billion dollars a year. How much of that goes to small farmers? It’s the big farmers and the cargals and the continental grain companies they get the lion's share and all the money you’re paying for California agribusiness is cheap water which they proceed to waste and now they’re allowed to re sell at huge profits if they wish to. Corporate welfare giveaways locally, Kmart walks into an area says well we won’t build our store in your municipal jurisdiction folks unless you give us the following package of incentives. They call it incentives. We call it welfare and usually involves a major 12 year tax abatement. In some areas, local new companies are demanding uh employment training subsidies all kinds of subsidies that the existing business doesn't get. The existing all-line business is still playing their property tax no one comes in. Woo. General Motors tried 35:34 this in Eastern Detroit they said we’ll build a plant in Eastern Detroit instead of over the line a few hundred yards away but you gotta give us a package so local state and federal agencies gave the richest corporation in the world in 1981 a 350 million dollar welfare package including a nice 50 percent twelve year tax abatement. They even took over a whole area where over three thousand people lived with 12 churches, a hospital, 2 schools, and several dozen small businesses and eminent domained it- cleared them all out, bulldozed the whole area and gave GM four times what it needed in terms of land area for its plan and GM promised they were going to employ 6,000 workers and guess what? The only employed 3,000 workers so you think the tax known pleased with us so you think the taxpayer will get a rebate? No way. No way. Just a few weeks ago citizen groups managed to stop an attempted in the US Senate through a little paragraph and a big bill to cancel a 10 billion dollar-billion dollar debt that the nuclear power utility companies owed the US government for uranium enrichment services. If nobody knew about that they’d have got through but some citizen groups in Washington bit and they highlighted and blocked it. Now this is at the same time people were going up to Capitol Hill on their knees begging congressional committees for a 100 million dollars more for drinking water safety programs, fifty million dollars more for libraries, 150 million dollars more for infant nutrition programs, a few millions of dollars more for infant inoculation programs and they were being told there isn't any money. But there’s money just one slice of a pen to cancel 10 billion dollars for uranium enrichment services. That’s Washington DC, goes on all the time. In the Pentagon, the waste is colossal. The general accounting office said that the Pentagon wastes fifty billion a year on its military contracts. Our esteemed national government looked the other way in the 1980s and let the SNLs go hay wire in some states and they got- and after they got in trouble with your money after the executives misused your money speculated with your money they turn around of course Washington is the all-purpose bailer out. Uncle Sugar, ready to bail them out. On whose backs? Your backs. See, they want to preserve your savings protect your savings with your tax dollar. How comforting! Over the next 30 years, 1.3 trillion dollars for the SNL bailout because Reagan and company and the Congress took the federal cop off banking beat and let the savings and the loan speculators use your money for investments they were never allowed to use in the past because they're too risky. From junk bonds to equity ownership and commercial real estate and this area is not foreign to these problems. 1.3 trillion for SNLs and hundreds of billions coming in for the commercial banks. So if we weren’t growing up corporate wouldn’t we put a stop to this? Would we really be so passive when our government refuses to apply some law and order for corporate abuses and corporate crimes? If we didn't grow up corporate we would’ve put a stop to this in many ways. First and foremost, by prohibiting private money and political campaigns so that are politicians are not up for sale or rent every two or four years the way they are now. This adds up to real serious business when you talk about health and safety laws. Who is paying the political penalty for letting 100,000 Americans die because the government threw in the towel to GM and didn’t issue the air bag standard and make it permanent in the mid 70’s? I don't anyone who’s lost a vote on that. Is anyone in Washington losing a vote for the Dan Quayle competitive councils move to freeze long awaited safety and health standards in order to cater to corporations and their money which will spell the death and injury and disease of many Americans? Nobody’s use to losing anything there. If we didn’t grow up corporate that would be terminal in terms of their political career. In 1984, when Reagan’s running against Mondale some physicians working for the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta that’s a government agency sent us some information telling us that they were in a real quandary that they had completed a study of 250,000 workers in hundreds of factories, mines, and foundries in the United States and that these 250,000 workers were deemed to be at risk to cancer, respiratory ailments, and other diseases due to workplace hazards: chemicals, gases. As doctors, they felt professionally obligated to notify the workers. Your taxpayer dollars funded the study. It’s a 12 year study. They asked the White House for special 3 million dollar appropriation. 3 million dollar appropriation? So like seven minutes the Pentagon? 3 million dollars to pay for certified mail and the notification of the workers so that they would go to the doctor they’d have checkups or they’d know what they’re being exposed to. The White House said no, no way we’re spending any more money. It’ll increase the deficit. Quite apart from other ways they’ve increased the deficit. This is a government that started out with a deficit of 200 billion and took it to 400 billion this year. A year. The deficit this year alone in inflation adjusted dollars is as big as John F Kennedy's entire federal budget in 1961. You’re gonna pay one third of your taxes just to pay the interest on a national debt this year 207 billion dollars just to pay the interest on the national debt which is now 4 trillion dollars. So suddenly they were very parsimonious on its 3 million dollars so they sent us the materials the doctors and we went to the White House people and said how can you do this? These are 250,00 Americans, their tax dollars paid for this study and they’re not even going to tell them that they’re exposed in terms of their health and they should go to the doctor. I said you don’t need a regulation to get you to do that. You just have to read the Bible. That's all you have to do for that and they said no, so we gave it to Mondale’s people. This was in the heat of the campaign. We said here take it use it go to Pittsburgh make a speech on occupational safety saying by the way this government doesn't have the human decency of notifying these workers. So you know what the Mondale people said? They said well we can't do that. I said why? He said because we have a platform that says we're not going to recommend any more programs in the government that costs money. See what I mean by tweedle dumb and tweedle dee politicians? And years went by- they wouldn’t do it. We finally had a news conference to release the information and it was news and localities all over the country because the press took it and applied to a factory in Birmingham and foundry in Michigan and so to some degree the workers were informed. Well this happens all the time if you think things are bad in Washington you're only scratching the surface there's so much money in Washington that could be used for community investment for the proper functions of government health safety the infrastructure the airports the-uh the roads the bridges the clinics the schools the water mains that are bursting under cities all over the country as they’re becoming more and more decay and disrepair and what’s our government doing? They’re spending 140 billion a year defending Western Europe, Japan, and Korea from uh Kazakhstan perhaps, Lithuania, maybe Maldova. Secondly, how long have these countries been prosperous enough to defend themselves? I mean they must think we're the prime Uncle Sucker of all time.  We’ve got 40% of our scientists and engineers working and producing and consulting and refining and testing weapons of destruction and they’ve got most of their scientists and engineers producing cars and toasters and all kinds of things we can't seem to produce at that level of quality. 140 billion a year should come back here. We should have a bill of-a G I bill of rights as we had right after World War II so we can bring those troops back home and they go into the civilian market. They’re given an opportunity to go to college or to get trained. That was one of the most successful pieces of legislation in American history in terms of building the human resource that is the real wealth of our country. The soldiers, sailors, Air Force people were mustered out in World War II and then went to college on the GI Bill. 90 dollars a month they were given, that’s a big thing in those days. But no, how can our government become the state of the big kid on the block around the world? After all, our economy is crumbling. Our companies are abandoning our country and going to 27 dollar a week wages in Mexico even less in other countries. We’re now the biggest debtor in the world. 12 years ago we were the biggest creditor in the world. The world owed us money. Now, we owe the world money. We were number one in 1980 in wages. Now we’re number 10 and dropping. 9 countries pay higher wages to their workers than our country. The ability of Trade unions to survive is now increasingly in doubt. Companies are saying to workers you keep quiet until the line otherwise we’ll lay you off or we’ll close down and go to Singapore, Taiwan, Mexico, Brazil and who knows where. Our standard of living is being pressed down to lower and lower foreign common denominators because we're told that's the only way we can become globally competitive. When did that ever happen in American history? We raised the level of the world until recent years and yeah you see we grow up corporate.  Ronald Reagan comes on the scene and he says I love you, I love America, I love Americans gives us Miller time beer politics. He waves a flag in front of our face and he's great at ceremonies, shoves the problems under the rug up and builds up a trillion dollar debt just in his 8 years. Think of that for future generations. This mantles the critical health and safety programs in the government food, drug, auto, air, water, pollution, pesticides, etcetera and proceeds to continue to develop the corporate welfare goodies and a lot of people bought it. Didn’t think for themselves, didn't get the facts.  You don’t have to be a Republican or Democrat to see through this stuff. This stuff is so wrong it transcends political differences like that. It's so fundamentally wrong, so fundamentally wrong that our country cannot do what it needs to do for infant mortality. 23 countries in the world ahead of us in infant mortality? In Washington DC, where George Bush lives unless that is nominally I guess his legal address is in a Houston hotel which is now up to-just filed for bankruptcy by the way. That's the way he escapes state taxes, income taxes. Texas doesn’t have it. Right where he lives the infant mortality has doubled the national average. It’s higher than Cuba, Bulgaria, Jamaica and the inoculation rate for infants in Washington DC is lower than that in the country of Botswana in Africa. Here we are. Hail to the Chief. Home of the brave. Makes you think. Makes you think how politicians manipulate people with symbols syrupy speeches the flattery above all flattery. Have you ever met a politician that does not flatter the people left, right, middle? Show me one, show me one. I’ll show you a visitor from Mars. That’s how they get where they get: money from special interests and flattery. What we’ve got to do is roll up our sleeves and start working on solutions. The country's indeed in deep trouble but it can get much worse before we become intolerant to it. You want an idea of how bad a society can get and still no-no revolt from the voters or citizens, look at some countries overseas. Let us not think that if it just gets a little worse why we’ll all sweep em out and really clean house. It won’t happen unless we develop a higher level of demand and expectation of what we expect from business and government in terms of their responsibility, in terms of their legal requirements to deliver and perform. The solutions are all over us. We need money to rebuild our public wealth, the infrastructure they call it is a 130 billion dollars in corporate welfare, 140 billion dollars in Western Europe, Japan, and Korea and another 30 billion dollars in royalties from the lands out west that aren’t collected and should be. Money's all over the place it’s just in the wrong hands poorly used or misused. Let’s put it this way. Let's assume you are running the Federal Communications Commission, would you allow the TV radio stations to use the public property, the public airways? We own the public airways, that’s federal law. We, the people. It’s leased to the radio and TV stations by the Federal Communications Commission. If you were running the Federal Communications Commission, would you give that lease away free to the biggest, middle-sized, and smallest TV stations in the land from New York down? Would you look at an industry that is making billions of dollars of profit using our property and it pays nothing for its license fee to the Federal Communications Commission? You pay more for your auto license fees than the biggest television station in New York City pays for its television license fee. We’re the landlords. The TV and radio stations are the tenants. They’re using our property, licensed by the FCC free. Have you ever seen a station sign off that way at 2 in the morning? They say this is KYNZ, we’re glad we’ve served you now. We’re signing off and we just want to let you know that we’re using your property for nothing, thank you very much for your generosity. Now let’s say a foreign corporation or domestic Corporation comes on federal lands in Nevada discovers a gold mine or a silver mine goes to Colorado and discovers a molybdenum mine on our land, federal land. Do you know what they can do? Under a 120 year law called the Mining Act of 1872, they discover the gold mine, they certify it for the US government and then they buy it. The government has to sell it to them if they document you know they fulfill the requirements so let's say this gold mine has 7,000 acres over it that the company wants to buy.  It could be a Belgian company, a Japanese company, or US company it doesn’t matter.  The law doesn’t distinguish. They say ok we want to buy from you Uncle Sam 7,000 acres over this gold mine. You know what the prices is? It ranges between 250 and 5 dollars an acre that's what it was in 1872, why would Uncle Sam wanna increase it? Has anything happened since 1872? A ice cream cone was a penny, wasn’t it then? Why not today? Wouldn’t you like to run and by an ice cream cone for a penny? Then they buy it for let's say 5 dollars and acre.  They dig for the gold, the sell the gold and keep all the money minus their costs, we get nothing. When the mine is exhausted it could be an environmental wreck contaminated with cyanide which is part of the chemical process for mining gold. Too bad, folks! Too bad. That is what is called the Hard Rock Mining Act of 1872 and the mining industry's prevented any changes since that. So, let's take a figure in the 1990s, 10 billion dollars of gold will be mined out of Nevada alone on your land and you’ll get nothing for it, in fact, you’ll probably have to pay a little to prepare the area. The timber is same, not much better as we speak 120 ft spruce trees that are 3 hundred years old are being cut down in Alaska, Tongas National Forest by a Japanese and US timber company, two companies. They're paying less than ten dollars for that tree. You’re paying 10 times for clearing the roads in that forest for those companies to come cut the trees, 10 times what you get by way of royalties. Now, if you were running the US forest service. Let’s say you had no PhD, let’s say you had no expertise, would you run it that way? Would you run it that way? Would you recommend after you sold uranium to nuclear power utilities? Would you recommend it to 10 billion dollars be canceled? You see what's going on? It doesn’t matter how many experts they have. What counts is conscious. What counts is common sense, what counts is public trust. That's what's missing. Now on top of all of this, presiding over a dead broke government in Washington, presiding over a declining economy, unemployment, recession, scandals from the Pentagon to HUD galore. What is the White House and Congress doing the last two years? They raise their pay 40 thousand dollars. Oil gets 50 thousand dollars, that's what called destroying the moral authority to govern. They’re now up to 130 thousand a year. They get national health insurance unlike millions of Americans. They get a great pension, you can’t believe what a pension is like for members of Congress. If Foley is 63, the house speaker retires this year and lives out his life expectancy he’ll get 3 million dollars in pension payments. 3 million dollars. When they raise their pay, they break their moral authority they rule by a double standard hypocrisy and demoralize the public. They lose respect by the public.  They know all this, so how do they raise their pay? Quickly, just before midnight in the Senate. Quickly, 24 hours in the house without any public hearings or even amendments being allowed on the floor and quickly George Bush signs it into law. Meanwhile, the same people froze the federal minimum wage for 7 million Americans who are working at the federal minimum wage in the USA at $3.75 from 1981-1989 and generously allowed it to be raised to 4 and a quarter. In other words, you can make it on 8300 dollars a year folks. But those members of Congress and top government officials they couldn’t make it on 90 thousand a year plus fringe benefits and perks a mile long. They have to go to a 130, so now maybe you understand a little bit why Jerry Brown is saying the things he's saying and why Bill Clinton is starting to say some of those things. Now, maybe you’ll appreciate more the need for new parties because no matter how disgusted you are with Washington it isn't as motivating as when these kinds of case studies come to your attention. You can’t believe it, you cannot believe it because we have all been looking the other way. Too many people give up on themselves, there are about 50 thousand people I would guess in the country who spend 50 hours or more watching Congress during the year. Just you know on a particular issue and they you know they go to Congress, write letters and challenge their members. 50 thousand, 50 hours or more a year. There are one and a half million bird watchers in this country. That’s good, they ought to watch em all while they’re still here. But I would like to see a million and a half Congress watchers in this country. If someone knocked on your door and said hi, I’m your new neighbor. Just thought I'd introduce myself. I can raise your taxes, I spent 22% of your family income, I can send your children off to war, and I can let others expose you to toxic chemicals, see you later! What are you gonna say? What are you bothering for as watching the A team or you’d say, you’d better come back. You mean something to me so I better mean something to you. That’s your Senators, that’s you're representatives so it really stands. You see when we grow up corporate we don't grow up civic. We don't say so ourselves we better spend some of our time month after month on our citizen duties because if we don't watch the government, if we don’t watch big business, we know what’s gonna happen. It isn’t just liberty, being priced-price of liberty’s eternal vigilance without Patrick Henry who said that. The price of democracy, of justice, is vigilance. It doesn’t have to be eternal.  A million people belonging to bank consumer groups could have headed off all this bank shenanigans cause they would've been right there in the local community with their full time staff of advocates and champions making sure their saving deposits were not eluded and speculated they’d have stopped it in the bud-nipped right at the beginning. Million people, 10 dollars a year, fulltime offices around the country would’ve headed off probably a 2 trillion dollar bailout before it's over. By the way, 1.3 trillion dollar bailout is about 10 thousand dollars per taxpayer. It really comes down to about. We need a resolve building up each one of us neighbors, friends, relatives to spend more time as public citizens because if we don’t our lives as private citizens are not gonna be as good. It’s going to be more burdensome, more economically strained, more deterioration of the health environment, etcetera. It does help when you make that decision to be more active as a citizen as I’m sure some of you are. It helps to have tools to get something done and that’s what we’re campaigning in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. A whole new toolkit for democracy bringing in up to date. The Bill of Rights are wonderful but they don’t tailor themselves to the telecommunications industry and the insurance industry and the oil industry and the government bureaucracies and everything that’s developed since. And the toolbox is really quite simple. Tools can be quite simple, the best tools are really simple. We have five roles we play. Voter, consumer, taxpayer, worker, and shareholder in our political economy goals. Those roles are roles that are now weak. Our vote is diluted by money, by all the things I noted earlier, the tools, limited terms, public financing of campaigns funded by voluntary well promoted contributions on the tax return. Doesn't take much. Half a billion a year, half a billion every two years will fund the entire Federal election campaign. It will sweep away all the distorting and corrupting power of private money and political action committees. You know how little half a billion a year is – a half a billion every two years is, by comparison with how much Washington spends? President Bush is going to cancel the remainder of the B-2 bomber program. You see, the B-2 bombers called the stealth bomber. Trouble is this technology is not really stealthy and it was designed to attack the Soviet Union and there’s no longer any Soviet Union, so President Bush says “no longer any Soviet Union, no stealth therefore what do we need it for?” So he’s gonna cancel it. But just for old time’s sake he's going to buy twenty of them. Twenty B-2 bombers. You know what a B-2 bomber costs? One bomber costs 850 million dollars minimum. 850 million dollars is more than what it would cost in voluntary contributions to fund the entire federal election campaign every two years for Congress and every four years for Congress and Presidency. That's the best bargain investment we’ll ever make. That’ll prevent interest groups coming in and spreading a million dollars here and there in Capitol Hill and in the White House coffers and getting a 5 billion dollar tax loophole or a 7 billion dollar debt cancellation or a 10 billion dollar corporate subsidy program and so on. What about taxpayers? Two simple changes. Do you know now that as a practical matter you can’t take your government to court – in federal court as a taxpayer with very few exceptions? The reason, because the federal judges have resurrected a doctrine called No Standing to Sue so they say “hey you’re only a taxpayer, you have no real stake in filing suit against this government program that you think that is a boondoggle or a waste pop” and so you’re thrown out of court before you can even plead your case. Now if we cannot use the federal courts to sue our government as taxpayers, we've lost a chunk of our democracy and what the Revolution in 1775 was fought about. Because they couldn’t sue King George in that period, and guess what? We can’t sue our King George in our period. What's even offensive about it is that the Reagan/Bush government which is the first to wave the American flag and praise our military has pushed relentlessly to make it impossible for any soldier, sailor, or Air Force person injured or next of kin killed to sue either the government or the military contractor for producing a dangerous technology, the cause of death like a defective helicopter. That’s how far it’s gotten. In fact now, there's an all-out attack on the right of injured and sick people to have their day in court against their sickness, injury, or fatality to be able to take the wrong door or the perpetrator of their harms to court – hold them accountable or responsible. That’s what Quayle does now as Vice President. 1:06:58 He doesn't attack victims, he attacks lawyers and you see but the real target is to make it difficult for victims to hold these corporations responsible. Now the other taxpayer reform is even simpler. I suggested it to the head of IRS in the late 70’s. I said why, don’t you put a square on the 10-40 tax return that you send out and have it say “attention taxpayers, if you're concerned how your money is spent in Washington, why don’t you join your national taxpayer watchdog group? Here’s the coupon, you’ll have the vote to elect council directors in the local, regional, national and then you’ll be able to watch Washington” You know what he said? I’ll never forget his answer. He said I’m against it, and I said why? It doesn't cost anything, it’s voluntary for the taxpayer to join, and don’t you think Washington needs watched? He said well I’m against it. I said why? I’ll never forget his answer. He said, because your proposal would inflict undue clutter on the tax form. Applause. Workers, what’s the power tool for workers other than a having a reasonable chance to form trade unions which in industries is more difficult all the time because they just fire the active workers and it takes 3 and a half years to be reinstated before the NLRB. Worker on 3 trillion dollars’ worth of pension money, they don’t control it. It’s controlled by banks and insurance companies, they decide where the workers money is invested what are they but that investing in lately they've invested in. What have they been investing in lately? They’ve been investing mergers in acquisitions, leveraged buyouts, and other speculative investments and make a lot of money for few investment bankers and corporate executives. These leveraged buyouts and mergers acquisitions almost never create any new jobs, any new wealth and they certainly don't benefit the workers and their communities. There should be tools where workers would have reasonable control, review, approval, veto over their pension money investments. You’ve got Townsend East that are industrial wastelands with closed down plants and the workers and retirees own billions of dollars of retirement pension funds and they’re not coming back into those communities. They're going for international mergers and acquisitions. They’re going for leveraged buyouts. RJ Reynolds Nabisco with million dollar fees for consults, etc. What's happened is the gap between the top executives of big companies in the entry level workers has gone crazy in the last 12 years. In 1980, it was forty times higher – the chief executive was making forty times more what the lowest entry worker was making on the average. It’s over 125 now. You've got these fellows like the head of United Airlines made 1200 times more than the stewardess made in his company. 1200 times, last year. The head of Philip Morris, a legal drug dealer, you know what he got for a retirement package three weeks ago? 24 million dollars. In Germany and Japan, they say why do we have to pay these people this much? Well we got to give incentives to work hard and so we can’t attract the best executive talent unless we pay them millions a year. Well, Le I Coca made last year four and a half million dollars. The head of Honda made 400 thousand. The head of Toyota made 700 thousand and guess who’s ahead? Funny, they seem to have incentive to go to work every day. In Japan, it's a about 18 times the CEO gets than entry level workers - 18 times more. In German it's about 23 times. The US? I said 125 times, the main book on the subject by Professor Crystal at the University California, he says 150 times. Now when you get the gap between the politicians and the taxpayers in terms of income and the CEOs and the workers. You’re not getting any leadership by any kind of motivation, example, or anything. You're getting a tremendous deterioration of morale and citizens and our leadership and our generation has disgraced itself – disgraced itself. While they’re laying off tens of thousands of workers, the CEOs are giving themselves all kinds of compensation packages and bonuses and surpluses and stock options. Imagine the head of GM closing 21 plants, laying off 77 thousand workers, telling workers there aren’t going to be any more pay increases for them and he didn’t cut one upper salary of the executives around them in that rarefied office building in Detroit. Now, how can he have any leadership capability under those conditions? Workers should have more reasonable control over what they own in pension monies. Shareholders own the corporations, they don’t control them the executives do with a rubber stamp board of directors. That's why they get away with what they get away with. Shareholders don't have the rights to run a decent fair election. They don't have the rights of cumulative voting. They can hardly get their own shareholder list. They have fewer rights vise vie their leaders than the people in dictatorships have. It’s completely rigged in terms of an election that is. Consumers, shouldn’t have a right for easy facility to organize as ratepayers, bank consumers, insurance consumers? I mean if you're going to be required to bail these critters out, if you're going to be required to support legal monopolies like your electric, telephone, Gas Company and when they want to build a nuclear plant or build a high voltage line or they want to disregard a reasonable rate making, why shouldn't the law require them to carry in their bill to you regularly? An insert, a little insert just like this. Here’s one right here, out of Illinois where our idea took hold. This appeared in the utility bills to Illinois consumers several years ago. There’s a little message and it says important message from your Citizens Utility Board inviting you to join. Here’s a coupon. Five dollars minimum dues. you elect the  board of directors, they hire a full time staff and they deal in a more powerful and organized way with the electric, telephone, gas companies; a regulatory commission and the legislature. Now 200 thousand people joined in the early 80’s. That’s all it took for their consumer group to save over 3 billion dollars since 1983 in utility rates and to win a whole series of victories dealing with environment, dealing with cost control, dealing with telecommunication gas pipeline and electricity company policies. That’s all it took. 200 thousand people, average of 5 to 7-8 dollars a year. See what I mean by a toolkit. By the instruments of democracy, doesn't cost the utility company anything. There’s no extra postage, the consumer group pays printing this. It doesn't cost you the taxpayer anything. It’s voluntary for you to join or not join. So guess what? Such an obvious proposal is adamantly attacked by the lobbies in Washington and their hench people in Congress. When Congress was sucking you with a 157 billion dollar SNL bailout in 1987 we went to the member's house bank committee. We said why don’t you put a little amendment requiring the SNLs to insert this in their bank statements inviting people to join in on their own statewide banking consumer groups with their own staff of champions? We said unlike the 157 billion dollar part of of your bill, this doesn’t cost the taxpayer anything. Unlike the rescue bill which forces the taxpayer to pay for something that taxpayers didn’t cause, the SNL crimes forcing the taxpayers to pay for you not doing your job in Washington while you raise your pay. This is voluntary. We got 6 out of 50 votes. They jeered the proposal down. They’re not jeering now thanks to the house bank scandal, but the best thing that has come along in the last 30 years. That’s the catalyst for all the perks and privileges and pomposities of these political imperialists. Imagine, 3 years we’re trying to get this in the bank bill because every year they charge you another fifty billion to bail out the SNLs. 60 billion a year, 20 billion a year.  Pretty soon it adds up to real money eh. Every year they jeer this down. We have a few supporters. They jeer us down. Not one of the senators on the Senate Bank Committee proposed it. You see how far gone they are? If you were there watching the Senate and the House, and you saw your senators vote this down. Vote to cancel the 10 billion dollar debt, vote not to notify workers of worker hazards, vote to keep sending 140 billion dollars from Uncle Sam overseas to defend Western Europe. If you saw money pouring into members pockets that encourage these kinds of bad votes, wouldn’t you want a new political system? Wouldn’t you want the kind of political candidates that come from your organization as citizens, rather than throwing their hat in the ring and then calling up the fat cats? We can turn the problems in our country around so fast because although they're very serious and getting worse. We still have resources, we have assets, we have science and technology, and we have the constitution. We’re using it, we’re not using it wisely because it's too much money and too much power in too few unaccountable hands in Washington and Wall Street. That, it spells plutocracy, oligarchy, not democracy. You know the old phrase government of the people by the people for the people? That needs people to be a reality. Otherwise we will continue to have in Washington a government of the Exxon’s, by the General Motors the DuPont’s which is what we have. All kinds of ways to get involved and  I’m gonna go through them very briefly. If you want to sign up there are signup sheets here. My associate is out there to ask your questions. We have all kinds of materials to be given away to you tonight to follow up. Number one, if you're interested in campaign finance reform, we’re very close to victory of the sort in Washington now. The House and Senate have passed the bill. Now they're working out the differences. It's not the bill we wanted but it curves the political action committees limits how much candidates can spend and has some matching funds so instead of a 100% reform, it's a 45% reform. Bush has threatened to veto. He says, I don't believe in matching funds for congressional campaigns. Guess what? he has received in his political campaign 200 million of your taxpayer dollars in presidential matching funds. There’s something about Mr. Bush that defies political consistency. 3 weeks ago, he attacked socialized medicine which nobody I know of is proposing in this country into various health plans I've studied. But guess who's been the beneficiary for over 20 years of socialized medicine – Walter Reed Army Hospital, Bethesda Naval Hospital style? George Bush. He's got three government doctors, 2 government peril medics and one government nurse on hand all the time in the White House. I guess socialized medicine is ok for him. There is a signup sheet for campaign finance reform materials, if you want to join the movement all over the country to get every improved and cleaner politics. The second is, a proposal called Audience Network. We own – we own the public airways. We need at least one hour back of primetime drive time on all TV and radio stations in the form of an Audience Network. Which we are free to join as viewers and listeners, few dollars a year dues. Which we’ll have professionally staffed and well funded studios, reporters, programmers, producers so we can begin communicating to ourselves, mobilizing ourselves, informing ourselves without the myopic control of the broadcast executives in New York and Los Angeles or without the censorship indirect self-censorship that comes from advertisers. So years ago, we would’ve learned about so many things that it took years to disclose. Whether what's going on in the auto industry, the drug industry, the chemical industry. We would've learned the solutions that people are proposing. We would’ve learned where things work in our country and why don’t we spread them? You know we talk about inner city schools and the terrible problems than they are. There are some inner city schools in almost every city where the teachers, the parents, and the principal have set models of performance. Why aren’t they on the TV? 1:22:00 Why’s the evening television news almost totally street crime, a mayor's statement, weather, and sports? It’s like the evening street crime news. Does anything happen in Tulsa, Oklahoma that's successful? That’s working? That needs to be on Television? Well instead of just trying to beg broadcasters to elevate the level of information and diversify why not have our own audience network with our own reporters and our own producers? So when they cover Tulsa, they cover the things that you think should be covered—the neighborhoods you think they should be covering. The successes that should be covered.  That they cover crime in the sweets (?) not just crime in the streets (applause). 1:22:55 They might have, uh, an audience network might have covered the Penn Square Bank very early on before it brought down Continental Illinois Bank and required 4.5 billion taxpayer dollars to bail out all the way to Chicago. There's a signup sheet for that. There was a congressional hearing last year by Congressman Ed Markey on the audience network. It’s not exactly pie in the sky. Third, those of you who wanna lock arms for a national health insurance in Congress, there's a nice package sent to you with the proposal for the single payer system. And that’s a sign up sheet.  Fourth, for those of you who want to pick up the conquered principles which I just discussed without calling in them the conquered principles to strengthen us as voters, taxpayers, consumers, workers, and shareholders, there are out there on the table, but if they run out there’s a signup sheet that will send you a copy. Finally, to illustrate a real create—the creative potential, once we start growing up civic, instead of corporate—once we think of family, neighborhood, community—there's a concept known as a time dollars service credit. Anybody hear of it? Time dollars spent on TV quite a bit—it’s been in Newsweek and some other magazines. It’s nothing more than the old idea of bartering volunteer time. But it’s done through a computer network which can be run by a neighborhood group, a hospital, or community college, such as here. And people use it in a (?) way—let’s say an elderly couple spends fifty volunteer hours tutoring teenagers, the fifty hours are logged in the time bank. A year later, let’s say the couple meets needs some transportation help. They need something done around their home but they’re not up to doing themselves. 1:25:01They tap fifty hours back from the computer time bank, because other people have put other hours in the exchange. Now where this is working—in about twenty communities around the country starting in Miami—it has an amazing consequence: people don't join it with volunteer time only get time back. They join it because the sense of community it fosters. Strangers become friends, neighbors become collaborators. There’s a fellow who’s a librarian who had a stroke. His mind wasn't impaired, but he was physically incapacitated. He was all alone. He lived alone. He began to despair—discouraged—think suicide. He happened to be in a community where there’s a Time-Dollar program, people needed to start a library. They tapped him for hundreds of hours of library advice. Put it in the time bank, he started getting all kinds a return from people who helped him—helped him get around—helped in a variety of ways.1:26:04  His moral went up, he became very happy. He had a whole network of friends and he wasn’t begging, because he had already given and he was getting in return. There’s a book out called the Time Dollar by Rodale Press in Miles (?) Pennsylvania. The people put out Prevention magazine. And, uh, there's a software and there’s a how-to kit and to find out how to get all these there’ll be a signup sheet that will be very nice for the college here to sponsor a community Time-Dollar service credit program. It works in all areas in helping healthcare and around the house and transportation and tutoring—it's about as flexible as the dollar. So what happens is for people who don't have much money, but they have a lot of time, this allows them to turn their time in a new form of currency called the time dollar.  It has great advantages. It’s inflation-proof—an hour’s an hour. It’s egalitarian—a lawyer’s hour is equal to a teenager’s hour. And the IRS has ruled it to be tax-exempt. (Laughter and applause). You can see how this rebuilds the neighborhood and the community in a very fine way. And the last thing I want to leave you with is why are we continuing to deliver our children, wholesale, to the entertainment and addiction industries without realizing the destructive effect it has on their sense of values and their attention spans. Millions of pre-teen children watch an average of thirty hours a week of television and video games. Those programs, if you've watched them lately, and those video games convey three values: violence is a solution to life's problems, addiction, and low-grade sensuality.  And pretty soon it's gonna be hardcore porn sensuality, given was coming off in terms of video games and certain cable programs. Now, for thirty hours a week, no vacations, these kids are watching these programs. No summer vacation from that. Their attention span’s being narrowed. They’re not receiving civic and community values. Because of programs or animation, they’re not even getting any history—it’s one thing if there are programs on historic wars, maybe they’ll learn something about history—no, you’ve got Tony the Tiger and shazam here and vaporize there—etc. Celestial creatures zooming through the sky—zapping each other. They're not learning the art of conversation. That’s why you see these teenagers have a smaller vocabulary than an Esperanto expert. I mean how many time you hear these words: y’know, kinda, like, sorta, you know, kinda, cool, like, sorta, like, sorta, kinda…They don't read anymore. They’re videoing—their videos. They’ve been turned into videos. They’re very vulnerable to thirty second political ads as a result, as they grow up. They have very low attention spans, try speaking to a junior high school quarter—it’s unbelievable. You almost have to leap up Superman style to command their attention. They’re always going like this, you know? They’re walking around with Walkman as if they don’t dare allow the prospect of one stray thought seeping into their minds from their brains while the music blows their minds and the more it does the more they like it. And here we are. We’re letting this happen. You know why? Because our generation has no time for children. We’re too busy for children. Why spend time raising them as parents when corporations can raise them? Kindercare can raise them. McDonald’s can feed them. HBO/Time Warner can entertain them. The cosmetic companies can teach them at age seven or eight how to fix their faces for the girls. The toy companies can show the five year old boys death dealing toys so they can nag their parents to buy them. And then along comes the drug industry. And the drug dealers. And then along comes the alcohol and  tobacco industry. And they’re gone. Addiction. Low-grade sensuality. Violence. Where are the community values? Where are the civic curriculums in the elementaries and high schools, giving youngsters and opportunity to spend time learning citizen skills, analyzing problems where they live in their neighborhood or community, working with responsible adults so when they grow up they can rise to the challenges of the twenty first century world-wide?  We got greenhouse effect, deforestation, acid rain and ozone deletion, famine and hunger, etc. What kind of youngsters are we raising? We don’t have time for them. There’s no time for them. Our generation of youngsters spends less time with adults, including defining adults as their parents, than any generation in our history. They spend time with their rat pack, their peer group and thirty hours a week watching television. If you ask them in high school “Have you ever heard of professor Herbert York?” No one’s ever heard of professor Herbert York. Well, he’s only the leading and longest-standing scholar and advocate for nuclear arms control in the United States. He was a science advisor to Eisenhower.  He’s the one that disarmament conferences want first on the list attending. They never heard of Herbert York. He deals with trivial subjects. Like global disarmament. But you say to them, “You ever hear of Morris the cat?” I’ve never met a high school student who’s never heard of Morris the cat. Never seen Morris the cat, but that’s the nature of our broadcast system, using our property. I warned you. Professor Herbert York would agree to eat tuna fish every day if he could have the exposure of Morris the cat on TV. That’s what I mean by growing up corporate—our children are growing up corporate—gets worse every year. Twelve minutes a day, 50,000 schools, is now sequestered by Channel 1 Whittle

Communications, subsidiary of Time-Warner. They give them ten minutes of plastic news and two minutes they’re selling them underarm deodorants, soft drinks, Nike shoes, and so on. 1:33:05 And 15,000 schools have said ok because they're leasing some television equipment from Whittle Communications. At 15,000 schools, I warrant you, would say no if the League of Women Voters, the Red Cross and the PTA wanted 12 minutes a day to teach these students about how to be involved and alert citizens. See how far commercialism has run roughshod even into our public school systems? We either grow up corporate or we grow up civic. And depending on how many of us do one or another will depend the future of our country in very concrete terms. And the future of our country, going one way or another, will affect the future of the world and it all rests on one internal decision by every individual that each individual will say to himself or herself that I will not subject myself to the indulgence of thinking that I don't count in our democracy and that I can't make a difference. Once, individually, people abolish that indulgence, great and wonderful things will happen to our society and to future generations who will inherit what we have done in our generation. Thank you. (Applause). Thank you. Thank you very much. I unfortunately went a little over. There will be questions and comments as you wish. And the last signup sheet is for people to get information on the time-dollar service credit program I just mentioned. I’m gonna leave a number of books in the library which reflect some of the things I spoke about this evening. And I hope that the librarian will put them on reserve so the students and anyone else can go get them at maximum convenience. They involve books on side effects of pharmaceuticals, books on corporate power, I think there’s a book on how to improve your daily newspaper—a manual for readers, and a variety of other materials I think you’ll find quite useful. We’ll start now with anybody who wants to ask questions, make an announcement—if you want. Is there a meeting coming up? Yes? (Inaudible question) Can we get copies of the book in the community in Bartlesville?  (Inaudible comment) Seems to me I remember that—that community. Is that the hope of Phillips? Yes, you do need those materials. Come on up and give me the address and send those. We’ll send them to you. Yes? (Inaudible question). Bush wants to help the former republics—Soviet Union, Russia. There was a 24 billion dollar package shared by seven countries, including the US. And, I don’t know what the US’s share is gonna be. It’s easy to say, you know, let’s—I favor, you know, taking care of ourselves here at home before we start shipping abroad. But in this case, let me tell you, if Russia—the Soviet Union—the former Soviet Union—turns in to a dictatorship, we’re gonna be paying a lot more. So, a modest amount of assistance—if it can be supervised—especially food, famine, or medicine relief—will reduce the likelihood that they will revert back to a military dictatorship. Without there being a military dictatorship, we can cut 150 billion a year off our military budget. So, sending over four or five billion to try to avoid that would be good, but you see I don’t trust him to use the money right and I don't trust either Bush or the Russians to make sure that the money gets down to where it helps people. So this puts us in a real problem and you can say well it makes good sense if it reaches the people. Because there are now some military dictator types who are saying look, the country’s falling apart and we want to restore the old system. They’re having marches and demonstrations. But, it does seem to me, as far as Bush is concerned, to ignore all kinds of important needs in this country. And Nixon makes a speech and Bush jumps. Nixon said help the Russians, Bush said OK. I think I’m gonna ask Nixon to say help Americans. You know, maybe Bush would rediscover his country, so. Descend from president of the world to hometown USA. Yes? (Inaudible question) Can any of you hear that? Are the acoustics good here? No, seriously, do you need me to repeat the question? (Audience says “yeah”). OK. The question is Jerry Brown has said that he’s going to—if he gets elected—he’s gonna appoint Jesse Jackson or me as vice president. He has not mentioned me in recent weeks. But I’m a full time citizen advocate. I believe in building democracy at the roots and then we’ll get a better brand of politics. So I’m—you know, it’s nice of him to think of me that way. Someone else? (Audience member asks: “What do you think of Ross Perot?”). Well now, everyone’s asking everyone else now: What do I think of Ross Perot? What do you think of Ross Perot? On the plane coming here asking me what do you know—what do you think of Ross Perot? Ha. First of all, Ross Perot is already the smartest politician of our age because of the way he’s making the announcement. I mean, he knows the people who are thirsting for democracy—greater equality and equity in our country. They’re not going to pick a billionaire as their first choice of reform. So he says, look, I’m not running unless you people get me on the ballot in fifty states. And when you do, give me a call. By the way, I’ll make 12,000 telephone lines available to you just in case. He then makes a whole series of statements that make liberals and conservatives like him. He’s against the war in the Golf and he stood tall on that until the war started then he went right behind Bush. So he got both sides. He’s for gun control and he’s pro-choice. But he’s for the family.  And he’s for entrepreneurs. And he’s for government efficiency. It’s like he’s been reading Gallup polls. Now, I’ve talked to him a couple times. I mean he has, you know, on the phone he comes across the way he does on TV. But I think every candidate has two layers and all we’re seeing is the first layer. It’s refreshing. He’s been used to commands.  He built his business by saying “You do this, employee, or you’re through.” That’s a little bit different than Washington. So there’s a temperamental change that has to occur. He’s got the money to be on TV and to run a campaign. He said he’s gonna spend 50 to 100 million dollars. My estimate is that’s seven months’ income for him. It’s quite a sacrifice. Imagine someone spending seven months’ income to run a credible race for the presidency? When you’re worth 2.5 to 3 billion dollars, it’s different. I don’t know what the second layer is. And, remember when Lei Okoku (?) was saying “Run for president, run for president!”? Somehow Lei Okoku(?) doesn’t look as good to the same people. So you never know what happens when the second layer is probed. I don’t mean just any investigation, I mean when you’re out on the campaign trail the second layer tends to come to the front, cause there’s so many people tugging at yah and asking you this and what’s your position on that. And if you lose your temper, you could drop in the poles. You have to have a certain seasoning to you. Having said that, would I like to see Ross Perot run for president? Yes, because I want more choice. And I think he’ll be three major candidates on the ballot: the democrat, the republican, and Ross Perot. Now, the pundits differ on whether he’ll pull more votes from Clinton if Clinton doesn’t implode along with Hilary, or from Bush if Bush indeed runs—you know, stays on the ballot. There’s a lot of uncertainties here. And nobody knows. For example, he’s not gonna be a spoiler. Well what does that mean? Let’s say, a day before the election in November, he’s 18% in the polls. That’s a spoiler. Is he gonna drop out? Haven’t heard yet. So, if that’s gonna be the case, I don’t need that, do you?  You want someone to run, to raise people’s hopes and then I’m only at 18 percent, I’m not gonna win, I don’t wanna be a spoiler. I’m gonna endorse a candidate. So we wanna know if he’s going to go all the way or no. The other thing is, maybe this is setting up for a new party in 96. You know, maybe, this is a first run in 92, but he wants to set up a new party in 96. He’s got a lot of energy. And, he uses his own mind. Built his own business. So on. He shares my criticism of General Motors. And has a lot of stories to tell about General Motors before they bought him out for seven hundred and fifty million dollars. But we’ll see. I think on a plus I'd like to see him in the race. Give people more choice. And I’m sure he’ll push the other candidates in certain directions that they wouldn’t ordinarily push themselves. Someone else? Yes? (Inaudible question) First of all—the question is three students in Stillwater got caught selling marijuana or smoking? Selling marijuana. And they face up to life imprisonment here? In balmy Oklahoma? Life imprisonment? And the tobacco executives get 24 million dollars to retire? First of all you gottah make a distinction between marijuana, and heroin, and cocaine. And a distinction between heroin, cocaine, and crack and other forms of very cheap and very addictive drugs. Marijuana—it’s absurd to make marijuana a crime like that. Unless you were going to make tobacco a crime because tobacco is killing 400,000 Americans a year. And marijuana is in the hundreds at the most. So we have to ask ourselves, are these addictions? Yes. Are they bad? Yes. If you criminalize them, you drive them underground. The biggest export crop from California is marijuana, in case you didn’t know. See what I mean? So, the biggest single export, plant. So, when it comes to marijuana, you decriminalize it and you regulate it. When it comes to heroin and cocaine it’s more difficult. We have to ask ourselves are our present policies working? Army, air force, marine, interdite(?)—it keeps coming, pouring in, corrupting the political system. It’s corrupting law enforcement in some areas of the country—try south Florida for example. And so we ask ourselves is it working? If it isn’t working can we try something in a pilot project—an experiment? One state. Are addicts criminals or are they patients? You want to treat them as patients? Then you have treatment centers where they’re slowly detoxified 1:47:06. You want to treat them as criminals, they go in the back alleys and they get the drugs and they pay for it with money they got from mugging people or vandalizing or stealing from people. The more difficult question is crack cocaine, because that is cheap and deadly. And on almost any scenario of legalizing that, there’s going to be a lot of trouble. There’s trouble with it illegal but legalizing would be a lot of trouble. But we’ve got to have open minds and we’ve got to discuss it and right now it’s a political taboo to discuss decriminalizing any drug except tobacco. Tobacco is fine—upstanding corporate citizens, you see. Now we know that if we outlawed tobacco, because forty thousand Americans are dying from it. 11,000 a day, by the way, or more, according to the surgeon general of the US. What do you think would happen? It’d be like prohibition where we outlawed alcohol in the 20s. You get underworld, underground, you get criminal behavior and people will find a way to get tobacco. So if that’s true of tobacco, why isn’t it true of marijuana? Why isn’t it true in terms of some other drugs, in terms of treatment? Some how we gottah find a way to solve the problem. Of course the other way is much more constructive, which is to say why do so many Americans don’t take drugs? Why are so many Americans not drug addicts? You say well, because they have purpose in their life, they have family, they’re needed, they’re wanted, they’re loved. You say OK. Maybe those same characteristics, expanded a bit to youngsters who are on drugs, we’ll get them not to be on drugs. Maybe we can reduce the demand for drugs by making them feel wanted, needed, loved, developing a youth citizen core. Kind of a boy scout, girl scout—only the citizen arena. 1:49:11 And the millions of youngsters in their late teens, for example, to constructively work with responsible adults in our communities to solve problems and help other people. You know how much the government is spending, just on military interditement of drugs? Seven billion last year. Seven billion dollars. You know how much they’re spending on trying to make youngsters needed and wanted? They won’t even fill the Head Start program. Which is a few hundred million dollars. They’re finally giving money to Head Start. Super successful program. So, all this by way of let’s talk more—let’s see what other countries are doing. Someone else? Yes? 1:50:00 (inaudible questions) You mean with each state and each region having to have a radioactive waste disposal site selected? (Inaudible questions) Yes, and they're also saying that there are certain radioactive materials that are below regulatory concern that can be put in your community landfill.  Those are all being fought with pressure to repeal the law, pressure to block the requirement that there be a dispersal of radioactive waste dumps rather than keeping them right now for the time being where they are near the utility plants or on the Hanford reservation or a couple of other reservations. All I can say is that it's a struggle with all kinds of citizen uproar in various parts the country. Some lawsuits pending against them. The arguments of consumer groups are a) we got to do something with radioactive waste but it doesn't make sense to open up new dumps-keep them where they are until we find a better way to neutralize the dump.   Keep them where they are because where they are is already radioactive. Secondly is to get rid of the below regulatory concerns provision. Something is radioactive. It better be put in a suitable location. You know your smoke alarms? You know the smoke of the radioactive silica is a little bit of radioactive material in the smoke alarms that you have in your homes? That would be below regulatory concern. Let me just take these little things from the smoke alarm when it's all over-the replacement-just dump it in the local landfill, but that’s very hard to control. At what point do you say “no, this is too radioactive.  Don't dump it.”  Do you see people all over the country monitoring this before their dump? That’s why we are very upset. The same was-uh-irradiated food.   There’s a lot of pros and cons against irradiating food. But if you happen to be against, but apart from what it does to your food and the chemistry of your food and the taste of your food-that it doesn’t really have as much benefit as the industry claims it does to replace pesticides or preservatives.  Look at all workers and look at all the factories that are going to be set up in with cobalt tunnels pushing this food through, and all the trucks and railroad cars carrying these radioactive materials. I mean that is a whole other side of the irradiated food controversy that is not being paid enough attention to. Is there anyone else? I think we are going to have a reception? (laughter). Are they all invited? No. Are there any more questions? Yes, back there. (inaudible question)Yes, Dr. Sidney Wolfe- W-O-L-F-E. Are you talking about the Oklahoma doctor? Well, he passed away some years ago. which is his name is Dr Michael Shadid, S-H-A-D-I-D , and it’s called “Crusading Doctor” Oklahoma University Press.  The other doctor leading the fight on this is Dr. Sydney Wolfe, W-O-L-F-E. - health research group post office box one nine four o four one nine four four Washington DC DC. The zip is 20036. If you think it makes a difference….in the speed of delivery. Anybody else? Yes. (Audience Question: I have a simple question. As long as I’ve been reading about your activites, I’ve asked myself “how can I get Americans to curb their appetite for private goods and private consumption and increase public consumption-transportation, healthcare-all these things we can buy together rather than buy our own.” My whole life has been “John, buy your own.” What have we done and what can we do?”) Yes, the question was we’ve been taught to seek private consumption when we have so many public needs, and how can we begin to direct more of our wealth into meeting public needs? I tried to give you some examples where there is already public tax money that is so misused and wasted that can be redirected to more legitimate, public needs, and we should start there.  But we really should think of that, about what we can do by joining together with one another in cooperative buying, or in providing cultural and public facilities in our community simply by joining citizen groups who provide these service. So it isn’t just government funded groups like daycare and headstart , but we can do a lot for our community. Frances, many people have joined the symphonies and groups and know you have a symphony in your town or they join to start a library, or they’ve joined to create an Arboretum. So there’s a lot of that that can be done for a fraction of what people spend on soft drinks…not to mention tobacco and liquor.  Tonbacco, in our country, absorbs up to forty billion dollar…liquor…cost sixty billion dollars, and soft drinks, forty-two billion. So, think people, if they felt they’re putting in a few dollars in a pot with a lot of others really produce some in their community they could really enjoy, they would be very happy to do so.  But they’ve gotta have some sort of certainty that it's going to produce something. In my hometown, we started the community advocate is a nonprofit lawyer who advises explains and sometimes represents citizens who take on City Hall, and it’s working wonderfully becuase all the citizens who want to be active but are mystified by lawyers and legal procedures, now go down to the community office, lawyers office and they get all this information free.  Now a foundation supports this, but it would've amount to about five dollars per person in town to support it, and that community advocate is pushing all kinds of economies on the town, and improving the town government. What’s five dollars?  Look what people spend on tobacco, alcohol and soft drinks, for example. Once they get an idea of how for their pooled contributions can go, they’ll raise the quality of life in their community measurably! Someone else? Yes -(Inaudible question) The six legislators who supported the insert in the bank? Congressman Schumer of New York, Congressman Kennedy of Massachusetts, Congressman Gonzales of Texas and three others I can’t remember now.   Roughly…. nobody from Oklahoma…if that’s why you’re asking. Yes. (Inaudible questions). Yes, pharmaceutical companies give doctors free drugs and trips to resorts where supposedly medical symposiums are occurring, and sometimes give them free trips if they prescribe certain amount of drugs, and our health newsletter, by the way which is out there for you to pick up, and if you want a free copy, there will be a sign-up sheet for that….health newsletter. Is exposed that….investigate the health industry for its abuses and report it to you. We think it should be a violation of medical ethics committee should need laws to prevent something that's a form of bribe. It’s a bribe. Yes. (inaudible question) Am I aware of any intentional foot dragging on AIDS research? Don't know enough to answer. I know a lot of AIDS groups think there is.  I know that there's a dispute over which way to go what when what do your research dollars among the medical scientists.  But I don't really know enough to answer that.  Yes. For Diane….She keeps saying it’s the final question. (Inaudible question)  The question is why does the Pentagon keep so many obsolete materials, equipments, and uniforms? Maybe they want it for central casting later on? (Laughter) The GAO (General Accounting Office)a month ago put on a report saying that, that’s the arm of Congress that investigates financial waste…The air force has eleven billion dollars in warehouse spare parts and when it needs more spare parts like that, they order new ones. So this eleven billion dollar inventory just sits there. I think the answer to your question is no one in the Pentagon's losing their jobs because of that.  You see, the best way to lose your job in Washington is to do it, and the best way to keep your job is not to do your job.  And the people in the Pentagon that are blowing the whistle on this kind of thing get eased out., or ostracized to monitor military bowling alleys in Thailand. The ones who go along with it don't lose their job and the real secret to bureaucratic accountability is that you lose your job when you don’t do your job.  You don’t get your raise; you get demoted. That's what has to happen in government and then you’ll watch and see the improvement. Bureaucracies have to be little insecure, and right now, they are far too secure.  Someone there. Yes (inaudible question) The question is how to reduce the salaries of Congress to fifty thousand dollars, which by the way, was a figure recommended two weeks ago on Meet the Press, or one of those programs from former Senator Proxmire from Wisconsin, who was always opposed to pay increases before he retired two years ago. He was a good senator. There’s now a bill in Congress called HR1033, introduced by Congressmen Andy Jacobs from Indiana, to cut the pay from one hundred and thirty thousand to ninety thousand. And he only takes seventy five thousand because he disagrees with pay increases, and he practices what he preaches. I would write….Who is your congressman? (inaudible answer). Oh, write Congressman Andy Jacobs, and ask for a copy of the bill. And then the only thing to do is to marshall protests and letters for the cause.  They’re on the defensive, and some would say that they are on the ropes because of the House bank scandal. They’re starting to get rid of one perk a week. Now they don't have free pharmaceuticals.