Senate Democratic majority leader George Mitchell exclaimed late in 1994, shortly before he abandoned Congress in disgust: “This system stinks. This system is money.” The law of life among us now is what Jefferson called “the general prey of the rich upon the poor.” The moment is dangerous. Democracy is not guaranteed God’s protection; systems and nations end. If we do anything serious now we might make things worse; if we do nothing serious now we are done for.
Why is there no longer any mass democratic organization we can trust and through which we can act together? Where is the strong national movement that is advancing working Americans’ interests, values and hopes? Where is the party of the common person? It’s no coincidence that within the same historical moment we have lost both our self-governance and the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party, on which many millions of ordinary people have relied to represent them since the 1930s, has been hollowed out and rebuilt from the inside by corporate money. What was once the party of the common man is now the second party of the corporate mannequin. In national politics ordinary people no longer exist. We simply aren’t there. No wonder only 75 million of us eligible to vote in 1994 did so, while 108 million more of us, also eligible, did not.
What is government about? As a worker told reporter Barry Bearak last spring about the U.A.W. strike against the Caterpillar corporation, government is about “control, you know, who controls who.” Ernesto Cortes, Jr., the exceptionally important organizer who helps people in communities in the Southwest to act together in their own interests, once exclaimed: “Power! Power comes in two forms: organized people and organized money.” To govern ourselves, power is what we need. To get it we must want it and organize for it.
But we will have to start small, “to begin humbly.” When only a few come that is enough. The women’s movement for the right to vote started when five women sat down around a table in a parlor in Waterloo, New York, six miles north of Seneca Falls. The Populist’s National Farmers Alliance and Industrial Union started with a meeting of seven people in a farmhouse in Lampasas County, Texas.
I propose the emphasis on Populism because the nineteenth century Populists denied the legitimacy of corporate domination of a democracy, whereas in this century the progressives, the unions and the liberals gave up on and forgot about that organic and controlling issue. I propose that we seize the word Populism back from its many hijackers, its misusers - the George Wallaces, David Dukes, Irving Kristols, Newt Gingriches - and restore its original meaning in American history, that of the anti-corporate Populist movement of the 1880s and 1890s.Our point, our purpose, is the well-being and enhancement of the person. We are all those who believe the corporations are becoming our masters and do not want to vote for candidates of any party dependent on them. We are all those who are tired of winning elections some of the time but losing our rights and interests all of the time.
As Lawrence Goodwyn wrote in his definitive work, The Populist Moment, the Populists were “attempting to construct, within the framework of American capitalism, some variety of cooperative commonwealth.” That was, as he wrote, “the last substantial effort at structural alteration of hierarchical economic forms in modern America,” and when Populism died out what was lost was “cultural acceptance of a democratic politics open to serious structural evolution of society.” Well, like the Populists of that era we are ready again to resume the cool eyeing of the corporations with a collective will to take back the powers they have seized from us, the power of farm or no farm, job or no job, living wage or no living wage, store or no store, medical care or no medical care, home or no home, pension or no pension.
So, as I would have it, we are Populists;
but we are many other things.
We are white, black, brown,
every religion and none,
young, middle-aged, old.
We are people who work,o r we’re job creators, local merchants,
for a corporation or a small business or a farm,
for our families or for ourselves,
We are ordinary people.W e eschew violence;
Probably we would be no better than the rich if we were rich.
But we are not haters or scapegoaters.
We are progressives;we are union workers, or non-union ones who might be union
we are liberals;w e are the poorly educated,
We are feminists, environmentalists,a nd we are moderates and conservatives
peace and anti-nuclear people,
civil rightsers, civil libertarians,
radical democrats, democratic socialists,
egalitarians;
Too much, too much . . .
In 1886 the Supreme Court decided, insanely, that corporations are “persons” with the rights our forebears meant only for people. The corporations - mere legal fictions created by the democratic states that are their only source of legitimacy - disposing of the Populists and slipping free from the states’ leashes, have multiplied into the corrupters of our politics and the international networks of greed and power that we know today. Hierarchical, essentially totalitarian, and now gigantic and global, in effect the corporation is the government, here and elsewhere. The divine right of kings has been replaced by the divine rights of C.E.O.s.
Jefferson wrote that what distinguished our new country from the Old World was the absence among us then of the fatal concentrations of private wealth that so deformed imperial Europe. Yet the gap between the very rich and the rest of us now is morally more obscene that anything Jefferson could have had in mind.
Although no democracy can work without a strong union movement, U.S. unions have been reduced to shadows by employer’s use of sophisticated unionbusters and by the corporations’ government, whose labor-management apparatus chains down the right to form and maintain unions. Compared with about one in three of the work force at the peak, only one in six workers now belongs to a union - if you exclude public employees, one in nine.
Multinational corporations now employ about a fifth of the private American work force and are getting bigger and more powerful by the hour. Workers are falling into paycheck poverty - by the millions we are becoming expendable hired hands, interchangeable units of work, governed in what counts by entities that have abandoned the traditional quest for a loyal work force, much less a happy one. Corporations are extracting cuts in wages and benefits from their experienced workers, low-balling new workers in two-tier wage systems, requiring mandatory overtime and hiring temps to reduce the fringe benefits they have to pay, and letting hundreds of thousands of workers go while exporting their jobs to low-wage areas around the world. As a worker at Caterpillar said, “They use you up and throw you away.”
Many millions of us hunger for serious discussion and debate on public affairs, but major corporations now control much of the access to our minds and the selection of the subjects that we are encouraged to think about from day to day. Twenty corporations own and control more than 50 percent of American radio and TV stations, newspapers, magazines, book publishers and major movie studios. In 1945, 80 percent of our daily newspapers were independently owned; almost half a century later 80 percent of them were owned by corporate chains. The commercial television corporations, which dominate the national consciousness day to day, debase and daze people with foolish and violent programming. Before one of our children is out of grade school he or she watches on the average 8,000 murders and 100,000 acts of violence on TV.
There is no vision, and the people are perishing.For decades savings and loan institutions were required by law to provide low-interest loans to help families buy homes. President Carter “deregulated” interest rates, Congress deregulated the S&Ls, and their ensuing collapse destroyed the government’s low-interest housing program. Both parties lied to the people about the disaster until after the 1988 elections and then we were stuck for the bailout of half a trillion dollars.
Forty-one million Americans, and rising, still have no health insurance, even though they could have been covered for nothing by the savings from national health insurance such as Canada’s single-payer system.When changes in cost-of-living components since 1960 are factored into the government’s measures of poverty, about a fourth of us are in poverty, almost twice the government’s official story line. Yet the Republican Congress continues deliberately to scapegoat and squeeze the poor and the elderly to provide still more tax benefits for the rich and the corporations, voting to give tax breaks of $245 billion by 2002 primarily to the wealthy while also cutting Medicare $270 billion and Medicaid $182 billion during the same period. Both parties cry out that the poor must work for their welfare, but neither would dream of providing the public revenues necessary to capitalize enough public-sector jobs for the poor to take. Benefits under the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program were slashed 42 percent between 1970 and 1991, yet Congress is still slashing them and seeks to end them as a federal entitlement. The oligarchy, tut-tutting against “class warfare” at every hint of a politics that might threaten its wealth and privileges, has declared its own class war against the poor.
Mostly we are shattered into subgroups - split by race or by duels between the hurting middle, working and out-of-luck classes or enclosed within one-issue or special-focus organizations or efforts. What resources do we have to take power and democratize the corporation?We as a people are rich if we could just get at our own common wealth. As Ralph Nader teaches, workers’ pensions funds come to four or five trillion dollars, our bank deposits and savings accounts total a couple of trillion dollars and mutual insurance proceeds come to a trillion and a half; yet all of this, our money and therefore our power, is controlled by the corporations. We as the people own about one-third of the land in the United States, yet ranchers and mining companies ravage and pillage it for next to nothing. The airwaves are public property - ours - yet our politicians hand them free to broadcasting companies, which use them to control our minds. We are fabulously rich, but the oligarchy controls our wealth while we are privileged to pay off the national debt, now more than four trillion dollars.
Many millions of us know more than the imperious establishment wants us to, and we are moving. The Industrial Areas Foundation has organized people in many communities around their own needs and hopes, inventing new principles for authentic democracy that can be applied anywhere. The phenomenal movement spawned by Nader gallantly fights on for the people’s interests through scores of organizations. . . . A majority of people polled nationally favor the establishment of a major new third party. . . . A small, but important effort, the Program on Corporations, Law, and Democracy (P.O. Box 806, Cambridge, MA 02140), is focusing on corporate tyranny and on withdrawing giant corporations’ privileges and immunities. There is of course no way to do justice here to the dedicated myriad other movements for justice and equality in the country.“We the People” ordained and established the United States “to . . . promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity” solely on our authority and power as persons. We did not ordain and establish the United Corporations of America. Each one of us still has the same authority and power on the sole strength of which the founders of the country declared themselves independent of the King of England. We can use this same authority and power, our strength as citizens, to write a new Declaration of Total Democratic Sovereignty Over the Corporation and make the United States, even if it will be for the first time, a democracy that is actually governed by the people that live in it, in our own interests and those of posterity. I don’t know if we’ll do it or not. But we can. If we want the power we can take it. We are entering now the first great test of whether we, one nation’s people who are as different as the people of the world, can govern ourselves. Can we see ourselves in others and the other in ourselves? I believe the first great experiment in international democracy will succeed or fail on the answer we collectively give to that question. We can or we can’t, and the answer in events will be the answer we give to history. Let’s try: Let’s revive and continue the American Populist Movement on the strength of our knowing that its best democratic passions have never died among us. With Tom Paine, we will “lay then the axe to the root, and teach governments humanity.”All this is what needs to be fused, if and to whatever extent people and their organizations want to be fused, into a pro-people national alliance. But can we reassemble and take power? Can a people so different in origin, race, religion and history know and care about each other enough and act together in our common interests powerfully enough to save the democracy and ourselves?
Ronnie Dugger is the founding editor of The Texas Observer and the author of several books. This article led to the founding of the Alliance for Democracy in November 1996.
Once we are formed, in my opinion, we should at once connect with other democratic workers’ and citizen movements and people-based nongovernmental organizations (N.G.O.s) around the world, because the only hope for turning giant corporate fictions into fundamentally subordinate bodies is direct and cooperative international citizen action.Here are some of my thoughts about policy issues, with which you may or may not agree - please come forward with your own, so that, in due course, a document on issues can be democratically composed by the participants in the new Alliance:
- Publicly mandated free television and radio time for bona fide candidates for office at each level; a limit on all campaign contributions to $100 from a flesh and blood person who is a permanent resident of the candidate’s district; prohibition of contributions or any other political activity by corporations.
- Single-payer national health insurance such as the Canadian plan, with automatic universal coverage.
- A doubling of the minimum wage and indexing it to inflation.
- A full-employment (3 percent unemployment) antipoverty program rooted in a thirty-five-hour workweek with four- to six-week vacations; equal pay for equal work.
- A huge public-investment program, including the creation of a community-owned, community-controlled public nursing-home system and a new profession of caring for the handicapped and neglected people, funded by the radical simplification of the income tax and the restoration of its steep progressivity, a permanent surtax on corporate profits and a steeply graduated annual wealth tax on personal assets of $5 million or more.
- A generic low-interest-rate national policy, which will require the abolition of the Federal Reserve System.
- Statutory reversal of court-made law that corporations are "persons"; the redefinition by law of corporate boards to require that they include representatives of workers and other stakeholders, including the public; re-establishment of strict personal civil and criminal liability of corporate officers and agents; corporations’ rechartering and, in cases of repeated wrongdoing, the revocation of corporate charters and their dismantling and distribution.
- A national public oil company to produce our own oil, and other local, state or federally owned yardstick corporations in airlines, communications, air travel and other transportation, and public utilities.
- Legislation to enhance freedom of speech and the press by limiting the ownership of newspapers, magazines, radio and television stations to one of any kind per person or independent owning entity.
- The criminalization of any large employer’s opposition to the formation of a union among any of its employees (the employer, not the government, required to stand neutral); the repeal of the requirement of a majority vote to form a bargaining unit, permitting minority unions; preference in federal contracts for unions that conduct periodic open accountability sessions among their membership and officers and that dedicate some specified portion of their assets to organizing the unorganized.
- Voting only on nonworking days; proportional representation and preference voting; initiative, referendum and recall; a requirement that judges inform juries of their common-law right and power to judge the law itself.
- Use of public monies to front-end the costs of homes rather than letting banks double or triple them through compound interest charges.
- Classification of cigarettes and alcohol as dangerous drugs; removal or reduction of the profit from narcotics, tobacco and alcohol by forbidding their sale other than by nonprofit local or state entities, decriminalizing narcotic use and a new national addiction-treatment system.
- Making the U.S. participation in world trade with other nations conditional upon those other nations’ worker’s pay, conditions and rights to organize, citizens’ rights and practices concerning the environment; no trade with dictatorships like China that use slave labor and shoot down, jail and torture their dissenters.
- The halving of military spending; the closing of most U.S. bases abroad and the withdrawl of most U.S. troops; the criminalization of the export of all lethal weapons abroad by U.S. manufacturers coupled with a U.S. campaign in the U.N. to achieve the same freeze internationally; the mandated impeachment of any President who wages any war without a formal declaration of war by Congress.
- Participation by U.S. citizens in a U.N. volunteer international armed force to stop mass murders anywhere while they are happening; U.S. support for permitting any person anywhere to join the U.N. for a small fee and receive a card as a world citizen, with the fees dedicated to paying the costs of the volunteer armed force.
- The abolition of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons and dedicated international work toward that goal; punishment of their first use by any state by harshly turning that state into a world pariah.
What else might we do to broaden and advance our views, to back up each others’ endeavors and help in mutually beneficial activities and enterprises? Internet actions? Buying groups? Low-interest loans among ourselves? Periodic accountability sessions with public officials or corporate executives? Teaching citizen action in high schools? Becoming distributors for Nader’s “democratic toolkit”? Actions in civil disobedience? Mass demonstrations? - R.D.
