Ralph Nader - The Concord Principles: An Agenda for a New Democracy
El_Kabong
Posts: 4,141
http://www.nader.org/index.php?/archives/56-The-Concord-Principles-An-Agenda-for-a-New-Democracy.html
Control of our social institutions, our government, and our political system is presently in the hands of a self-serving, powerful few, known as an oligarchy, which too often has excluded citizens from the process.
Our political system has degenerated into a government of the power brokers, by the power brokers, and for the power brokers, and is far beyond the control or accountability of the citizens. It is an arrogant and distant caricature of Jeffersonian democracy.
Originally written in 1992, The Concord Principles sets forth ten arguments of how democracy has been abused, and the constructive tools that citizens can use to regain their rightful participation in their own destiny.
First: Democracy must empower and enable citizens to obtain timely and accurate information from their government, to affirmatively facilitate citizens in banding together in civic associations in pursuit of a just society, and to communicate their judgments through modern technology.
Second: The American people should have reasonable control over the public lands, public media airwaves, pension funds, and other societal assets which the public legally owns, as a commonwealth, rather than having these public assets controlled by a powerful few.
Third: We need modern mechanisms so that civic power for self-government and self-reliance can correct the often converging power imbalance of Big Business and Big Government that seriously weakens the rights of citizens and the democracy.
Fourth: Citizens should have measures to ensure that their voting powers are not diluted, over-run, or nullified. Such measures include easier voter registration, state-level binding initiatives and referendums, public financing of campaigns, and term limits for elected officials not to exceed 12 years.
Fifth: Citizens must have full legal standing to challenge in the courts the waste, fraud, and abuse of government spending and corporate abuses. Overly complex, mystifying jargon in our laws and procedures must be simplified and clarified so that the general public is not shut out from readily understanding and challenging them. Citizens should be accorded computerized access in libraries and in their homes to the full range of government information.
Sixth: Inserts in billing statements from monopolized utilities, financial and insurance companies should invite consumers to join consumer action watchdog groups. The public, which owns the tv/cable/radio media airwaves, which are leased for free to large commercial businesses, should have its own Audience Network to inform, alert, and mobilize democratic citizen debate and initiatives.
Seventh: Effective legal protections are needed for ethical whistleblowers who alert Americans to abuses or hazards to health and safety in the workplace, or contaminate the environment, or defraud citizens. Such conscientious workers need rights to ensure they will not be fired or demoted for speaking out within the corporations, the government, or in other bureaucracies.
Eighth: Working people need a reasonable measure of control over how their pension monies are invested, rather than it being controlled by banks and insurance companies.
Ninth: Shareholders, who are the owners of companies, should not have their assets wasted or worker morale victimized by executives who give themselves huge salaries, bonuses, greenmail, and golden parachutes, self-perpetuating boards of directors, and a stifling of the proxy voting system to block shareholder voting reforms. Workers, consumers and local communities should have representation on the Board of Directors of large multinational corporations.
Tenth: Our country's schoolchildren need to be taught democratic principles in their historiccontext and present relevance, with practical civics experiences in their communities todevelop their citizen skills and a desire to use them, and so they will be nurtured to serve as a major reservoir of future democracy. At the university levels, facilities should be available for self-funded student civic action associations with full time staff.
The Concord Principles outlines the tools for enabling a better informed and strengthened civic participation by citizens in their roles as voters, taxpayers, consumers, workers, shareholders, and students. All office holders, candidates, and activists should adhere to these principles in their campaigns and in whatever public offices they may hold so that citizens are in a position of knowledge, strength and wisdom.
Control of our social institutions, our government, and our political system is presently in the hands of a self-serving, powerful few, known as an oligarchy, which too often has excluded citizens from the process.
Our political system has degenerated into a government of the power brokers, by the power brokers, and for the power brokers, and is far beyond the control or accountability of the citizens. It is an arrogant and distant caricature of Jeffersonian democracy.
Originally written in 1992, The Concord Principles sets forth ten arguments of how democracy has been abused, and the constructive tools that citizens can use to regain their rightful participation in their own destiny.
First: Democracy must empower and enable citizens to obtain timely and accurate information from their government, to affirmatively facilitate citizens in banding together in civic associations in pursuit of a just society, and to communicate their judgments through modern technology.
Second: The American people should have reasonable control over the public lands, public media airwaves, pension funds, and other societal assets which the public legally owns, as a commonwealth, rather than having these public assets controlled by a powerful few.
Third: We need modern mechanisms so that civic power for self-government and self-reliance can correct the often converging power imbalance of Big Business and Big Government that seriously weakens the rights of citizens and the democracy.
Fourth: Citizens should have measures to ensure that their voting powers are not diluted, over-run, or nullified. Such measures include easier voter registration, state-level binding initiatives and referendums, public financing of campaigns, and term limits for elected officials not to exceed 12 years.
Fifth: Citizens must have full legal standing to challenge in the courts the waste, fraud, and abuse of government spending and corporate abuses. Overly complex, mystifying jargon in our laws and procedures must be simplified and clarified so that the general public is not shut out from readily understanding and challenging them. Citizens should be accorded computerized access in libraries and in their homes to the full range of government information.
Sixth: Inserts in billing statements from monopolized utilities, financial and insurance companies should invite consumers to join consumer action watchdog groups. The public, which owns the tv/cable/radio media airwaves, which are leased for free to large commercial businesses, should have its own Audience Network to inform, alert, and mobilize democratic citizen debate and initiatives.
Seventh: Effective legal protections are needed for ethical whistleblowers who alert Americans to abuses or hazards to health and safety in the workplace, or contaminate the environment, or defraud citizens. Such conscientious workers need rights to ensure they will not be fired or demoted for speaking out within the corporations, the government, or in other bureaucracies.
Eighth: Working people need a reasonable measure of control over how their pension monies are invested, rather than it being controlled by banks and insurance companies.
Ninth: Shareholders, who are the owners of companies, should not have their assets wasted or worker morale victimized by executives who give themselves huge salaries, bonuses, greenmail, and golden parachutes, self-perpetuating boards of directors, and a stifling of the proxy voting system to block shareholder voting reforms. Workers, consumers and local communities should have representation on the Board of Directors of large multinational corporations.
Tenth: Our country's schoolchildren need to be taught democratic principles in their historiccontext and present relevance, with practical civics experiences in their communities todevelop their citizen skills and a desire to use them, and so they will be nurtured to serve as a major reservoir of future democracy. At the university levels, facilities should be available for self-funded student civic action associations with full time staff.
The Concord Principles outlines the tools for enabling a better informed and strengthened civic participation by citizens in their roles as voters, taxpayers, consumers, workers, shareholders, and students. All office holders, candidates, and activists should adhere to these principles in their campaigns and in whatever public offices they may hold so that citizens are in a position of knowledge, strength and wisdom.
standin above the crowd
he had a voice that was strong and loud and
i swallowed his facade cos i'm so
eager to identify with
someone above the crowd
someone who seemed to feel the same
someone prepared to lead the way
he had a voice that was strong and loud and
i swallowed his facade cos i'm so
eager to identify with
someone above the crowd
someone who seemed to feel the same
someone prepared to lead the way
Post edited by Unknown User on
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Comments
We have a Constitutional Republic.
If I opened it now would you not understand?
an agenda for a NEW democracy
he had a voice that was strong and loud and
i swallowed his facade cos i'm so
eager to identify with
someone above the crowd
someone who seemed to feel the same
someone prepared to lead the way
Some well before 1992.
Public owned is not a new Idea and wasn't in 1992 when this was published.
Some of these ideas don't work when given public bureaucratic treatment.
Nader hates capitalism, but when the wheels fall off public owned entities, the public suffers. When the wheels fall off a corporate held entity, it usually doesn't destroy an entire nation or small state economy.
See the 1980's Soviet Union.
It's all great in theory until one of our states has a natural disaster or local economic crash.
Who can bail them out??? The Government??
not under these guidelines or better.... Nader's platform
under Nader's platform... California would be best to succeed from the union before the next great earthquake or Enron type fiasco.
how so?
he had a voice that was strong and loud and
i swallowed his facade cos i'm so
eager to identify with
someone above the crowd
someone who seemed to feel the same
someone prepared to lead the way
Well California is the closest we have to a state that could possibly be self-supporting.
So if Nader wants to Regulate corporate big business, and place resources such as electricity and natural gas into the public's hands ....While at the same time he would largely disable the military and rework the federal banking and interstate trade infrastructure. This all spells disaster for larger more self sufficient states.
California would be better off succeeding from the union and selling it's natural resources than taking loses under the public entity plans of Nader.
Then what happens if there's a natural disaster? We've cut our military which includes much of the same equipment used for rescue in natural disasters as well as wars.
If Federal funding has been replaced by public rather than corporate holdings, then not only the large power brokers stand to lose but so do the common folk.
Yeah this shit looks good on paper.... and who isn't against those big ugly corporations.... but for as much greed and corruption that exists there's also a tremendous upside to this capitalist system.... you start taking links from the chain and we can't pull our shit outta the mud anymore.
It was funny, the people in that state had free electricity but their money wasn't any good. They couldn't trade the electricity and when the fear started to hit it grew exponentially until everyone was rationing goods and then the crime grew out of control.
This is why the Soviet Union fell apart...that and a long long war with Afghanistan.
Everything was state owned in that economy and everything went to shit in a matter of days.
you're absolutely right.
why hasn't there been a single country to come out of debt after opening up to the paradise of the 'free market' forced upon them by the world bank or wto?
the problem is some things shouldn't have profit involved when it's to the benefit of the public. like education and health care, you should want to help ppl b/c it's the right thing to do, not based on what or how much you can get out of them. jesus said to teach a man to fish, he didn't say charge him for the lesson, then charge him for a fishing license
he had a voice that was strong and loud and
i swallowed his facade cos i'm so
eager to identify with
someone above the crowd
someone who seemed to feel the same
someone prepared to lead the way
Because the term "debt" does not have the same meaning as it had 25 years ago.
Debt is transitional now and can only be measured accurately when the assets of trade stop. Since the assets never slow down in the trade process everyone appears in debt...when actually it's a Peter and Paul type scenario...
The GNP of the world has shifted from a production based to a credit based economy. The way of assessing debts in the modern world is no longer goods being followed by dollars or euros or whatever....
Spin machines use the word "debt" now to convey their propaganda.
That's a load of shit. Debt can't expand forever without losing value. It's really not a hard concept.
This video really opened my eyes about debt and our monetary system. It's quite long but very educational
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVkFb26u9g8
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
-Oscar Wilde
Think about it like this.....
every man woman and child on the planet can technically be in debt at the same time. It doesn't mean anything.
You owe me $20 I owe Jim $20 Jim owes you $20...then we're all in debt.
You're adding time-value to debt which essentially is the business of credit. Only uncollectible debt loses value.
You're right it's not a hard concept. But it's always easy to say everyone is in debt.
Right now the world still says "your credit's good ,,...no worries..."
That would explain the lazy eye.
That is just low. He has a condition.
Oh wells...
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
-Oscar Wilde