Quotations

from the book

The Ralph Nader Reader

p36
Voter tools include a binding none-of-the-above option on the ballot, which would trigger a new election if it received the largest number of votes; term limitations of twelve years; public financing of campaigns through well-publicized taxpayer checkoffs; easier voter registration and ballot access rules; binding initiative, referendum and recall authority in all fifty states and a non-binding national referendum procedure.

p37
A new audience television and radio network, whose studios would provide one hour of prime and drive-time programming on every licensed station, would be set up. It would be controlled by viewer and listener members in accordance with the principle that the airwaves, which we legally own together as Americans, should be more effectively controlled by and for the owners' direct benefit.

p41
The owners of the public lands, pension funds, savings accounts, and the public airwaves are the American people, who have essentially little or no control over their pooled assets or their commonwealth.

p43
Federal law says that the public owns the public airwaves which are now leased for free by the Federal Communications Commission to television and radio companies

p44
Presently the electronic broadcasting systems are overwhelmingly used for entertainment, advertising and redundant news, certainly not a fair reflection of what a serious society needs to communicate in a complex age.

p58
... the tax code subsidizes foreign investment by U.S. corporations, that the Export-Import Bank provides subsidies as loan guarantees for U.S. multinationals operating abroad and that a federal agency, called OPIC, insures these companies against political risks.

p65
The people legally own major national assets: $3 trillion in pension funds, more than $2 trillion in savings deposits, hundreds of billions more in insurance company equity, federal lands (one-third of America), large blocs of shares of companies on the stock exchanges, as well as the airwaves. Although the people own these assets, they do not control any of them. Corporations do. Presidents have ample backup power to preserve this split between ownership and control, but they and Congress have little backup power to make such ownership mean control.

p66
Societies rot from the top down.

p79
... we need a constitutional amendment that declares that corporations are not persons and that they are only entitled to statutory protections conferred by legislatures and through referendums. Only then will the Constitution become the exclusive preserve of those whom the Framers sought to protect: real people.

p91
Our history has demonstrated that the well-being of society springs from the growth of daily, active citizenship that provides an enabling environment for good leaders to come forth. Every significant social movement m this century has sprung from active citizens fighting for their cause - women's suffrage, workers' rights, civil rights, environmental and consumer protection, peace. Put in today's terms, citizens in our country need to spend more time being citizens.

p133
General counsel and vice-president of Ford Motor Company, William T. Gossett, 1957, about the modern business corporation:

"The modern stock corporation is a social and economic institution that touches every aspect of our lives; in many ways it is an institutionalized expression of our way of life. During the past 50 years, industry in corporate form has moved from the periphery to the very center of our social and economic existence. Indeed, it is not inaccurate to say that we live in a corporate society."

p133
Peter Drucker, 1996, fresh from a study of General Motors, about the modern business corporation:

"What we look for in analyzing American society is therefore the institution which sets the standard for the way of life and the mode of living of our citizens; which leads, molds, and directs; which determines our perspective on our own society; around which crystallize our social problems and to which we look for their solution ... And this ... in our society today is the large corporation."

p149
William Greider
"Leaving aside the financial and economic complexities, the savings and loan bailout is most disturbing as a story of politics-a grotesque case study of how representative democracy has been deformed."

p149
Representative Jim Leach, R-Iowa, then a House Banking Committee member and now the Committee chair, told the Los Angeles Times in I989, about the S&L scandal:

"At every turn, any effort to rein in the thrifts' powers and accountability has been shackled. If there ever has been a case for campaign finance reform, this is it."

p149
In I996, Congress quietly handed over to existing broadcasters the rights to broadcast digital television on the public airwaves-a conveyance worth $70 billion-in exchange for... nothing.

Although the public owns the airwaves, the broadcasters have never paid for the rights to use them. New digital technologies now make possible the broadcast of digital television programming (the equivalent of the switch from analog records to digitalized compact disks), and the broadcasters sought rights to new portions of the airwaves. In recent years, the Federal Communications Commission has, properly, begun to recognize the large monetary value of the licenses it conveys to use the public airwaves-including for cell phones, beepers and similar uses-and typically auctions licenses. The I996 Telecommunications Act, however, prohibited such an auction `) for distribution of digital television licenses, the most valuable of public airwave properties, and mandated that they be given to existing broadcasters.

p150
The 1872 Mining Act
This nearly I30-year-old relic of efforts to settle the West allows mining companies to claim federal lands for $5 an acre or less and then take gold, silver, lead or other hard-rock minerals with no royalty payments to the public treasury Thanks to the anachronistic I872 Mining Act, mining companies-including foreign companies-extract billions of dollars worth of minerals a year from federal lands, royalty free.

From I987 to I994, the mining companies gave $I7 million in campaign contributions to congressional candidates-a small price to pay to preserve their right to extract $26 billion worth of minerals, royalty free, during the same period. More recently, in the I997-I998 election cycle, the industry- led by the National Mining Association, Cyprus Amax Minerals, Drummond, Phelps Dodge and Peabody Coal rained more than $2 million in contributions on congressional candidates.

p155
We have 179 law schools and probably only fifteen of them offer a single course of seminar on corporate crime.

p156
We own the public airwaves and the Federal Communications Commission is our real estate agent. The radio and TV stations are the tenants who are given licenses to dominate their part of the spectrum 24 hours a day and for four hours a day ...

p156
You pay more for your auto license than the biggest TV station pays for its broadcast license.

p156
We have the greatest communications system in the world and we have the most demeaning subject matter and the most curtailed airing of public voices.

p157
The dismantling of democracy is perhaps now the most urgent aspect of the corporatization of our society.

p342
Our society has the resources and the skills to keep injustice at bay and to elevate the human condition to a state of enduring compassion and creative fulfillment. How we go about using the resources and skills has consequences which extend well beyond our national borders to all the earth's people.

p337
It is what citizens do between elections that decides whether elections are to be meaningful exercises of debate and decision or whether they are to remain expensive contests between tweedledees and tweedledums.

p337
... the blessings of liberty, will not come to pass until we cease viewing citizen involvement as just a privilege and begin defining our daily work to include citizenship toward public problems as an obligation.

p338
There seems to be less and less relationship between the country's total wealth and its willingness to solve the ills and injustices that beset it.

p343
Democratic systems are based on the principle that all power comes from the people.

p344
Too often, people who are properly outraged over injustice concentrate so much on decrying the abuses and demanding the desired reforms that they never build the instruments to accomplish their objectives in a lasting manner.

p352
"Our country ... when right, to be kept right. When wrong, to be put right."

p353
Citizenship has an obligation to cleanse patriotism of the misdeeds done in its name abroad.

p353
There is no reason why patriotism has to be so heavily associated, in the minds of the young as well as adults, with military exploits, jets and missiles. Citizenship must include the duty to advance our ideals actively into practice for a better community, country and world, if peace is to prevail over war.

p354
A patriotism manipulated by the government asks only for a servile nod from its subjects. A new patriotism requires a thinking assent from its citizens.

p404
The information age has produced much information. We are inundated with data and information, less so with knowledge, even less with judgment, and almost not at all with wisdom.

p429
The public owns the airwaves. We lease it 24 hours a day, 365 days a year to broadcasters who pay no rent.

p431
The current regulatory regime for radio thwarts the First Amendment rights and interests of most Americans. We speak little, if at all, on our own airwaves, while the wealthy may speak through radio by controlling who uses their stations and for what purposes.

p431
What good is freedom of speech if nobody can afford it? Is speech truly free if only the wealthy can buy it?

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