The Green Party of New Jersey Corporate Care Platform

From Ralph Nader:
The worsening concentration of global corporate power over our government has turned that government frequently against its own people, denying its people their sovereignty to shape their future. Again and again, the will of the people has been thwarted and the voice of the people to protest has been muted.

Over the past twenty years we have seen the unfortunate resurgence of big business influence, generating its unique brand of wreckage, propaganda and ultimatums on American labor, consumers, taxpayers and most generically, American voters. Big business has been colliding with American democracy and democracy has been losing. The results of this democracy gap are everywhere to be observed by those who suffer these results and by those who employ people’s yardsticks to measure the quality of the economy, not corporate yardsticks and their frameworks. What we must collectively understand about the prevalent inequalities is important because so many of these conditions have been normalized in our country.

...[T]his campaign must challenge the campaigns of the Bush and Gore duopoly in every locality by running with the people. When Americans go to work, wondering who will take care of their elderly parents or their children, irritated by the endless traffic jams, stifled by their lack of rights in the corporate workplace, ripped off by unscrupulous sellers and large companies, put on telephone hold for the longest times before you get an answer to a simple question–so much for this modern telecommunications age, beset by having to pay for health care you cannot afford or drug prices you shouldn’t have to suffer, aghast at how little time your frenzied life leaves you for children, family, friends and community, overcome by the sheer ugliness of commercial strips and sprawls and incessantly saturating advertisements, repelled by the voyeurism of the mass media and the commercialization of childhood, upset at the rejection of the wisdoms of our elders and forebears, anxious over the ways your tax dollars are being misused, feeling that there needs to be more to life than the desperate rat race to make ends meet, then think about becoming a part of a progressive movement of Greens, of this citizens’ campaign, to change the political economy so that healthy environments, healthy communities, and healthy people become its overwhelming reason for being.

In 1941, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis made a prescient observation when he wrote: "We can have a democratic society or we can have the concentration of great wealth in the hands of the few. We cannot have both." Today, that concentration of wealth and its political power has reached stunning intensities. In large companies, people who work in the same enterprise are now earning $1 for every $416 that the CEO takes away. In 1940, it was $1 for every $12.

Today the financial wealth of the top 1 percent of households exceeds the combined wealth of the bottom 95 percent of American households. Earlier this year Bill Gates’ wealth was equal to the combined wealth of the poorest 120 million Americans. Whatever this enormous imbalance says about the Great software imitator from Redmond, Washington, it means that about tens of millions of Americans, who work year after year, decade after decade, are nearly broke. What democracy worth its salt would have led to this profound inequity? Globally, the combined annual income of the world’s poorest 3.5 billion people equals the world’s two hundred richest people who more than doubled their net worth between 1996 and 1999.

The net would be much smaller were other forms of corporate welfare such as subsidies, erased corporate debts to Uncle Sam, giveaways and bailouts to be subtracted. Of course, small businesses don’t have such complex shelters to avoid taxes. When small businesses get into trouble, they are free to go bankrupt, unlike speculating, mismanaged or corrupt big businesses that can go to Washington for a complex bailout.

There is more to collectively understand. Corporatization is fast going global with autocratic support structures such as the World Trade Organization (WTO). The WTO undermines our legitimate local state and national sovereignties which enable America to lead the way in worker, consumer, environmental standards. Global corporations command the capital, technology, labor and many governments. How have they used this unprecedented supremacy to alleviate the world’s problems? The big drug companies avoid research into global infectious diseases, such as malaria and TB, that claim millions of lives a year and are heading to our shores in drug resistant form. Despite adverse publicity over their duplicitous behavior, the tobacco companies are straining to hook every possible youngster in the Third World with portents of massive cancer and other tobacco-related deaths yearly. The munitions makers are busy expanding their lethal export trade, using your tax dollars in the form of subsidies.

The food processing giants and the fast food chains are busy displacing indigenous foods with fat and sugar pumps a la McDonalds fast food. At the same time, the biotechnology companies drive to change the nature of nature without answering basic scientific or need questions. The banking giants and their IMF and World Bank cohorts are continuing their structural adjustment polices in Third World countries that cut public budgets, end critical consumer subsidies and replace real food acreage with cash crops for exports, while imposing environmentally damaging megaprojects that enrich the local oligarchy.

The timber companies, working directly or through local firms are rapidly destroying the rich biological diversity of the equatorial forests. The large energy companies want these countries to buy more nuclear and coal-burning plants, develop the same fossil fuel-nuclear alliances that undermine local renewable solar technologies and energy efficiencies. By cutting such deals and supporting dictatorial regimes and the domestic oligarchies, democratic developments that would help the people, for example, land reform, agrarian credit, cooperatives, trade union rights, and political reforms are stymied and destroyed. (Nomination Acceptance Speech, 6.25.00)

From Catherine Parrish (NJ Congressional District 1 Green candidate):
Corporate Crime:
Reform the corporate-owned mass-media culture, and encourage civic activism to promote the possibilities of our democracy

Enact and enforce tough corporate crime legislation

Increase corporate taxes and pollution taxes

(http://gpnj.org/catherineparrish/index.html)

From Robert ("Gabe") Gabrielsky (NJ Congressional District 2 Green candidate):

For his entire life, "Gabe" Gabrielsky has struggled against not only greedy corporations and their political lackeys, but also against bureaucratic and corrupt union bosses, the self-serving, self-appointed "leaders" of progressive social movements, and the narrow mindedness of the general public, as well as his own personal success, adopting the motto, in 1967, "The only way not to sell out is to make yourself unmarketable." He has tried to remain true to it ever since. (http://gpnj.org/Campaign 2000/Gabe flyer.html)

From Stu Chaifetz (NJ Congressional District 4 Green candidate):
Corporations are given the status as "persons", and the protection afforded by that designation, while real people slave away in corporate-run sweat shops and drink corporate water polluted by chemicals that seep into the ground. (http://www.hnva.net/chaifetzforcongress.html)

From Earl Gray (NJ Congressional District 6 Green candidate):
Earl Gray wants to replace the current Corporate Culture of Greed with a Culture of Justice which will restore our Democracy, put a human face on our economics, and, as our Constitution requires, "bind our nation more closely together... establish justice... and promote the general welfare."

Platform:
An Economic Program to replace the currently in-vogue Corporatism with Equitable Capitalism. Corporatism includes False Images of Prosperity in the face of extreme poverty, Rambo Globalization, Corporate Power, Corporate Welfare, Privatization of Public Functions, Commodification of Public Goods, Deceptive calls for Deregulation, Devolution, and Diminishment. Equitable Capitalism (Capitalism with a Human Face) addresses the following areas:

Dispel Economic Myths;
Eliminate Corporatism;
Regulate Corporate Social Accountability;
Create Economic Democracy;
Promote a more equitable distribution of wealth and income;
Enhance Labor Standards and Conditions;
Ensure Environmentally Sustainable Economic Activity;
Reform national and international Financial Institutions

(http://gpnj.org/Campaign 2000/Earl flyer.htm)

From Joe Fortunato (NJ Congressional District 8 Green candidate):
Opposes corporate welfare (http://gpnj.org/Campaign 2000/Joe Fortunato flyer.htm)

From Lewis Pell (NJ Congressional District 9 Green candidate):
Get government out of the hands of the corporate-America controlled "DemReps" that continue to promise so much and deliver so little. All political campaigns financed out of the tax base (i.e., major campaign reform). We need a return to government of the people, by the people, for the people. (http://gpnj.org/Campaign 2000/Lewis flyer.htm)

From Carl Mayer (NJ Congressional District 12 Green candidate):
Mayer is best known for his appearance on CBS's Sixty Minutes in 1996 when America's most respected television show featured Mayer in a segment exposing the corrupt political deals that cost New Jersey taxpayers, consumers, and workers so much. Using a hidden camera, the program demonstrated how a system controlled by corporate special interests results in higher taxes, suburban sprawl, polluted air and water and skyrocketing auto insurance rates.

From Claudette Meliere (NJ Congressional District 13 Green candidate):
Eliminate tax breaks for the wealthy. Ensure that businesses treat their workers fairly and pay adequate wages. Enforce strict environmental and safety codes. (http://www.claudettemeliere.org/issues.htm)

From the Green Party platform:

B. RE-ASSERTING LOCAL CITIZEN CONTROL OVER CORPORATIONS

Currently, corporations possess more rights and freedoms than natural human persons. Through a series of judicial rulings, and by virtue of their ability to control governments and economies by virtue of wealth, corporations have judicially rewritten our Constitution and have emerged as unaccountable, unelected governments. The Greens, therefore, support all reforms that seek to supplant governmental regulation of corporations with communities that seek to define corporations.

In the interim, Greens support measures that hold executives and officers of corporations directly liable for harm that results from their decisions. When we look at the HISTORY OF our states, we learn that citizens intentionally defined CORPORATIONS through charters - the certificates of incorporation. In exchange for the charter, a corporation was obligated to obey all laws, to serve the common good, and to cause no harm. Early state legislators wrote charter laws to limit corporate authority, and to ensure that when a corporation caused harm, they could revoke its charter. In the late 19th century, however, corporations claimed special protections under the Constitution.

Large companies used legal power to assert legal authority over what to make and how to make it, to move money, influence elections, bend governments to their will. They insisted that once formed, corporations may operate forever, with the privilege of limited liability and freedom from community or worker interference in business judgments. It is inappropriate for investment and production decisions that can shape our communities and lives to be made essentially from afar, in boardrooms, closed-door regulatory agencies, and prohibitively expensive courtrooms. It is unacceptable to have the level of influence now being exerted by corporate interests over the public interest.

We challenge the propriety and equity of "corporate welfare" in the form of tax breaks, subsidies, payments, grants, bailouts, giveaways, unenforced laws and regulations; and historic, continuing access to our vast public resources, including millions of acres of land, forests, mineral resources, intellectual property rights, and government-created research. We call for revisiting what one Supreme Court Justice called, when referring to the history of constitutional law, "the history of the impact of the modern corporation upon the American scene."

We believe that corporations are neither inevitable nor always appropriate. Judicial and legislative decisions that have made it possible for big business to stay beyond the reach of democracy need to be re-examined. Legal doctrines must be continually revised in recognition of the changing needs of an active, democratic citizenry. Huge multi-national corporations are artificial creations, not natural persons uniquely sheltered under constitutional protections.

It is time to support local government and state government attempts to DEFINE CORPORATIONS and to prevent these entities from exercising democratic rights which are uniquely possessed by the citizens of the United States. One point remains unequivocal: Because corporations have become the dominant economic institution of the planet, they must address and squarely face the social and environmental problems that afflict humankind.

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