Thank you very much. I appreciate it. One always expects a great response here in Madison, Wisconsin, but this goes beyond expectations. Thank you very much. Well, we look on Madison from the East Coast as the home of the Progressive Magazine, still staying with us all these years. The home of Ed Garvey who stays the course, doesn't he? And I couldn't be prefaced by two better people, Phil Donahue and Michael Moore. I mean, you know you don't have to worry about weather vanes when it comes to those two people. They've been at it for years and I know Phil has opened up of more issues before millions of people for thirty years that were all taboo. You just name them. Before he started womens; rights were hardly ever discussed.
Before he started, gay and lesbian rights were almost never discussed. He had the first program on AIDS. He had the first program on bailout of the S&L. He came to Flint and did two shows at a time when all these factories were being downgraded. I found my voice on his show again and again and again when other shows were afraid to have guests on who dared to criticize big business. There's just no end to the areas that he broke ground in. Civil liberties, civil rights, the rights of workers to form unions, and there's no Phil Donahue anymore on TV. Instead, as epitomizing the decline of matters of importance in our society we have, let's see, who do we have? Jerry Springer, Sally Jesse Raphael, and Dr. Laura, and Howard Stern. Yeah, that sadistic, masochistic person who beats up on women and gets away with it compliments of the profit of CBS. CBS making all that money.
The other thing that's important to keep in mind here is just look at the arithmetic. There about 200,000 people in Madison, two thousand people here at least, if you pull out in the next seven weeks, by talking it up, the whole new progressive wave, that we can sweep across the country, reminiscent of over 100 years ago when those farmers came out of East Texas, dirt poor, in 1887, and said, and with only their minds and their hearts and their feet, that they weren't ever going to allow the big banks and the big railroads to crush their livelihood and the livelihood of their families, and they roared out of East Texas and in the next 25 years gave us the greatest political reform movement in the history of our nation, and it's time to do it again.
This is after all the home of Senator Bob Lafollette, Fighting Bob, and we know we all carry the torches of those who came before us, were motivated by those who came before us who were so heroic in the striving for justice, and he was one of my boyhood heroes. He was one of my boyhood heroes because I read the courageous statements he made in the Senate and all over the country. He was one of the few senators who went out and mobilized public opinion behind important legislation in Congress instead of just sat behind the beltway. And he did that as a person who inherited himself the early efforts of those farmers who built a populous progressive movement. And you have a very worthy and rare senator here in Wisconsin fighting to get dirty money out of politics, Senator Russ Feingold. Imagine Al Gore, Al Gore picking for his vice president the consummate corporate democrat, that hybrid Republocrat, that democrat who couldn't abide by a week passing in the senate without trying to immunize corporations from harm done to innocent people in courts of law. And he picks Joe Lieberman as his vice presidential candidate and not Russ Feingold. What does that tell you? It tells you that Joe Lieberman is the real Al Gore. That's what it tells you.
You know we look around and we see so many solutions in our country. You pick a major problem, a systemic injustice, somewhere in the country there's a pilot project that puts the lie to anyone who says that we don't have the capability and the answers to diminish these problems and injustices. A lot of poverty. We don't know how to abolish poverty? Gee, I wonder how some Western European countries did it back in the 1950s and '60s right out of war torn Europe? Because they had a social safety net, they basically said, we have enough wealth in our society that no child is going to go hungry, no people are going to go homeless, no people are going to go without health insurance coverage, no people are going to work without one month paid vacation, no people are going to work without full paid maternity leave and sick leave. And here in this country, thirty, forty years later, 2000 A.D., booming macro economy, the most powerful, richest country in the world, we have 20 percent child poverty, 25 percent in California, 33 percent in District of Columbia.
We have a majority of the workers who are making less today working 160 hours longer a year than they did in 1979, notwithstanding regular macroeconomic growth. We have 47 million people in this country working every day not for a living wage. They're working in Wal-Marts, McDonald's, Burger King, K Mart and other places for five and a quarter an hour, six, seven, eight dollars an hour, nine dollars an hour, before you even deduct the cost of getting to work. It's not a living wage. Imagine, one out of every three workers, now their counterpart in Western Europe, the bottom one third of the labor force in Western Europe makes 44 percent more wages plus paid maternity leave, sick leave, full paid four weeks vacation, nice public transit so you don't have to buy another car and another insurance policy. They can get to work. There are people in our country who can't get to work because there's no public transit in the center city to the suburbs where the jobs are, and they can't afford a car.
Is anybody going to look us in the eye, out of this plutocracy and oligarchy that dominates this country in the interest of big business? Anybody going to look us in the eye and say that we cannot solve these problems? I mean, are we just going to get on our knees and walk through life on our knees? Are we going to sit around, around the table in some Madison, Wisconsin cafeteria or restaurant or bistro, and analyze the woes of the world, and engage in our brilliant diagnosis of all the injustice, and we've gone through appetizer, entrée, dessert, and then we wind it up with a frenetic rationalization of our own futility?
Let's get off this kick. You know there's such a thing as shame here. Shame that we allowed this to happen. Yeah, power is concentrated. Yeah, the top one percent of the richest people have net wealth equal to the bottom 95 percent. Yeah, Bill Gates' net worth is equal to the net worth of the bottom 120 million Americans, forty percent of the population, full of workers who work week after week, day after day, month after month, year after year, and are essentially broke. They are essentially working pay check to pay check, going into deeper and deeper debt, which now totals 6.2 trillion dollars in this country, consumer debt. And if you're really poor you don't go from paycheck to paycheck, you go from pay day loan to pay day loan at 100, 200, 300 percent interest because the politicians, Democrat and Republican, don't want to put the prosecutors in the corporate suites. They don't want to enforce the law against this kind of gauging. 46 million people without health insurance coverage, including millions of children. That's 10 million more than the number of Americans who didn't have health insurance coverage when Clinton Gore came into office. So when Gore says he's going to go for universal health insurance step by step, does he mean backwards or forwards?
I just don't believe them anymore. I just don't believe their phony rhetoric. I don't believe their frenetic desire to get us for one day every four years, and then forget about us in between and cater to the corporations. It's all about money in Washington. You want an appointment with your senator or representative, how much did you give? Oh, you didn't give much, you get a legislative assistant. Oh you didn't give much at all? You get an administrative assistant. You didn't give anything? How about a college intern. Access now is money. When I came to Washington, there were 400 political action committees. There are now 9000 political action committees, and most of them are corporate. You've got every one of them with a signal. I give to you, you do for me. Whether it's the auto dealers or the petro chemical, or the insurance or the finance or the bank pacs, they all have a quid pro quo. It's called cash register politics. You know what happens when a political system is so embedded in the corporate power structure that it can take common law criminal behavior and legalize it? They can legalize extortion, politicians shaking down fat cats the way they did in Philadelphia and L.A. at the Republican and Democratic National Conventions. And the fat cats bribe the politicians for present and future favors. Now that's legalized extortion coming in and legalized bribery going out, and it's okay because they write the rules. Let me tell you, if we have any self-respect as citizens in the country, we've got to mount a progressive political movement where the people write the rules, not corporations.
About two hundred years ago when the modern corporation took its form in Massachusetts, the old textile mills, they were chartered by the state legislature into existence. Corporations as you know, come into existence when state governments charter them. The charter is supposed to be like a rule book, like a constitution of the corporation. Well in those days they were really worried about these artificial entities, these artificial fictions called corporations. Daniel Webster once said a corporation has no soul. They were worried about corporations getting all the rights we have under the constitution, and all the privileges and immunities that we can never have because we're real people, we're not artificial people.
We're not corporations that can be in a hundred places at once in the world, that can create their own parents called holding companies, that can diffuse and obscure responsibility for damaging deeds done, vertically and horizontally in these corporate bureaucracies, that can go into chapter 11 bankruptcy and pay their executives top dollar and then get rid of their creditors or their claimants who have been wrongfully injured, that can travel to Washington and deduct their air fair and hotel as ordinary and necessary business expenses to lobby their members of congress, whereas you as a citizen, flying to Washington as a citizen to do that, you can't deduct these expenses as ordinary and necessary business deductions.
Corporations have patents on life forms they are now moving not only to change the nature of nature through genetic engineering, they're moving to convert the nature of nature into their 20 year monopoly patents called intellectual property. You know how fundamental, how radical that is? One hundred and fifty years ago businesses had slaves, human beings as slaves. Let's never forget that. The dominant business community in the South in particular, for almost three hundred years had human beings as slaves, as property, and now corporations are moving, not to own us as slaves, but to own our genes. To own our genes, to put a price on our genes, in the massive sweep across the nation of commercialism where everything is expected to be for sale, isn't it? Our government is for sale, our democracy is for sale, our human genes are for sale, our personal privacy is for sale, our universities are for sale, including the University of Wisconsin, which is being corporatized from A to Z.
Our workplace is for sale. Everything. Our childhood is for sale. These children are being delivered to these corporate hucksters who have no interest in them other than to make a buck, no matter what they transfer into their minds, and into their bodies, and there seems to be no rebuttal because our public airwaves are for sale and the price is zero. We own the public airwaves, we're the landlords, the radio and TV stations are the tenants. They've paid us no money for the last seventy years for use of this extremely lucrative asset, the public airwaves. They're the tenants without any rent, and they proceed to decide who says what, 24 hours a day, and who doesn't say what 24 hours a day. The Green party stands for the principle that whatever the commonwealth of America is, whatever is owned now legally by all the people in this country, the public lands, one third of America, the public airwaves, five trillion dollars of worker pension funds, that all of these commonwealth assets must not be controlled by corporations. They must be controlled by the people who own them. We own them, we control them.
After all, no democracy worthy of its salt can rely so heavily on a commercial media. We have to have we have to have our own media, a media that is accountable to us, not accountable to corporate donors and right wing members of congress deciding how much money to give to public television or public radio, turning those two institutions into frightened institutions, afraid to even be so bold as to have programs on corporate power that Sixty Minutes does. We are own media, accountable to us, not to the advertisers or to the corporate executives in New York and Los Angeles. We need a progressive political movement represented by the Green Party platform and its candidates, that will take on the massive extremism of our day. And the massive extremism of our day is as follows. It is massive and brutal extremism for corporations to poison, contaminate and devastate the very environment within which all life has a right to thrive.
That's extremism. That is the silent, cumulative form of violence, environmental violence, that we too charitably call pollution. It is extremism to expose two hundred thousand minority kids in our cities to the deadly effects of lead based paint peeling off tenement walls, when the lead industry knew 80 years ago how devastating to the brain and the body was lead contamination, and when they knew they didn't have to put lead in paint, they didn't have to put lead in gasoline, they didn't have to poison half the world with that deadly contaminant, except to make a profit. That is extremism of the worst kind. That is unaccountable violence coming in silent ways that aren't even detectable by our human senses, which it makes it even more insidious and more savage.
It is extremism for corporations to hijack our democracy, buy and rent our politicians, corrupt our government, turn it against its own people, or at least make it indifferent, while these corporations funnel hundreds of billions of our tax dollars into their corporate welfare coffers as handouts, bailouts, giveaways, subsidies and guarantees. That is real extremism when you contaminate a democracy with money and take away our votes.
It is extremism for peoples' hard earned monies, ripe for expenditure in the market place, being defrauded, deceived, price-fixed, stolen in effect, by massive systemic consumer fraud. That is really extreme. That is destroying the essence of the free market place with corrupt deception and fraudulent activity. The kind that goes after especially poor people in the ghettos with these incredibly cruel rent to own rackets, pay day loans, discriminatory health care, discriminatory municipal services, which like to service the well to do rather than the poor in city after city. The Green party movement is a party of basic American values of decency, fair place, opportunity and justice hurled against these giant corporate extremists.
There's a lot of talk these days about agriculture and farm country. Just imagine what's happening. Booming economy, farmers going bankrupt. Booming economy, farmers getting thirty to forty percent less than they did in 1996 for their wheat, their soy bean, their corn. Abandoned villages and towns, the doors creaky, schools closing up, rural America disappearing as we knew it once. That is not just for rural people to worry about. That is for all of us to worry about. A society as heavily urbanized and suburbanized desperately needs a rural dimension to it.
The greatest political reforms have come out of rural America, the populous progressive movement. Some of the greatest homegrown culture, arts and music, have come out of rural America. A far greater proportion of the dynamic human energy that went into our cities and suburbs to lead the way have come out of rural America. Is there something about a reasonable amount of solitude? Is there something about a communion with nature?
Is there something about real reality instead of the virtual reality that's taking over so much of our daily lives? Well, here's what the Republicans and Democrats have done for rural America. Number one, they passed the so-called Freedom to Farm bill in 1996 which has devastated rural America and furthered the concentration of giant agri business like IVP, Cargill Continental Grain, Smith Field, ADM, Purdue, Tyson, you name it. They are crushing the price structure, and they're not passing it onto us in the supermarkets, it's going up vertically to enrich the guys at the top. The Republicans whipped this bill through with no public hearings in 1996, and Bill Clinton signed it just as quickly. And at the recent farm aid gathering with Willie Nelson in Virginia, which is the main major gathering of farm activists every year in the United States, neither George W. Bush nor Al Gore could spend the time to go there. I don't know what they were doing. One was going to Las Vegas on a campaign, I don't know what the other was doing.
I do know they have time for David Letterman. They have time for other shows like that, but they don't have time, just once, for the biggest conclave of family farm activists. We need to break up these giant agribusiness companies under the anti-trust laws. We need to have the U.S. department of agriculture set aside its obsession with pushing chemicalized, highly concentrated industrial agriculture, and push for life sustaining organic agriculture.
We need the Clinton Gore administration to stop being so cowardly. Presiding over a country that allows the importation of industrial hemp, but doesn't allow any farmers to grow industrial hemp in this country. Industrial hemp is the most versatile, domesticated plant in the history of the world. It's absolutely stunning. Textiles, paper, lubricants, fuel, food, medicine, cosmetics, thousands of uses going back five thousand years, but since the Marijuana Act of 1937 it has been placed on the DEA proscribed list, as a proscribed substance.
Now I, I was campaigning in Hawaii recently, I went to the only DEA permitted plot to grow industrial hemp, and it was about five times the size of this stage, surrounded by barbed wire and lights. We were let in after showing our security passes by a very wry biochemist who was in charge. And he took us over to the dreaded green plants that were growing, the plants that don't need herbicides, don't need pesticides, need very little water, that can amplify farm income in a period of distress, that can reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, especially imported oil, reduce the number of trees that have to be cut down because it produces a better brand of paper without chlorine. And so I asked the scientist, "What do you do most of the time?" He said, "Well I take care of the plants." I said, "There's just a few square yards." He said, "Well, I've got to fill out of a lot of forms." "For example," he said, "yesterday some birds flew over the fence and sampled some hemp seeds," and I asked him, "Well when they flew back did they wobble?" He said "No, they went on their way, but I had to fill out a report."
Well let me tell you, General McCaffrey and Bill Clinton should be ashamed of themselves fifty times over. They have no fortitude, no guts whatsoever, to stand up for a plant grown by George Washington, by Benjamin Franklin, by Thomas Jefferson. And let me say, Clinton's General McCaffrey, who has presided over the failed, destructive war on drugs year after year, Clinton's General McCaffrey says, "Industrial hemp is a stocking horse for marijuana." Well we have news for him, at one third of one percent THC, even General McCaffrey and Bill Clinton couldn't get high on industrial hemp.
Notice all these things I've been mentioning this evening, they've all been documented by the main media. You can refer to reports in major newspapers, page one exposés of corporations' abuses, crimes, fraud, deceptions. Sixty Minutes, 20/20, they keep reporting on it, nothing happens because we have an underdeveloped democracy and an overdeveloped plutocracy. Now let me tell you, it's gotten so bad, it's gotten so bad that, first of all the Republican party is beyond the pale, I mean it doesn't take much time here to describe it, although it is interesting that the Democratic party lost our congress to the most cruel, extreme wing of the opposing party, that really took some doing, and they lost it in '96 and they kept losing it in '98, for which I hold them responsible for Trent Lott, Newt Gingrich, and Tom Delay, etc. They're not going to get away that easy.
Now here's last week's Business Week Magazine. Now this is an established magazine. For those of you who haven't read it, it's like as a mainstream as you can get. It's got all these corporate ads, page after page. Here's the cover, Too Much Corporate Power? The answer in page after page of documentation is yes. Not only that, but in the editorial at the end they say "Corporations should get out of politics." It's the exact words, get out of politics. Now, this magazine is to the left of the Democratic party. Is the Democratic party making corporate power the cover story of the 2000 Presidential campaign? Of course not. Indentured, two parties morphing into one corporate party with two heads wearing different makeup, sipping Pepsi here, and Coke there. Indentured to the same business interests, competing for the same business money, asking for the same business consultants. The circle around Al Gore is made up of a rogue's gallery of corporate lobbyists. Peter Knight, drug industry. Curt Eskew, tobacco industry. How come they attract themselves to Al Gore? Because he's of them. For 8 years he's been their servant. Al Gore doesn't think corporations should be our servants. Al Gore has behaved along with Bill Clinton as if these corporations must be our masters. It's time for a change.
Look at the mess they made out of the so-called criminal justice system, the criminal justice system is the criminal injustice system. First of all, when you look at all the crime data, the 10 most wanted, the 10 worst crimes, they're all street crimes, they're not corporate crimes. There's no data for corporate crimes, although piecing together the evidence leads one to conclude that in terms of deaths, injuries, disease and property threat, corporate crime, fraud and abuse, towers over street crime, bad as the latter is. We hear, and rightly so, about the 19,000 homicides last year, but we don't hear about the 100,000 people who lose their lives due to exposure to toxics, particulates and trauma in the work place. In the work place. We don't hear about that. Those are silent deaths. They just drift away.
There's no evening news that starts out "7 people were killed yesterday in a major refinery accident," or "20 people died in a West Virginia due to black lung disease exposed to coal dust." You don't hear those. These are very silent, expendable. So too are the 80,000 Americans who die every year from gross malpractice and negligence in hospitals according to the Havard School of public health, physicians with no ax to grind. They don't get much hoopla over those tragedies in terms of what can be done to prevent it. They don't get on the nightly news. And how about the 400,000 Americans who died last year from tobacco-related disease. Is it really entirely their fault when the tobacco drug dealers systematically for decades pursued a strategy of hooking eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen year olds, knowing that the earlier they're hooked the more they're going to be hooked for life and one out of three will die as a result? These are the ultimate child molesters. The lead industry, the asbestos industry, the drug industry, who lied, delayed and covered up and bought their way out of disclosure for decades before they were finally exposed and partially brought to justice.
The criminal justice system. Both George Bush and Al Gore are straight out for the death penalty. Why they think that that really deters. There is no study that shows deterrence. There are dozens of studies that show if you are poor, and a poor person of color with an incompetent lawyer you're going to have a far higher probability of being executed than people who have good lawyers, who have engaged in first degree murder, and who got off with a short jail term, if indeed they ever got caught. There's only one party against the death penalty, and that's the Green Party, in this country. We're the only Western country in the world with the death penalty.
We have the highest homicide rate by far in the world, per capita. We also, for those of you who are worried about the economy, it takes more money to pursue a capital punishment case than to incarcerate a person for life without parole. We have to also see the status of our courts and our jails. There should never be in this country, under the U.S. Constitution, any corporate owned or run jails or prisons. This is a governmental function. It's not a function by a corporation who wants more customers, that puts more prisoners in solitary confinement by far than government jails because it extends their sentence, that opposes the decriminalization of non-violent drug offenses because they want more customers in jail.
Imagine as we sit here, there are people in Texas with real names who were caught for possession and use of marijuana. Little amounts of marijuana. They were sent for 5 years, 10 years, however long in jail, and they're still in jail. And here you have a candidate for President of the United States, George W. Bush, who's admitted that when he was "young and irresponsible" he broke the drug laws. Now you tell me, why does George W. Bush deserve to be president of the United States while these people deserve to rot in jail?
We should have a society where people don't harm themselves by the use of drugs, where they don't feel hopeless enough to be chronic users, so hopeless and bereft, with no purpose, no one cares with them. But, you don't treat drug addicts as criminals. We don't send alcoholics to jail. We don't send nicotine addicts to jail. They receive health treatment. Rehabilitation. The money should be used for prevenion, for rehabilitation, for community policing where police live and work in a community and where they can become much more effective and responsible, and restrained. And instead where are the billions of dollars going? It's what the Republican governor of New Mexico said to me again in Albuquerque. A few days ago we had a joint press conference on the topic. It's going to military hardware. It's going to helicopters in Colombia. It's going to militarize and criminalize a situation that only makes it worse.
Not better, worse. Now again, all these issues I've raised, there isn't any difference in reality between Republicans and Democrats. There's no difference on WTO, GATT and NAFTA. They both want more. Gore's surrender of local, state and national sovereignty to the international governments of giant corporations in Geneva, Switzerland, where they have secret courts and secret arbitration committees where the press can't even enter and observe proceedings, completely contrary to our democratic processes and circumventing them. They want more.
The debate isn't about initiaiting withdrawal from WTO and NAFTA, which is provided for in the trade agreements, in order to renegotiate trade agreements in order to lift all standards up instead of pull all standards down. That's what the Green party wants. We want to renegotiate that. That's a big difference between the Green party and the Democratic and Republican party.
Furthermore, even where they are different, let's examine them. It's the Supreme Court. It's the Supreme Court. That's enough to vote for Al Gore. Let's look at that. You ask the Democrats who are the worst justices? "Bingo," they'll say, "Scalia and Thomas." Oh, and who nominated them? A Republican president. Well now, what was the vote in the Senate on Scalia? It was 98 to nothing, and the two missing ones were Republicans. Now what about Clarence Thomas. He came up in front of the Anita Hill hearings, where he didn't really come out too well, and the Democrats had the majority in the Senate, they ran the senate, George Mitchell was the majority leader. I was there right up to the last minute before the vote, and I saw him just sitting in his office not twisting arms like he could have, and the vote was 52 to 48 in favor of Clarence Thomas, and it was 11 Democrats who won it for him. And what about those fairly good Supreme Court justices who also were nominated and got through the Senate years ago? Warren, Brennan, Black, Stevens and Souter? So if the Democrats say to you, "It's the Supreme Court." You can say, "Sorry, you don't have much credibility. 98 to nothing and 11 votes giving Clarence Thomas a 45 year life on the Supreme Court."
Anyway the Republican Senate, who we lost the Senate to, the Republican would veto anything a Gore presidency would send up. And you can imagine what we'd get through. Steve Breyer is no martyr. He's the worst anti-regulatory justice of the Supreme Court in memory, and we're going to feel the brunt of his Chicago School of Economics doctrine in the coming years.
Now let me just talk about non-voters. Most people don't like to admit they're non-voters. You know the newest phrase, non-voting is a vote for Bush and Gore. How many people here are non-voters? Can you raise your hand? How many students haven't had a chance to vote Well, 51% of people are non-voters. The majority. 51% didn't vote in the presidential elections in 1996. By far the lowest turnout, again, of any Western country. Now here's the way to get people more interested in voting. The first way is to give them bigger choice. Who wants to go and say, "Well, this is the drab and this is the dreary, and they're pretty much on the same page on one issue of structural power after another" Who wants to vote?
Phil Donahue had a show in New Hampshire four years ago. Half the people were non-voters, admitted they were non-voters And the non-voters had some interesting reasons why they didn't vote. One person said they didn't want to participate in a charade. Another one said he didn't like the candidates that kept being served up to him. Another said, even if they voted it wouldn't mean anything. They will decide whatever they want to decide. So let's run through a quick list here. Same day voter registration. Only six states have it. All states should have it. Ask Jesse Ventura. He says himself that's how he won in the last week. Number two, instant run off voting. That means you can't win an election without winning a majority, not a plurality. Ad if you don't have a plurality you have to go to the second round. So we all vote for one, two and third choices if there are three, and then that gives our campaigns more and more meaning and it gives minority candidates more effect over the eventual winner.
Open the debates. What is this with the debates? What's going on here? Imagine a company that starts up in our country and the only way to compete for customers, the only way they can reach their customers is to go through an iron gate controlled by the two major competitors. That's the way it is. It's a private corporation and you can't sue it because it's a private corporation owned and controlled by the two parties who are the co-chairs, funded by tobacco and all the other money, Anheuser Bush and all the others.
Now, we could easily deal with this if we had a strong democracy we'd have dozens of debates. We'd have our own media where the major candidates and significant third party candidates couldn't say no. We would have, the labor unions could get together and say we want a debate on labor issues.
Unfortunately most of the labor unions, international unions have endorsed Gore on the basis of the least worst. You should hear them in private. You should hear talk about Gore in private. But they fear Bush more, so they go to Gore. But locals are starting to break lose and endorse us. The most democratic union nationwide, the United Electrical Workers has endorsed this candidacy. The California Nurses union, one of the most progressive unions in the country, has endorsed this candidacy. It's breaking loose my friends, it's breaking loose.
By the way, if the presidential debates can allow George Bush on, and you know George Bush's campaign might be unconstitutional. I'm researching it. Because George Bush is really only a big corporation running for president disguised as a human being. That's unconstitutional. Here's another way to get non-voters. You ask them. We don't like the choices. Well, what do you want to do? That's the only thing we can do, stay home. We don't have any choices. Well, how about this one, why shouldn't every ballot line have the candidates and next to it something called binding none of the above. All of those rejectionist voters who can only stay home because in America you cannot go down to the polls and vote no, you can only vote yes.
See? Something we don't exactly grow up analyzing in eight grade civics. And we need practical civics and civic training and citizen skills training and connecting to classrooms and communities, that's educational reform. People go down to the polls, they don't like the candidates, they vote none of the above. At the end of the day, election day, none of the above amasses more votes than any of the other candidates, it will cancel the elections, send the candidates packing, order new elections and new candidates. Another is end legalized bribery. The public schools and public parks are publicly financed, for sure public elections must be publicly financed. There are business lobbies that dump a million dollars in Congress and they get five million dollar tax cut. Or they dump a million dollars in Congress and they get an exemption from certain law enforcement. Or they bump a million dollars in Congress, and they get billions dollars of subsidies, handouts, giveaways. A lot of the high priced drugs that you're paying for were developed by tax payers at the National Institute for Health in Washington, given away like taxol, AZT, to Brisco Meyers, under monopoly marketing agreements that let them charge whatever they can get away with, and they didn't spend a cent researching, testing these drugs. Not a cent.
How long are we going to stay and do nothing about this? By the way, is your indignation level going up? Well how about this? How would you like to be this woman who wrote us a number of months ago with serious ovarian cancer, lost her $19,000 a year job, lost her health insurance, she goes to her doctor who bravely says to her, "Only with taxol will you have any chance to live." She says, "How much doctor?" He says, "14,000 for 6 shots." Brisco Meyers is grossing over a billion dollars from that drug that was completely developed from tax payer money.
(break in tape)...acquaintances, neighbors, replacing small talk with exciting, pulsating, progressive, political talk on the future of our country. If each of you bring in 25 votes, we carry Madison, Wisconsin. A few weeks ago in a coliseum in Oregon we had to turn away many people, I don't know if Michael told you about this, but if each one of those brought in 40 votes each, everyone has their circle, you know, before I'm going to have credibility. Everybody has their circle. Small talk, word of mouth, it's a wonderful medium. Incredible, fast. If they each brought in 40 votes we carry the state of Oregon. We have to make history hear. Never mind these polls, never mind these trick questions that marginalize third party candidates in order to have them turn out low in the polls. We know what the Gallup poll, the techniques here. Let's make history by working for it. By working for it.
Now, 2040 years ago, Cicero, Marcus Cicero, a great Roman orator and lawyer, defined freedom for the ages. I've never heard a better definition. He said, "Freedom is participation in power." And participation in power for the advancement of the great work of human beings on earth, justice. And those of us who know must act because as the ancient Chinese proverb once put it, to know and not to act, is not to know.
It all comes down in every social justice movement, to the individuals who accept that they are going to pick up the oars. That they're going to do their part, and others do their part, and it becomes élan, and it becomes contagious, and it becomes an esprit de corps, and just like the rocks and the brooks and the streams that lead to the Mississippi River, a great river flows through the land. If you're not excited by this, you're not going to do it. If you don't think it's important, you're not going to do it. If you're otherwise predisposed, with all your time taken up, you're not going to do it. You've got to have time for citizen duties, time for politics. Time for seven weeks to get out the vote and debate and argue with people who disagree with you.
When they tell you they don't want to waste their vote, you say, "Really, why do you want to waste your vote on two corrupt parties that have been wasting our democracy?" Ask them. Ask them, do they want their members of congress to vote their principles? They'll say yes, and you can ask them, "What about you?" Ask them whether they're satisfied with the two parties' behavior and whether they're going to go for least/worst. Ask them if their mistake were either Bush or Gore running away with it, they don't have to worry about that. They can work for a Green party watchdog after election, where the Green party, with millions of votes to its credit in November, and we're going out for all the votes, we're not discounting any vote, is going to say to those to those two party remnants, those fossil parties, "You either shape up, or you're going to continue to shrink down in one election after another." Ask them to invest their vote in a burgeoning political movement that they can be part of, that they can run for office with, that they can help organize, that they can give their ideas to.
A party of, by and for the people is a party that's more likely to build a government of, by and for the people. And our campaign has not been a campaign looking for photo opportunities. It has gone all over the country. Here in Madison marching on the picket lines for a living wage for the employees of the University of Wisconsin, subcontracted, you know, the usual deal, with another company. We have been campaigning with citizen groups around the country in one social justice, one structural reform effort after another. And if you have been handed this green page here called Wisconsinites for Nader/LaDuke, please try to fill that out so you can stay in touch with us and we can stay in touch with you. And log into our website and become one of the stalwart, pioneer builders of the long overdue clean, progressive, civically rooted political movement. Thank you.