To Protect the United States, Protect Democracy:

A Call for a Citizens Agenda Against Corporate Raids on the Treasury and an Outburst of Wartime Opportunism

On September 19, merely eight days after the bombing of the World Trade Center and Pentagon, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page presented a blueprint of how the Bush Administration could take advantage of the post September 11th environment. The Journal noted that President Bush had "an historic opportunity to assert his leadership, not just on security and foreign policy but across the board." "Now is the time," wrote the Journal editors, to push for next generation weaponry, big defense budgets, tax cuts, judicial nominees, drilling in Alaska, and more. And, as Bill Moyers said on October 16, "it didn’t take long for the war time opportunists – the mercenaries of Washington, the lobbyists, lawyers, and political fundraisers – to crawl out of their offices on K Street determined to grab what they can for their clients. While in New York we are still attending memorial services for firemen and policy, while everywhere Americans’ cheeks are still stained with tears, while the President calls for patriotism, prayers and piety, the predators of Washington are up to their old tricks in pursuit of private plunder at public expense. In the wake of this awful tragedy wrought by terrorists, they are cashing in."

The media has said little on the public airwaves to inform the citizenry about how members of Congress and their corporate contributors are heeding the Journal’s advice to enrich the corporate moguls while they ask working people to send their relatives to fight abroad, dig out from the wreckage in New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, and bear the brunt of recession at home. Since September 11th, members of Congress have served up a nonstop buffet of corporate pork legislation. Under the guise of "national security" our federal treasury is being raided and our democratic rights are being taken away while Congress feeds sympathetic campaign contributors at taxpayer expense, sends working people to fight, and leaves the unemployed, the disenfranchised, and American families to suffer.

The shameful profiteering and opportunism since September 11th includes:

1) A so-called "Economic Stimulus" Plan that benefits corporate treasuries and neglects workers
Instead of a plan to help the hundreds of thousands of workers displaced by the events of September 11th and the millions more at risk of losing their jobs, a piece of legislation even the Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill labeled "show business" – the so-called "economic stimulus" legislation – costing $212 billion over three years -- passed in the House of Representatives on October 24 and allows instead for:

*$70 billion in corporate tax cuts.
*$28 billion in individual tax cuts ($13.7 billion for families who did not qualify for the first round of rebates).
*$12 billion for state unemployment programs.
* The repeal of corporate alternative minimum tax and related refunds from 1986 forward, at a cost of $25.4 billion.
*A decrease in capital gains tax (1-5 year bracket) from 20% to 18%.
*An acceleration of the reduction of federal 27% income tax bracket to 25%. This will be 4 years ahead of schedule.

The Senate Republicans have now upped the ante, proposing a $220 billion package over the next three years.

According to Citizens for Tax Justice, the $25 billion in immediate tax rebates to large profitable corporations that paid the low-rate "alternative minimum tax" over the past decade and a half because loopholes cut their regular income tax bills to little or nothing include some $7.4 billion for just 16 tax-avoiding Fortune 500 companies—each of which would get more than $100 million in rebates. Topping the list is IBM, slated to get a $1.4 billion rebate check. Ford is next at $1 billion, followed by General Motors at $833 million, General Electric at $671 million, TXU (Texas Utilities) at $608 million, DaimlerChrysler at $600 million, and ChevronTexaco at $572 million.

In other words, profitable corporate tax escapees, including five in the energy business, along with the three largest U.S. automakers, and two companies in the airline industry (which is already receiving $15 billion in bailouts) are getting $25 billion plus in instant rebates – almost twice as much as the $13.7 billion in individual rebates that the tax committee decided to provide to 37 million people. According to the campaign for America’s Future, the bill "offends common decency." And, as the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities noted, while the meager aid to the unemployed and low and moderate income worker is temporary, the corporate tax cuts are permanent.

Common Cause says that, "Regular Americans are being told to go out and spend more to do their part to stimulate the economy…"Big campaign donors, though, are being told that ‘the check’s in the mail.’ …"It’s easy for proponents of some of these measures to dress them up as credible remedies to the economic downturn brought about by the terrorist attacks. But there’s nothing patriotic about profiteering in a time of national crisis." Common Cause points out that fourteen corporations alone get $6.3 billion of that rebate, while those same corporation gave nearly $15 million in huge soft money contributions in the last 10 years.

Another example: On October 26, the Pentagon awarded its most lucrative contract ever to Lockheed Martin at the taxpayer cost of $200 billion dollars. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, "Lockheed Martin and Boeing -- the only two companies who competed for the contract – spent hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars on advertising and other lobbying efforts in an attempt to sway federal officials in their favor." And the groundwork was laid even earlier. "During the 1999-2000 election cycle, Lockheed Martin contributed just over $2.7 million in soft money, PAC and individual contributions to federal candidates and parities. More than two-thirds of that money went to Republicans. On the other hand, Boeing gave $1.9 million to federal parties and candidates, split almost equally between Democrats and Republicans. That doesn’t include Lockheed Martin’s $225,000 in checks written the Bush-Cheney Inaugural Fund or Boeing’s $100,000 contribution to the same committee."

For more information see Citizens for Tax Justice at www.ctj.org; ACORN at www.acorn.org; the AFL-CIO, www.aflcio.org, Campaign for Americas Future, www.ourfuture.org, Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, www.cbpp.org; Friends of the Earth, www.foe.org; Common Cause, www.commoncause.org;
and Center for Responsive Politics, www.opensecrets.org.

2) Pharmaceutical Gouging
The Administration has refused to authorize generic competitors to manufacture ciprofloxacin, and thereby reduce public anxiety over the supply of anthrax-fighting drugs. According to the Consumer Project on Technology, the Department of Health and Human Safety could easily introduce competition which would ensure redundant capacity and a more favorable procurement environment for these drugs by using 28 USC 1498 to issue compulsory licenses for patents, and immediately authorizing the five companies who have already satisfied US FDA requirements for the quality of their products to speed the manufacturer of ciprofloxacin to confront the current crisis. Instead the government cut its own deal with Bayer. In the face of unknown health care risks to Americans, the federal government needs to build stockpiles of effective medicines, and to ensure that it can distribute care to everyone in need. To this end, the government needs to have and exercise the authority to override patent rights, which action is needed to address issues of supply or price.

According to the Consumer Project on Technology:

The case of the current Anthrax attacks have highlighted the problems. At one point, the only FDA approved treatment for Anthrax was Cipro, the brand name for Bayer's version of Ciprofloxacin, a drug sold on an exclusive basis by Bayer A.G., the giant German pharmaceutical company. Bayer was being investigated by the government for violating
antitrust laws, after paying another company more than $200 million to end its challenge to the validity of the Bayer patent.

CIPRO sells for $4 to $5 per pill in US pharmacies, two to three times as much as it charges in many foreign countries for the same drug. Bayer had contracts to sell CIPRO for $.43 to $1.77 to the government under various programs. Why is Uncle Sam condoning a multiple-price structure for the same pills bought in volume? Generic copies of ciprofloxacin sold for as little as $.03 per pill, in countries where the drug was off patent.

When public health authorities announced they needed a stockpile of 1.2 billion pills to protect against a large scale anthrax attack, they confronted two problems. At 2 million pills per day, it would take Bayer 600 days to manufacture enough medicine for the stockpile, an alarmingly long time. And the cost of the stockpile would be more than
$ 2 billion, a huge chunk of the budgeted funds for bioterrorism.

Senator Charles Schumer and others asked the government to override the Bayer
patent, and authorize generic production of ciprofloxacin, giving the government the opportunity to build up the stockpiles faster, and saving the government money. Under US law, Bayer would be compensated for this use of the patent, but only a reasonable amount. Bayer balked at this proposal, as did other pharmaceutical companies, who did not want the government to set a precedent against strong patent protection, particularly right before the WTO negotiations on patents and public health. The government nonetheless threatened to authorize generic production of ciprofloxacin, unless Bayer dropped its price, but Bayer obtained a new price of $.75 to $.95 per pill, a figure several times the cost of generic alternatives, and much higher than its $.43 government contract, to ensure that it would make a tidy profit.

Meanwhile, the FDA and the CDC announced that less expensive antibodies could be used effectively for the current strains of Anthrax, and the government lowered its stockpile goals for ciprofloxacin from 1.2 billion to 100 million, a decrease of 92 percent, with the difference made up with purchases of Doxycycline, an inexpensive tetracycline class of antibiotics, that has fewer side affects than Cipro. The problem for the public however concerns the risks that a future Anthrax attack may be with a strain that is resistant to penicillin or tetracycline drugs -- a concern among bioterrorism experts. In order to downplay the need for larger stockpiles of ciprofloxacin, a drug to which there is no evidence of Anthrax resistant strains, the government and the pharmaceutical industry say they can substitute untested and perhaps less safe quinolones alternatives, largely to understate the need for overriding the Bayer patent.

If the government does not have in place mechanisms and systems to get the drugs it needs, fast and at affordable prices, it will cut corners with the public health, and put Americans at risk during an extraordinary period of attacks against
civilians.

For more information see: Consumer Project on Technology, www.cptech.org

3) "Bailouts for Billionaires" and a Pay Raise for Congress too!
Congress is open for business for maximum corporate and personal greed, but closed for business to raise the long-suppressed minimum wage for workers, which at $5.15 is more than $2 less in purchasing power than the minimum wage was in 1968. In the aftermath of September 11th, more than 130,000 airline and civilian aircraft aviation workers have been laid off and nearly one million people employed by the hotel industry have been either laid off or are working only one or two days per week. Congress gave the airline companies a cash and loan guarantees bailout of $15,000,000,000. Congress gave nothing to laid off aviation workers or hotel industry workers.

According to Public Campaign, "How did the airlines get to the head of the bailout line? And how did they end up getting more money out of taxpayers than they lost in the three days the nation's airports were shut down? By moving fast and without shame to deploy a crack army of lobbyists on Capitol Hill and by using all the access and influence that could be bought with $65 million in campaign contributions over the last eleven years."

And, according to Public Citizen, who did these current or recent lobbyists for the airline interests include? "Linda Hall Daschle (wife of Senate majority leader Tom Daschle); Haley Barbour (former Republican National Committee chair), Harold Ickes (former Clinton deputy chief of staff), Ken Duberstein (former Reagan chief of staff and a friend of Colin Powell), Nick Calio (now President Bush's congressional liaison), and former Senators Dale Bumpers and Bob Packwood."

As Americans suffer from the highest jump in the unemployment rate since May of 1980, and while the minimum raise remains stagnant, members of Congress are proposing to give themselves a pay raise. Members are seeking to boost their already generous salaries ($145,100) by $4900, to a salary of $150,000, plus generous pensions, benefits and other perks. Worse, they are seeking to do this without a recorded vote, much less a public hearing on whether salaries that are already far ahead of inflation should be raised for the ninth time in eleven years!

For more information see: Public Campaign at www.publiccampaign.org; Public Citizen at www.citizen.org; Congressional Accountability Project, www.congressproject.org

4) The Re-emergence of Autocratic "Fast Track"
The Department of Commerce official numbers admit that at least 360,000 jobs have been lost to NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement), while the Economic Policy Institute estimates nearly double that many jobs and potential jobs have been eliminated. Now, as millions of layoffs have begun, what is Congress doing? It is deciding whether to surrender to the corporate demand to expanding Nafta under a no-amendment NAFTA abdication of authority. President Bush and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick have zealously pursued their secret global government trade agenda in the wake of the attacks, putting special emphasis on Fast Track. The Administration’s fast track request:

*Grants congressional authority to the executive.
*Gives the president the power to negotiate trade agreements without congressional amendments.
*Does not require enforceable protection of the environment or worker’s rights.

Article I of the Constitution provides for the powers of the legislative branch. Since when has the American public sent its legislators to Congress to give up their right to change legislation?

For more information see Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch: www.citizen.org/trade; Friends of the Earth, www.foe.org; and the Economic and Policy Information Network at www.epinet.org;

5) Handouts for the Insurance Industry
According to J. Robert Hunter, director of insurance for Consumer Federation of America and former Federal Insurance Administrator, "[t]he insurance industry has proposed a "massive overreach that unnecessarily exposes taxpayers to billion of dollars in risk." The insurance industry is proposing legislation that would create free government reinsurance for the industry with taxpayers footing the bill, while waiving all federal and state anti-trust laws and a reduction of oversight.

For more information see: Consumer Federation of American at www.consumerfed.org; www.acorn.org

6) More Phony "Missile Defense" and the Reintroduction of Biological Weapons
President Bush has said he is determined to build an unworkable missile defense system and to withdraw from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty with Russia. According to the Center for Defense Information and Aerospace Daily, on Oct. 24, 2001, the House Appropriations Committee approved missile defense funding up to $7.9 billion, $400 million less than the Senate. The Senate Appropriations defense subcommittee will approve the $8.3 billion for missile defense requested by President Bush and endorsed in the Oct. 2 Senate authorization. "The Appropriations Committee plans to let the President decide whether to spend up to $1.3 billion of that amount on fight against terrorism, as was also recommended in the original authorization."

Bush’s plans for missile defense are far more ambitious than any thus far even though CDI calculates that since 1983 the Pentagon has spent $95 billion on Ballistic Missile Defense, and roughly $44 billion on National Missile Defense alone. Rear Admiral Eugene J. Carroll, Jr., USN (Ret.), Vice-President of CDI says that Americans should care deeply about the decision to deploy a national missile defense system. "By such an action we will signal to the world that we are willing to pursue illusory defenses against non-existent threats even though we subject all nations to continued nuclear competition and increased risks of a future nuclear war."

On October 10, the U.S. proposed a plan to modify Article I of the Biological and Toxic Weapons Convention, and is trying to sell the idea to its allies before the 5th Review Conference of the BTWC beginning November 19. According to the Sunshine Project, this modification would draw a distinction between "good" and "bad" biological weapons, as well as between developing and using them, and thereby allow the U.S. to continue its development of anti-crop fungi ("Agent Green"), "non-lethal" weapons, and the U.S. Navy’s genetically-modified superbugs that consume materials like plastics, jet fuel, and asphalt.

For more information see: Center for Defense Information, www.cdi.org; Union of Concerned Scientists, www.ucsusa.org; The Sunshine Project, www.sunshine-project.org;

7) Endangering the Environment and Energy
For over 30 years, watchdog organizations which follow the nuclear power industry have warned that a successful attack on any of the 103 nuclear power plants could unleash an immense quantity of radioactivity which could cause hundreds of thousands of cancers and contaminate wide areas for generations. The response thus far from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been to completely shut down its website (see restrictions on access to information) and to suggest a "long bureaucratic review process" according to Paul Leventhal, president of the non-profit Nuclear Control Institute. As Representative Markey of Massachusetts has said, neither the nuclear regulatory agency nor the nuclear power industry appear to have "fully awakened to the fact that we are living in a whole new world after September 11." Instead of pushing for conservation, the development of alternative fuels, nuclear security and the necessity to decrease dependency, which should be our aim for sustainability and national security, the Bush Administration energy proposal calls for expanded nuclear power. As Californians demonstrated in response to their energy "crisis" by reducing consumption by more than 10 percent, Americans are very capable of conserving energy.

On Friday, October 26, the Washington Post reported that President Bush made a fresh appeal to the Senate to approve his proposal to boost domestic energy supply and production, including a plan to allow drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. As actor-environmentalist Robert Redford and Biogems, a project of the National Resource Defense Council, points out: "A handful of determined U.S. senators, encouraged by the White House, are arguing that national security requires the Senate to rush a pro-oil energy bill into law. They have vowed to hold up normal Senate business and attach the bill to every piece of legislation that comes to the Senate floor. So far they have failed in what The Boston Globe is calling "oil opportunism." But with President Bush, himself, now calling for rushed passage of this disastrous bill, intense pressure is building on Senate leaders to succumb to the emotions of the moment. Using our national tragedy as an opportunity to advance the narrow interests of the oil lobby would not be in the best interest of the public. This bill, already passed by the House, would not only open the Arctic Refuge to oil rigs, it would also pave the way for energy companies to exploit and destroy pristine areas of Greater Yellowstone and other gems of our natural heritage. As important, it would do nothing to address energy security."

According to Friends of the Earth, legislators have been trying to attach controversial energy proposals "calculated to please oil, coal and nuclear companies and short-circuit a full national debate of energy issues" to defense authorization bills.

For more information see: Friends of the Earth,www.foe.org; the Sierra Club, www.sierraclub.org; Biogems, www.savebiogems.org; The Nuclear Control Institute, www.nci.org; Public Citizen, www.citizen.org; USPIRG, at www.uspirg.org; Greenpeace, www.greenpeace.org

8) The Oxymoronic "USA PATRIOT Act"
In a September 16th broadcast of 60 minutes, the former director of CIA operations all over the Middle East, Mr. Frank Anderson was asked by Mike Wallace "what civil liberties should Americans be asked to contemplate giving up in order to fight terrorism." Mr. Anderson responded, "That’s easy. Absolutely none. If we can’t figure out how to begin and conduct and win the war against terrorism without supporting and defending the Constitution of the United States, frankly, I want to go somewhere else, and you can’t have my son for it."

Yet on October 26th, President Bush signed legislation redefining civil liberties in the United States which the Congress had passed at breakneck speed -- despite a widely supported and diverse coalition of organizations, law professors, computer scientists and others who protested the contents. According to OMB Watch "[t]here was no conference, since lawmakers worked out their differences in closed-door sessions prior to the votes. The process was so rushed that a final copy of the bill was not available to the public at the time the votes were taken." The lone Senator to vote against the Bill, Russ Feingold, remarked: "It is one thing to shortcut the legislative process in order to get federal financial aid to the cities hit by terrorism….It is quite another to press for the enactment of sweeping new powers for law enforcement that directly affect the civil liberties of the American people without due deliberation by the peoples’ elected representatives."

According to an October 23rd letter from the Washington office of the American Civil Liberties Union to Senators, among the act’s most troubling provisions are measures that would:

"*Permit the Attorney General to indefinitely incarcerate or detain non-citizens based on mere suspicion, and to deny re-admission to the United States of non-citizens (including lawful permanent residents) for engaging in speech protected by the First Amendment.
*Minimize judicial supervision of telephone and Internet surveillance by law enforcement authorities in anti-terrorism investigations and in routine criminal investigations unrelated to terrorism.
*Expand the ability of the government to conduct secret searches -- again in anti-terrorism investigations and in routine criminal investigations unrelated to terrorism.
*Give the Attorney General and the Secretary of State the power to designate domestic groups as terrorist organizations and block any non-citizen who belongs to them from entering the country. Under this provision the payment of membership dues is a deportable offense.
*Grant the FBI broad access to sensitive medical, financial, mental health, and educational records about individuals without having to show evidence of a crime and without a court order.
*Lead to large-scale investigations of American citizens for "intelligence" purposes and use of intelligence authorities to by-pass probable cause requirements in criminal cases.
*Put the CIA and other intelligence agencies back in the business of spying on Americans by giving the Director of Central Intelligence the authority to identify priority targets for intelligence surveillance in the United States.
*Allow searches of highly personal financial records without notice and without judicial review based on a very low standard that does not require probable cause of a crime or even relevancy to an ongoing terrorism investigation.
*Allow student records to be searched based on a very low standard of relevancy to an investigation.
*Create a broad new definition of "domestic terrorism" that could sweep in people who engage in acts of political protest and subject them to wiretapping and enhanced penalties."

And these are not the only restrictions proposed. According to the Electronic Privacy Information Center, since September 11th, corporations presumably seeking to profit from any government program to use face recognition technology, are promoting national identification cards.

For more information see: American Civil Liberties Union, www.aclu.org; Electronic Privacy Information Center, www.epic.org; OMB Watch, www.ombwatch.org; October 25, 2001 Statement of Senator Russell Feingold from the Senate Floor On The Anti- Terrorism Bill.

9) Restrictions on Information/Invasions of Privacy
According to Bruce Shapiro, in the October 29th edition of the Nation: "Never in the nation's history has the flow of information from government to press and public been shut off so comprehensively and quickly as in the weeks following September 11. Much of the shutdown seems to have little to do with preventing future terrorism and everything to do with the Administration's laying down a new across-the-board standard for centralized control of the public's right to know."

On October 12th, Attorney General John Ashcroft issued a Department of Justice memorandum that emphasized the importance of safeguarding government-held information and, according to Access Reports, "setting a tone for non-disclosure reminiscent of the Reagan years." Ashcroft abandoned the former Attorney General Janet Reno's standard of using "foreseeable harm" for a much laxer standard of "sound legal basis." On October 29th, a coalition of civil liberties, human rights and electronic privacy groups had to file a Freedom of Information request because the government’s refusal to release basic information regarding those detained since September 11 "prevents any democratic oversight" of our government’s response to the attacks. The Washington Post editorialized on October 31, "[i]f the government’s response has been as benign as claimed, why not release the data and put the questions that have begun to arise to rest?"

According to Public Citizen, in an unprecedented move, "the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) shut down its entire Web site, barring the public from even innocuous information about public hearings in their communities….The NRC has done what no other federal agency has done: deny [continued] public access to all online information." And they are not alone. OMBwatch is keeping an inventory of the information being removed from government websites, though the government is not.

For more information see OMB Watch, www.ombwatch.org, Public Citizen, www.citizen.org; USPIRG, www.uspirg.org; The Nation, www.thenation.org Electronic Privacy Information Center, www.epic.org

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President Bush said, in his September 20th address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People, that, "They hate our freedoms – our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other." What freedom "to disagree with each other" does he refer to as Congress rushes nearly in lockstep to satisfy vested corporate interests while weakening and damaging our rights in numerous ways? Citizen groups and citizen advocates who band together to question, to seek debate, to protest or to voice their opposition are acting out of deeply felt sense of patriotism and allegiance to ideas which represent the best of our country. And, as Bill Moyers said, the corporate marauders are "counting on your patriotism to distract you from their plunder. They’re counting on you to be standing at attention with your hand over your heart, pledging allegiance to the flag, while they pick your pocket!" The huge distortions of public budgets and resources on the way – which must be stopped -- such as the billions in tax rebates to corporations, drilling in pristine environments to enrich oil companies, and furthering cold war weaponry designed to fight a no longer existing Soviet Union – has nothing to do with a response to terrorism in the aftermath of September 11th.

We are opposed to this rancid opportunism and call for every citizen to become part of a coalition – to call for better approaches to domestic security that includes:

A. Signing on to a citizen’s coalition -- the Citizens Agenda Against Corporate Raids on the Treasury and an Outburst of Wartime Opportunism at www.citizenworks.org.
B. Adopting a new plan for America that promotes our national security through actions that seek to protect public health and safety with access to health care and prescription drugs at reasonable prices, adequately funding our state and local public health departments to combat bioterrorism, and providing national security for our transportation systems; protect energy security and our environment by shifting to clean energy sources, promoting conservation and increased efficiency, reducing dependency of fossil fuels and oil imports, and reducing risks with our nuclear infrastructure; protect our economic security by taking care of displaced workers and their families, not corporations and political campaign contributors; protect our civil liberties and prevent unwarranted invasions of privacy; protect our relationship with citizens across the globe by respecting human rights -- political, economic, and social, minimizing global diseases, health risks, and environmental devastation, promoting citizen-managed rather than corporate-managed trade agreements, and moving toward waging peace to foresee and forestall future perils.
This plan should:

1. Enact legislation that mandates publicly-financed public elections and broad reforms of the electoral process. Strengthen citizen participation in our political economy.
2. Enact living wage laws, strengthen worker health and safety laws, and repeal Taft-Hartley and other obstructions to collective bargaining and worker rights.
3. Issue environmental protection standards to systematically reduce damaging environmental impacts, global warming, and toxics and to promote energy, agricultural and other sustainable technologies.
4. Provide full Medicare coverage for everyone and revamp our national programs for prevention of disease and trauma.
5. Launch a national mission to abolish poverty, as other western democracies have done, based on proposals made long ago by conservatives, liberals, and progressives.
6. Design and implement a national security policy to counter violence and the silent mass violence of global diseases, environmental devastation and extreme poverty. Reduce waste and corporate domination of defense budgets – a wasteful defense is a weak defense. Wage peace and advance nonviolence by educating, foreseeing and forestalling global perils.
7. Renegotiate NAFTA and GATT to be democratic and to be "pull-up" not "pull-down" trade agreements that subordinate labor, consumer and environmental standards to trade matters.
8. End criminal justice system discrimination, reject the failed war on drugs, and replace corporate prisons with superior alternatives.
9. Defend and strengthen the civil justice system, apply criminal laws against corporate crime, and fully prosecute consumer fraud and abuses. Expand consumer, worker and children’s health, safety and economic rights.
10. Strengthen investor-shareholder rights, remedies and authority over managers and officers and boards of directors so that those who own the companies also control them. End the massive corporate welfare schemes that distort and misallocate public budgets. Reintroduce the historic function of corporate chartering as an instrument of insuring corporate accountability and the sovereignty of the people.

C. Making sure that any legislation that passes for security contains citizen empowerment provisions that can help revitalize our democracy and our economy by restoring the ability of citizens to influence the decision of Government and the actions of powerful business corporations. These provisions could include easy ways for citizens in each state to form federally-chartered nonprofit membership organizations to inform citizens and strengthen their representation in decisions concerning the financial service industry, the United States Postal Service, and public utilities; the creation of federal minimum standards for the internal governance and conduct of the nation’s largest business corporations; the possibility for a national advisory referendum every two years on important issues; the establishment of a consumer protection agency; citizen standing in lawsuits against violators of key federal statutes; and the creation of a federally-chartered nonprofit membership organization that would operate its own prime time and drive time stations using the public’s airwaves and representing audience interests before federal agencies such as the FCC.

D. Monitoring rigorously the abuses of power under legislation enacted after September 11th.

Signed: Ralph Nader and Theresa Amato, Citizen Works