ONCE WERE WHIGS...:

Taking on corporate government in an age of surrender : Goals for a better America and stronger democratic tools. (Ralph Nader, SF Bay Guardian)

I summarized these first-stage goals for a better America and stronger democratic tools in my new book, Crashing the Party: Taking on the Corporate Government in an Age of Surrender, to wit:

1. Enact legislation that mandates publicly financed public elections [...]

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 toxins and to promote sustainable technologies like solar energy and organic farming.

4. Provide full Medicare coverage for everyone...

5. Launch a national mission to abolish poverty...

6. Design and implement a national security policy to counter violence...

7. Renegotiate NAFTA and GATT to be democratic...

8. End criminal justice system discrimination, reject the failed war on drugs in favor of rehabilitation and community development, and replace for-profit corporate prisons with superior public institutions.

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, officers, and boards of directors...

Obviously from the perspective of a conservative (or anyone who was paying attention during the 20th Century), this program seems like lunacy. But you have to wonder if the Greens couldn't eventually supplant the Democrats by advocating such policies while the Dems remain supine. If you believe in liberalism, isn't this platform more appealing than the Clinton/Gore/Daschle/Gephardt brand of GOP-Lite that national Democrats have been peddling? Posted by Orrin Judd at April 27, 2002 8:16 AM