Acceptance Statement of Ralph Nader.

• Position: Green Party presidential nomination June 2000

[The following are highlights of Ralph Nader's acceptance statement for nomination for US President in Denver, Colorado on June 25, 2000. For the full text, see http://www.greens.org/s-r/]

On behalf of all Americans who seek a new direction, who yearn for a new birth of freedom to build the just society, who see justice as the great work of human beings on Earth, who understand that community and human fulfillment are mutually reinforcing, who respect the urgent necessity to wage peace, to protect the environment, to end poverty and to preserve values of the spirit for future generations, who wish to build a deep democracy by working hard for a regenerative progressive politics, as if people mattered--to all these citizens and the Green vanguard, I welcome and am honored to accept the Green Party nomination for President of the United States.

The Green Party stands for a nation and a world that consciously advances the practice of deep democracy. A deep democracy facilitates people's best efforts to achieve social justice, a sustainable and bountiful environment and an end to systemic bigotry and discrimination against law-abiding people merely because they are different.

Green goals

Green goals place community and self- reliance over dependency on ever larger absentee corporations and their media, their technology, their capital, and their politicians. Green goals aim at preserving the commonwealth of assets that the people of the United States already own so that the people, not big business, control what they own, and using these vast resources of the public lands, the public airwaves and trillions of worker pension dollars to achieve healthier environments, healthier communities and healthier people.

Worsening concentration of global corporate power

Earlier this year, I decided to seek your nomination because obstacles blocking solutions to our society's injustices and problems had to be overcome. Feelings of powerlessness and the withdrawal of massive numbers of Americans from both civic and political arenas are deeply troubling. This situation had to be addressed by fresh political movement arising from the citizenry's labors and resources and dreams about what America could become at long last. 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.

In the past, citizens who led and participated in this country's social justice movements faced steep concentrations of power and overcame them. A brief look at American history is instructive today. Common themes occur from the Revolution of 1776 against King George III's empire to the anti-slavery drives and women's suffrage movements of the 19th century, to the farmers' revolt against the large banks and railroads that began in 1887, and on to the trade union, civil rights, environmental and consumer protection initiatives of the 20th century. culminating in the demands for equity by Americans who are discriminated against due to their race, gender, tribal status, class, disability or sexual preference.

All these movements took on excessive power, pressed for relinquishment or sharing of that power despite vigorous opposition by elements of the dominant business community. Many years were lost before justice began to prevail and corporate power receded. However, when citizens won, and Tory merchants, cotton slave holders and corporations were compelled to share that power with the people they oppressed or excluded, America was a better place for it.

The democracy gap

Over the past 20 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.

Over the next four and one half months, this 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, 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 chilchildren, 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...