Citizen Power: A Mandate for Change: A Mandate for Change

By Mike Gravel

As author of Citizen Power in 1971, Senator Gravel determined that much of what he wrote then is apropos in America today; hence, the release of Citizen Power: A Mandate for Change that reflects the accuracy of his evaluation of problems then, his current position on a number of issues facing America now, and the process Americans can undertake

• Language: English
• Publisher: Go To Publish
• Release date: Jul 17, 2020
• ISBN: 9781647491093

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Citizen Power

A Mandate for Change

Copyright © 2020 by Mike Gravel

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher or author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Although every precaution has been taken to verify the accuracy of the information contained herein, the author and publisher assume no responsibility for any errors or omissions. No liability is assumed for damages that may result from the use of information contained within.

ISBN: 978-1-64749-109-3

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To Whitney,

The love of my life

And to my grandchildren

Renee, Alex, Madison & Mackenzie

And their parents

Martin & LizaBeth

Lynne & Drake

With love and hope for the future

Contents

Acknowledgments

Foreword

Introduction

1 Now It’s the Citizen’s Turn

2 National Initiative for Democracy: Legislature

of the People

3 Closing the Education Gap

4 Tax Reform – The Fair Tax

5 A Healthcare Security System

6 National Environmental & Energy Policy

7 The War on Drugs

8 Crime & Punishment

9 Shrouded in Secrecy

10 American Imperialism

11 Global Governance

12 Who Stole the American Dream?

Appendix A

Appendix B

Appendix C

Appendix D

Appendix E

Appendix F

Acknowledgments

Books seldom are written without a great deal of assistance and encouragement from friends and associates. This book is no exception.

With respect to the original Citizen Power, my thanks to the wonderful women on my staff, whose abilities and efficiency made it possible for me to find the time to write a book without diminishing the effectiveness of my office: Flora Bergman, Dianne Church, Susan Gordon, Roselynn Heath, Marcia Miller, Elisabeth Romayko, Betsy Schoenfeld, Alice Slater, Jill Smythe, and Kathy Morgan.

My gratitude to those who contributed many of the thoughts and writings from which much of the finished product was drawn: Dr. Len Rotberg, Dr. Douglas Jones, Dr. Tom Lantos, Bill Hoffman, Egan O’Connor, Arlie Schardt, Joe Rothstein, Karl Hess, Marcus Raskin, Charles Fishman, Tom Smythe, Ted Johnson, Tom Reeves, and Michael Rowan. Also, my appreciation to many others too numerous to list here for their helpful suggestions and thoughtful comments.

Special acknowledgment and deep personal gratitude to the two men who served as my chief editorial consultants and advisers throughout the compilation and the preparation of this work in 1971: Bill Howard and my administrative assistant, Marty Wolf, and his patient wife, Sonia.

Since the original text in 1971, my efforts have centered on the development of the National Initiative a Legislature of the People. My work would not have been possible without the creative participation of Donald Kemner, David Parish, Charles Turk, Sylvia Shih, John Sutter, Esther Franklin and others.

For this current edition, I express sincere gratitude to Susan Giffin, Stacy Standley, David Eisenbach, Laurence J. Kotlikoff, Victor Fuchs, Joe Lauria, Mike Gray, Ralph Nader, and to Vid Beldavs of AuthorHouse.

With special appreciation to my 2008 campaign staff, advisers, and support team: Chris Petherick, Elliott Jacobson, Alex Colvin, April Shapley, Jose Rodriguez, Eli Israel, Jim Brauner, Augustine Gyamfi, Michael Grant, Skyler McKinley, Lynne Mosier, Dick Thomas, Deborah Petri, Alexander Rosenberg, David Nelson-VanDette, Beckey Isaiah, Mindi Iden, Jim Dupont, Jon Kraus, Marie and Tom Lombardi, Tom Lombardi Jr., George Ripley, Michael Szymanski, Mike Foudy, Richard Rebh, Peter Peckarsky, Paul Linet, Rob Ryan, Hans Barbe, Dan Connor, Jeff Rammelt, David and Hi-Jin Hodge, George Rebh, Josh LeKoch, Wayne Madsen, James McCrink, Jeffrey & Cici Peters, Greg Piccionelli, Larry Rothenberg, Catherine Hand, Jim Stork, Ron Ansin, Lynn Stewart, David Weisman, Theresa Wrangham, Afifa Klouj, Phil Davis, Casey McIlvaine, Jake Futerfas, and two of the most unusual supporters of my political career, Greg Chase and Jeff Tausch.

Foreword

Like a fresh wind coming from Alaska, the state he represented as a U.S. Senator from 1969 to 1981, Mike Gravel is determined to start a debate about the fundamentals of democracy.

Throughout his work in public service, Senator Gravel has understood that politics is about power—who has it, who should have it, who misuses it, and how it can be used to the betterment of human life here and around the world. He not only understands it, as the cliché has it, he also has walked the walk.

As a senator, he became known for releasing the controversial Pentagon Papers at an ad hoc committee performance. He was early against the Vietnam War. He was early in advocating diplomatic relations with China. More recently, Senator Gravel was opposed to the War in Iraq even before this quagmire and criminal endeavor began. He opposes military action against a completely United States-surrounded Iran. He understands the inequities in the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

Senator Gravel knows that elections have been commercialized to the point where the very media expectation of candidates is determined by how much money they’ve raised in every quarter. It’s almost like a corporation: What is the quarterly report? Money from commercial interests, such as the drug industry, the oil industry, the nuclear industry, the auto industry, the banking industry, and insurance industries, with their 10,000 political action committees, comes heavily in terms of quid pro quos. They are rarely specific about what they want in return.

Senator Gravel understands what very few candidates are willing to understand and demonstrate publicly. Now more than ever, this country needs a shift in power from the few to the many. He understands that we must make the domination of just about everything by giant corporations a major issue. These giant corporations see no boundaries to their hegemony, to their greed, to their abandonment of our country, to the control of communities, to the infiltration of elections, and to the control of every department and agency in the U.S. government, including the Department of Labor. With their political appointments, their thousands of political action committees, and with their 35,000 lobbyists—if you don’t make this a major issue, it will affect our economy and our electoral reforms, and we will be avoiding a critical issue and engaging in rhetorical charades, slogans, clichés, and self-censorship.

If money is the index of electoral politics, Senator Gravel rightly believes our democracy is gone. We’re supposed to have a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. There can be no democracy if it is a government of the Exxons, by the General Motors, for the DuPonts.

For over a decade, given the failures of elected politicians, Senator Gravel has been engaged in some extraordinary research and consultations with leading constitutional law experts about the need to enact another check to the faltering checks and balances—namely, the National Initiative for Democracy—a proposed law that empowers the people as lawmakers in a Legislature of the People.

In recognizing this, Senator Gravel has convened conferences of some of the finest constitutional law experts in the country. He has engaged them in a fundamental debate regarding the plenary power of the American people to enact their own laws, rooted in the Declaration of Independence, a juridical document, not just a protest, the U.S. Constitution, the Federalist Papers.

Senator Gravel’s National Initiative for Democracy is the most fundamental proposal I have ever seen or read about by any candidate in any major party in the United States. It is not a proposal that can be reduced to sound bites on television. It cannot be compressed in seven seconds and 42 nanoseconds. It has to challenge our willingness to engage in a deliberative electoral process where people are given a chance to interact with the candidates, to propose their own agendas, and to meet with them all over the country as they campaign. There will be no more manipulation of the voters into spectators, and there will be no more simply viewing the electoral process as entertainment funded by commercial interests and beyond the range of effective political action on the part of the voters.

What Senator Gravel is conveying to the country is a wisdom embodied in the definition of freedom by Marcus Cicero over 2,000 years ago in ancient Rome. That prominent orator and lawyer defined freedom in a way that forces us to confront its denial or its substance—not its rhetorical flourish by manipulative politicians indentured to commercial and corporate interest. According to Cicero, that definition is the following: Freedom is participation in power. This is the key element that is launching Senator Gravel into one state after another with his proposals. And that could be the mantra for Mike Gravel’s 2008 presidential campaign.

Ralph Nader

Introduction

When I decided to run for president, I decided to re-issue Citizen Power . My initial hope was that it would be a second edition. Upon rereading it, however, two things stood out: 1) the total disappointment upon realizing that the problems I defined 37 years ago had grown considerably worse; and 2) my hopes of having to do very little rewriting were dashed by the fact that some of my views had matured and changed, requiring new and different solutions to the problems I thought I had figured out.

The entire economic section has been left out, because I cannot begin to do justice in the amount of time I have available; nevertheless I have some unusual programs that I hope to undertake when I become president.

I added a chapter on the drug war which, of course, started with Richard Nixon just about the time I was writing Citizen Power. The War on Drugs occasioned the whole debacle of prison expansion, and I felt compelled to address both of these serious problems which seem to scare other progressive candidates.

In the chapter on taxation that I wrote 37 years ago, I recognized the corruption of the income tax and advocated a single tax. However, the work that has been done on the Fair Tax was superior to what I had done more than three decades earlier. I therefore found it easy to support the Fair Tax with its progressive rebate. Of course, with our present fiscal gap, the Fair Tax now becomes the only possible solution.

My healthcare proposal probably represents the most substantial change. At the time, I naively assumed that a total government program could meet our requirements. As a result of my personal experiences with government programs and the innate abuse of government power, I departed from what I would call not a single-payer but a single-source solution. That’s why I amalgamated a program from two sources that meld together the checks and balances involving all the stakeholders in the healthcare field.

The warfare state that I defined as a result of the Vietnam War has been expanded to include the Iraq War, but mostly to address the military-industrial complex, the existence of which mandates the repetition of wars periodically; otherwise, there are no profits to be made by the industrial part of the partnership and no promotions within the military arm.

Probably the most discouraging chapter is the one on secrecy. Thirty-six years ago, I had just released the Pentagon Papers and my case was before the Supreme Court; I was unsure of the outcome. Nevertheless, I was optimistic, which characterizes my whole approach in the original Citizen Power. Bear in mind, I was at the beginning of my Senate career and had great confidence that changes could be brought about within representative government. It was only at the end of my career when I left office that I was totally discouraged over the inability of representative government to address the problems that face us all. The secrecy issue was terrible under Richard Nixon, and it has only become worse in succeeding Democratic and Republican administrations.

The chapter on global governance articulates a view I have had since I was in my teens when I read The Anatomy of Peace by Emory Reeve. In it, he stated that until there is some form of global governance, mankind will never enjoy peace or a fair distribution of the planet’s resources. As a result of my experiences and studies on global governance, I have now written a specific plan that defines the kind of global governance that would work fairly for everyone. It is a restructured United Nations that would require little change in the U.N. Charter, which is a magnificent document. What will facilitate this change is essentially the subject of Chapter 2, which I view as the most important contribution of this book and, I hope, the most important contribution of my life as a public servant.

The creation of a legislative proposal––the National Initiative for Democracy––is nothing less than an effort to bring about a fundamental change in the paradigm of human governance. Certainly, it is not the most modest undertaking, but in essence a very simple one; and that is that human beings with rational will are more than capable to govern themselves. They merely need a structure to do it in a common-sense fashion.

I apologize for the many shortcomings that you will find in this book. I do not consider myself a scholar, but I do consider myself very much of a knowledge junkie, and I respect wisdom, which I do not think is based on education alone but on life’s experiences.

My writing is self-taught. The acquisition of knowledge, for me, is a thrilling experience that I have sought all my life and have chosen to share through a career of public service and now through a modest literary effort.

I hope that this book strikes a chord of interest and becomes a catalyst for thought and discussion.

Mike Gravel

December 7, 2007

1

Now It’s the Citizen’s Turn

There can be no democracy unless it is

a dynamic democracy.

When our people cease to participate—to have

a place in the sun— then all of us will

wither in the darkness of decadence.

Saul D. Alinsky

BULLSHIT, Senator. It won’t work.

Why not?

Because you’re talking about something that doesn’t exist, man, that’s why. There’s no such thing as citizen power. Not for people like us.

The black youth tilted his chair back against the wall and regarded me with open skepticism, challenging me to prove him wrong. The others nodded their agreement.

It was a hot summer afternoon in mid-1970, and I was in a Harlem storefront street academy, talking with a group of social and educational drop-outs—the ones polite society paternalistically refers to as the disadvantaged. I had scheduled the visit when I arrived in New York earlier in the day and learned I had some free time before my evening speaking engagement. The street academy program was getting some good reviews. I wanted to see one for myself, and I wanted to talk with the students.

For months, I had sensed a happening taking place in America. Everywhere I traveled, I saw growing public dissatisfaction, frustration and anger. That was no silent majority I was witnessing. They were people articulating in both words and deeds that they wanted something more out of life than they were receiving. They were demanding more economic security, more benefits and safeguards, more personal freedom, and more control over the decision-making process.

The demands were not particularly new, but there was something significantly different about the manner in which they were being presented. Instead of complaining and demonstrating individually, citizens were joining together and forming powerful public-interest constituencies: blacks, Latinos, peace groups, the young, the aged, women, homosexuals, environmentalists, welfare mothers, consumers—each with their own specific objectives and proposals, yet all sharing the common bond of seeking to change the status quo in America, to improve it, and to have some impact on society.

Out of the seeds of despair, conflict, and alienation, I detected, and probably others also did, that the embryo of new citizen empowerment was taking shape—a program for change—struggling to achieve life. A new force was emerging upon the American scene: citizen power. All that was needed, I felt, was public awareness of that power and the vehicle for assuming it.

I did not understand then what that vehicle was. I thought it was just getting good people elected to government who would then use the people’s power to act in the public interest.

But sitting in that Harlem street academy in the middle of neglected America, I could readily understand why the idea of citizen power was greeted with contempt when I raised the subject. What did that mean to these alienated young men and women? They had only to look out the window to see a street—their street—littered with debris, where crime and poverty were daily facts of life. They had no jobs, no money, nothing to call their own. What little they received from government was doled out as a privilege, not as a right. Maybe if I had talked about the possibility of getting some extra money to buy some clothes or get a car or rent a better apartment, they would have responded more enthusiastically. But citizen power? What was in it for them?

Hell, man, there’s no such thing as citizens around here, much less citizen power, the boy seated next to me argued. There’s just people. The only citizen I know is the dude in the White House and, I guess, maybe the fat cats that get all the money. They’re the ones who call it their way. The rest of us, we got no say. We just got to cut it our own way.

Look around you, I said. How do you think this academy got here? It wasn’t the government. A bunch of citizens joined with the Urban League to set up this academy, because so many of you were dropping out of the public-school system. They couldn’t get the government or the schools to come up with any solutions to the problem, so they raised the money, rented the buildings, hired the teachers, and started doing something about it on their own. I’m not saying it’s going to be easy. For example, I understand the street academy program is in trouble because the private money sources are drying up and the government refuses to fill the breach by pumping in sufficient funds needed to keep it alive. That’s a real shame.

Even today, in 2008, dropout rates are a significant problem. Thirty percent of our children do not graduate from high school. In many inner cities, it’s considerably more.

I guess you’re right, the boy grudgingly admitted, but that’s not it, man. I mean, I’m not talking about street academies. I’m talking about the big things. You know, like going to Vietnam or getting a good job or earning more money. We don’t have any say in those kinds of things.

...

THAT’S WHAT I WROTE IN 1971. But I could write it today about a storefront in South Chicago or Los Angeles. Sadly, the story is all too relevant 37 years later. In all that time, while many citizens have formed effective grassroots organizations to work on solving society’s critical problems, the average American citizen has been precluded from the decision-making process; the disenfranchised even more so. The fact that there is so much citizen effort to make a difference and yet virtually insurmountable problems still exist in our society means that there is something drastically lacking within the system. Real power rests in the hands of those who control government by way of their investments in politicians—these politicians make the laws for those in control.

Wouldn’t you rather be a part of the governing process instead of being under the thumb of those who control the government? Wouldn’t you like to have enough control so that government and corporate power respond to your needs? You might argue that that takes a lot of clout. Well, how do you think business, labor, farmers or corporations are able to secure the laws that give them an edge? They do it by putting their money where their mouth is and by making sure that they get the results they want on Election Day.

People are tired of liberal promises and conservative game plans which offer the rhetoric of hope but, in reality, merely protect and perpetuate the status quo. Conservatism in America has too often meant racism and support for the wealthy against the poor. Liberalism, on the other hand, has relied too heavily on the power of the state and on faceless bureaucrats in government to solve problems, while failing to assure continued popular participation and control. The liberals have not attacked the increase and centralization of wealth and power; they have abetted it. They have sold out to Wall Street. What astounds and irritates so many people is that the liberals, both Democratic and Republican, have been in power since World War II; yet, they have not made good on their promises.

Liberals have applied some band-aid emergency measures to the poor, but their programs have been paid for by ordinary citizens, while their policies have first benefited the rich and powerful. To achieve security at

Reviews for Citizen Power

[fulner · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I first learned of Mike Gravel when he was seeking the Libertarian nomination for president in 2008. This review is of the first edition of this book in 1972. This edition had a lot of references to what at the time where current events, such as relating to Richard Nixon, that I felt as a 90's kid I didn't have enough back ground on to reference. It would be interesting to compare it with the 2nd edition released during the '08 election cycle, to see if he updated these references to provide more background, or found more modern examples to show his positions. However, at only 3 stars its not really worth my time to get another copy for that reason alone. Gravel is a great champion of Democracy, and his book explains why quite well. Its a good reminder that the same problems we have now, have been no different in the 70's. He does fairly well explaining his plan for the 4th branch of government, to allow for national referendum. If you believe in democracy I guess it makes sense. But he takes for granted that his reader does believe in democracy. For me he does nothing to convince me the rights of the minority will be improved at all under such a stance, in fact I fear it would be worse. Not to mention who wants to hear commercials from every special interest group in the world about the need to "save the earth from businesses" no explanation on this at all. If you are a true believer in Democracy, but feel that the current republican form of government has been taken over by special interests, than this book is for you. If you are a true believer in individual liberty, the ideas here are not main stream enough for it to be considered looking at our competition and no respectful enough of the NAP for it be something we can adopt.