Unstoppable (2 page)

It is with this experience in mind, the fact that my campaign appealed strongly to people in
both
parties, that I wrote this book to explore the topic of convergence, which I take to be voluntary alliances for the common good by positive-spirited persons of the Right and of the Left. A major area of potential for building alliances comes from the deep aversion many people have to the wars of empire and corporate control over their lives, particularly the ever-tightening influence of Big Business on the mainstream media, elections, and our local, state, and federal governments. These power grabs are then turned against the people themselves in harmful and lawless manners. If you are looking for more explicit labels for who would be attracted to these alliances, I see them as
a coming together
on various specific objectives of people who call themselves
conservatives, libertarians, liberals, progressives, Republicans, Democrats, Independents, Third Partiers, capitalists, socialists, or anarchists, or use any other labels free-thinking Americans choose for themselves.

Aren't such alliances doomed? The enduring but surpassable obstacles to such convergences will elicit rejections from people who think such alliances are foredoomed to failure. Such naysayers have not yet experienced the exuberance of seeing through the divide-and-rule tactics that tell us we are a sharply divided “red state–blue state nation.” This book is addressed first to those people who are
not
knee-jerk rejectionists. It's meant for those who want to explore another beckoning pathway—one that can rescue our country from being driven further into the ground and turn it into a nation where many more of its inhabitants can fulfill their potential.

A danger that skeptics—but not only skeptics—promulgate is complacency, the idea that political divisions are set in stone, so rightists and leftists, for example, could never join hands no matter how bad things get. But maybe these people don't realize how bad things have already gotten in our country. After all, most people want safe food and drugs. They want to breathe clean air and drink clean water. They want their work to be rewarded with adequate returns for the necessities of life. This is true, for example, among Walmart workers, whether they label themselves as “liberal” or “conservative.” They want clean elections and competitive candidates, who provide perceived differences and choices in their platforms. They want their taxes to be reasonable and used well for the common good in an efficient manner. They want some voice in decisions that affect them. They want peace, justice, and public safety.

Yet they don't believe they can do much to get these desirable things. Too many do
not
believe they can fight city hall, Washington, or Wall Street. Large majorities tell pollsters, including 74 percent of those polled in a 2000 survey conducted by
Businessweek
, that Big Business has too much control over their lives and that the Big Boys will always get their way in Washington.
²
Therefore, as if the culture has taught them helplessness, they have ceased to believe in themselves. Or at least they act that way: they don't spend any time and energy with others to acquire some knowledge and skills with which to restore the sovereignty and rights of the people. The instructive American history of triumphs over abusive power, usually against the odds, is lost to them.

These are generalizations about people's attitudes, but they are fairly accurate about tens of millions of honest, humane, hardworking, self-described powerless Americans. I say “self-described” because this is how people have been taught to depict themselves. Years spent in our educational system, our culture, and our political structures nurture a sense of powerlessness from a young age. We neither learn civic skills nor experience civic practices in our schoolwork—classroom to community—nor do we think of ourselves after our school years as possessing any “freedom to participate in power,” to paraphrase Marcus Cicero. Yet, as I shall strive to demonstrate, there is a consistent, profound consensus among the American people as to the many directions our society must pursue. To be sure, there are consistent and profound differences as well, but the former far outweigh the latter and should not be subordinated to them. We can move areas of consensus into realities once we deliberate at the concrete levels of daily life and experience. That is where the widespread understanding and belief in fair play comes into formidable focus.

At this point, readers may say that while people do have wide agreement on many ends, they often disagree vigorously on the
means
to those ends. They think this is what keeps people from getting together. After all, this disagreement spills into our elections and our councils of government, such as Congress and state legislatures. How you reach agreed-on ends is the devil in the details.

Well, let's get underway and see.

1

Convergence: The Sporadic Coming Together of Right and Left Against Corporatists

A Signal Convergence

“Strange Bedfellows” was the way the
National Journal
in 1982 described the coalition of environmental and conservative groups opposed to the Clinch River Breeder Reactor in Tennessee.
¹
The Breeder Reactor Project seemed unstoppable from the time it was first authorized by Congress in 1970. It soaked up money as if there were no tomorrow. A total of $1.3 billion was spent before a tree was cleared at the ninety-two-acre site.
²
No matter, the project had powerful backers from the Nixon and Reagan White Houses to the enthusiasts on Capitol Hill. They were buttressed by legions of lobbyists from the nuclear industry and its construction and engineering allies spread over three states, all intent on partaking of this taxpayer honeypot.

Once underway, the Breeder Reactor became a classic juggernaut of the corporate state, protected by the secrecy of the Atomic Energy Commission and its officious patron, the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy. Designed to breed its own
electricity, the project was treated like a military endeavor. It was protected from open debate and any disclosure or oversight, lest it give credence to the critics who called it a “technological turkey” that bred runaway economic costs instead of electricity. These critics' doubts were enough to persuade President Jimmy Carter—who was a nuclear engineer—to cancel the Breeder because of the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation. The Breeder lobby, however, continued to push to restart the project through Congress while Ronald Reagan was president.

But in the early eighties, Arkansas Democratic senator Dale Bumpers had the political nerve to encourage a liberal/conservative coalition. Until then, environmentalists were active, but conservatives had not focused on the issue intensely, since it was somewhat distant from their usual concerns. Once they did focus, they formed a group with liberals, which named itself the Taxpayers Coalition Against Clinch River. That umbrella organization included the Friends of the Earth, the National Taxpayers Union, our Public Citizen's Congress Watch, the Council for a Competitive Economy, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, the National Audubon Society, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and the Natural Resources Defense Council.
³

Washington hands saw this as an improbable combination of Left and Right. Members of Congress—who might have been reluctant to support the campaign—realized this combo gave them cover from their ideological and political opponents back home, since they couldn't be targeted as identifying with either a liberal or a conservative side of the issue. Meanwhile, estimates of the project's total costs were going through the roof. Congress's own General Accounting Office reported them as $8.8 billion. A House subcommittee predicted a cost range from $5.3 billion to $9 billion. Both figures were a few light years from the official $400 million estimate in 1970, even allowing for inflation.
⁴

The anti-Breeder coalition was uniquely operational. We met regularly; this was not a mere petition drive or open letter to
Congress with no follow-up. The conservative/libertarian members reached their fiscally conservative friends in Congress with arguments about runaway costs, while the environmental/consumer groups were arguing that Clinch River would create a “plutonium economy,” which would generate large quantities of that lethal product in forms that could be diverted for crude nuclear weapons.

On October 26, 1983, this coalition won a stunning victory. The Senate voted 56–40 against any further funding for the Clinch River Breeder Reactor project, thus beating a furious lobbying effort from a corporate–government combination on the other side.
⁵
The civic coalition against the Breeder Reactor triumphed over the corporate state. On the losers' side, no one was more taken aback than the project's leading booster, the powerful, well-connected Republican senator from Tennessee, Howard Baker. On the winners' side, archlibertarian Fred Smith, one of the coalition leaders, told me that the decisive impact came from the linkage of economic and security arguments, together with the energetic idealisms of the two camps.

Three years later, another Left-Right coalition broke through the immense lobby of government contractors to enact a revised False Claims Act with the False Claims Amendment Act of 1986. In the words of its key sponsors, Republican senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Democratic congressman Howard Berman of California, the 1986 law “provides a means and an incentive for reporting fraud against the public treasury. For thousands of individual whistle-blowers, it offers the only alternative to fearful silence or the near certainty of terrible consequence. It protects and rewards those with the courage to cast their light in dark places. It levels the playing field in the contest between corporate greed and personal conscience.”
⁶

The act was first proposed by public interest lawyer John Phillips, and groups interested in protecting taxpayer dollars and assets came from both conservative and liberal camps. Phillips made the rounds on Capitol Hill and found support from Republicans and
Democrats whose votes passed the legislation in the House and in the Senate. Conscientious whistle-blowers began to come forward to expose tens of billions of dollars in corporate fraud on government agencies from the Pentagon to the Department of Health and Human Services. These silent-no-more patriots were compensated with a share of the recoveries secured by the Justice Department, which partnered with them. By 2012 more than $40 billion had been recovered by the act, of which over $21 billion was the result of the whistle-blower protections and incentives that were enacted.
⁷

As Grassley and Berman declared, by making greed pay the price and integrity receive the rewards, deterrence was given a lift. They noted studies that estimated that the fraud deterred “runs into the many hundreds of billions of dollars.”

These clear-cut victories led some of us to wonder what other working coalitions could be forged between what the media chose to call “unlikely allies.” There was no lack of opportunities in the following years. Outspoken verbal support from both sides for drug decriminalization, fighting corporate welfare, reducing military spending, stopping further media concentration, opposing taxpayer-funded stadiums and arenas, and challenging excessively invasive scanning by airport x-ray machines were just a few of such common stands taken by prominent leaders and organizations. Taking on a bizarre taboo, Congressman Ron Paul, with a dozen Democrats and Republicans, sponsored a bill to legalize the growing of industrial hemp, a long fiber used to produce food, paper, clothing, car parts, and fuel. Hemp is stigmatized because it is unfairly associated with marijuana. What makes the whole issue bizarre is that it has been legal for years to import industrial hemp from countries like Canada, China, Romania, and France, yet we can't grow it here.

Many major changes can be accomplished in areas where self-described liberals, conservatives, libertarians, and progressives all agree on the goal, not because they are pushed to these stands
by pressure groups, but because they feel it is the right thing to do. But beyond words, it requires what Republican Bruce Fein calls “advocacy without an agenda.”
⁸

But there are also major obstacles to such convergences. Notwithstanding common ground for many in the Left-Right spectrum over such matters as sovereignty-shredding global trade agreements, Wall Street bailouts, the overweening expansion of Federal Reserve power, and the serious intrusions of the USA PATRIOT Act against freedom and privacy, barriers to the transition from thought to action come from numerous directions and in many forms.