President Obama delivers a campaign speech. (photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images)
18 January 14
ear President Obama:
All the daily decisions and crises you have to
confront must not preclude occasional addresses to the country that rise
to the level of statesmanship, transcending the hurly-burly of politics
and executive branch administration.
There are three areas where the people need the views and vision of their President.
1. A major address on the resources and preconditions
necessary for the government to wage peace as a continual policy of
statecraft and not just sporadic initiatives between waging war or
engaging in other violent conflicts. Consider the enormous disparity of
time, power and money allocated to preparing for or waging military
assaults with what is devoted to prevention of conflict and other
fundamentals of securing the conditions for peace. The tiny U.S. budgets
for nuclear, chemical and biological arms control with the Soviet Union
and other nations over the years have certainly produced positive
returns of incalculable magnitude and importance.
We have military academies but no peace academies.
Vast sums are allocated for research and teaching about war and military
tactics, but very little for peace studies at our schools and
universities. You may wish to meet with former Washington Post
columnist, Colman McCarthy, who teaches peace in the Washington D.C.
area schools and has written pioneering books and articles that include
his compelling arguments for having peace studies adopted in high
schools and colleges around the country (see
http://www.salsa.net/peace/conv/ for more information).
2. Earlier in 2009 and again in 2011 I wrote to urge
you to address a large gathering, in a convenient Washington venue, for
the leaders of nonprofit civic organizations with tens of millions of
members throughout the United States. Not receiving a reply, I sent my
request to the First Lady, Michelle Obama, whose assistant replied
saying you were too busy.
You were, however, not too busy to address many
business groups and also to walk over to the oppositional U.S. Chamber
of Commerce. Well, it is the second term and such a civic gathering
could be scheduled at your convenience. You could use this occasion to
make a major speech on the importance and means of advancing the quality
and quantity of civic groups and their chapters which, taken together,
are major employers. Your advisers could even justify the effort as
stimulating a jobs program by urging larger charitable contributions
from the trillions of dollars of inert money in the hands of the upper
economic classes.
3. Strengthening democratic processes and expanding
democratic institutions and participation by the people are cardinal
functions of the presidency. Indeed, Harvard Law Professor, Richard
Parker in his little, seminal book: Here the People Rule (Harvard
University Press, 1998) argues that the constitution authorizes the
President "to facilitate the political and civic energies of the
people."
A major address on this topic should be right up your
experiential alley from both your early experience in Chicago of
observing and confronting the power structures' many forms of exclusion
and mistreatment of the populace and your more recent accommodation to
that power structure and its influence over Congress.
As has been said, democracy is not a spectator sport.
It requires a motivated citizenry, along with rights, remedies, and
mechanisms that facilitate people banding together as candidates,
voters, workers, taxpayers, consumers and communities. Concentration of
power and wealth in the hands of the few who decide for the many is the
great destroyer of any society's democratic functions. It was Justice
Louis Brandeis who, memorably, stated that, "We can either have
democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in
the hands of a few, but we can't have both." And another well-regarded
jurist, Judge Learned Hand declared, "If we are to keep our democracy,
there must be one commandment: thou shalt not ration justice."
As "politics" is seen by more people as a dirty word
and as the people move from cynicism about political institutions to
greater withdrawal from them, including public meetings, primaries,
elections and referenda, they need a president who addresses these
disabling symptoms of a weakening democratic society from the local to
the state to the national levels of our political economy.
Such an address will have positive reverberations
beyond the general public.
Depending on your scope, recommendations and
announcements, it will reach the youth of our country, our high schools,
universities, workplaces and professional schools. Why it may even
affect the moribund, technical routines of the Harvard Law Review (where
you were president in 1990) as well as other law schools, bar
associations and lawyers who aspire to higher estimates of their own
professional significance (see my remarks "The Majesty of the Law Needs Magisterial Lawyers"
before the Connecticut Bar Association June 17, 2013). If law means
justice, as it should, then the rule of law needs presidential
refurbishing to strengthen the fiber of our democracy.
I hope you will see the merit of these three
suggestions. A copy of this letter is being sent to the First Lady,
Michelle Obama, whose staff may be responsive in a different manner.
I look forward to your reaction.
Sincerely yours,
Ralph Nader
Sincerely yours,
Ralph Nader
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