Lucas,
People occasionally ask me, "How do you keep doing the work?"
"Don't you feel overwhelmed by the odds and all that needs to be done?"
"Isn't it hopeless?"
Now, I have to admit that I look at what passes for conventional wisdom in Washington, D.C., and sometimes wonder about things.
Financial deregulation enabled Wall Street to speculate wildly and fuel a housing bubble, activities that eventually crashed the U.S. and global economy. So why does anyone take seriously claims of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other Big Business dogmatists when they say that the solution to the jobs crisis is less regulation?
CEOs of many of the nation's richest companies are stalking the halls of Congress, spreading fear about an artificial "fiscal cliff" as a ruse to cut Social Security and Medicare — enormously popular, effective and critical programs that the rich just have never and will never like. These same CEOs, by the way, have pension benefits averaging $9 million awaiting them upon retirement. How do they have credibility talking about the "shared sacrifices" we allegedly all should be making?
As Hurricane Sandy devastated New York and New Jersey, the governor of New York stated the obvious truth that, due to climate change, this kind of disaster — and worse — is going to be ever more common. But as the flooding recedes and the TV cameras leave, where is the debate about new initiatives to avert climate catastrophe?
So, yes, I do sometimes wonder.
But I never feel hopeless or overwhelmed.
I know that Public Citizen makes amazing things happen, even in the face of seemingly overwhelming odds.
We boast an unparalleled record of achievement over the past four decades, demonstrating we can face down corporations on big-picture issues — and win.
Indeed, part of our formula for success is refusing to be constrained by what seems feasible. We identify problems and design campaigns to solve them. Those efforts often seem chimerical at first. But then we reshape the boundaries of what seems reasonable; and then, more often than seems possible, we win.
We do that by being strategic, through impeccable research, by confronting corporate power directly and by working with our remarkable and expanding membership and support base.
For over four decades, we've done great things. I'm excited about the challenges and opportunities awaiting us in 2013. This message is about Public Citizen's work program for the coming year.
There's a lot we plan to do!
And because I want to tell you about a lot of it, this message is uncommonly long. Please read on.
Actually, one more thing first. Among public interest groups, Public Citizen has an unusually broad portfolio. You may wonder how we decide what to do.
When we're choosing advocacy priorities, we look for areas where we: have substantial expertise (there are many); can exercise a leadership role; offer a strategic approach; and make a difference in people's lives.
We do work in a disparate range of issue areas — it's one of the things I love about the organization.
But there is a single unifying theme connecting almost all of our work: excessive corporate power.
We identify excessive corporate power as the most serious threat to the values and policy objectives we most treasure: justice, health and safety, ecological sustainability, a functioning democracy, freedom and equality.
Our concern with corporate power shapes everything from how we operate (e.g., we don't take corporate donations) to how we analyze issues. So, for example, when we ask why the richest nation in the world doesn't provide health care to all as a matter of right, we focus immediately on the health insurance industry.
What follows here is a partial overview of our 2013 agenda. Because we work on so many issues, this sketch passes over a great deal of what we have planned. But again, as you'll see, it's very extensive nonetheless. Bear with me — this is important.
DEMOCRACY CORRUPTED BY WEALTH
The U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission is undermining the functioning of our already fragile democracy.
In the 2012 election, a tiny slice of giant corporations and super-rich people poured hundreds of millions of dollars into independent organizations that dominated the electoral landscape and took over the airwaves with an unprecedented rash of attack ads. These independent organizations now aim to conduct lobbying campaigns against the backdrop of threats to spends millions in elections against those who oppose them; and, learning lessons from 2012, look to invest more in grassroots mobilization for future elections.
We simply cannot permit this to go on.
We see real opportunity to win political disclosure rules in 2013. Disclosure is a very modest step, but if we can shine a light on the political dark money, most brand-name corporations will probably pull back from electoral spending. They don't want to accept the reputational risk.
We are strongly encouraging the Obama administration to issue an executive order requiring all government contractors to disclose their campaign spending. The direct purpose of such an order would be to prevent contracting corruption. But because most large corporations are government contractors, the executive order would achieve significant disclosure of corporate campaign spending.
We also help lead a 70-organization coalition that includes traditional pro-democracy organizations as well as socially responsible investment funds, unions, environmental groups and others. With the coalition, we are pressing hard for the Securities and Exchange Commission to require publicly traded companies to disclose their political spending to investors (and the public). The SEC has now received more than 500,000 comments calling for a shareholder disclosure rule! With continuing pressure, we are hopeful the agency will act.
Disclosure is only a small step, of course. Fixing the money-and-politics mess requires both a system of public financing of public elections — around which we hope to see progress in the 2013 Congress — and a constitutional amendment to reverse Citizens United and other Supreme Court decisions.
Along with allied organizations, Public Citizen has been at the forefront of the movement for a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United. We have gained very considerable momentum over the past year, far exceeding our expectations. We now have 125 members of Congress, 1 President (!), 11 states, 350 cities and towns, and more than 100 national organizations supporting a constitutional amendment.
Going forward, we aim to continue our priorities of widening the civil society coalition supporting an amendment to overturn Citizens United and winning more state and local resolutions calling for an amendment. We anticipate shifting more attention to Congress gradually, as we begin the direct effort of developing sufficient congressional support to win an amendment.
We don't have any illusions about the difficulty of this project. But nor do we have any doubts about the necessity of winning a constitutional amendment to reclaim our democracy.
We also see substantial importance in building a public consensus that basic propositions of Citizens United and related decisions — that corporations are entitled to the same constitutional rights as people, that the First Amendment prevents limits on campaign spending, that political spending does not distort and corrupt the political process — defy common sense and are unacceptable. There's no doubt that the public already shares these views — lots of polling data says so — but it has to be expressed strongly and visibly, with power and determination.
If we can do that — and our movement is making huge strides in this regard — then we'll help reshape the overall political culture.
HEALTH CARE IS A RIGHT
Despite the vast popularity of Medicare and its unparalleled record of success, Congress is now seriously considering undermining the existing Medicare system. They would slash benefits for the elderly and leave older Americans at the mercy of the for-profit insurance industry.
We aim to prevent that.
CEOs are parading to Washington, saying we must cut Medicare because it's bankrupting the country. But that's exactly upside down.
Medicare saves money, eliminating all the waste associated with the for-profit insurance industry. And, of course, Medicare provides coverage to everyone eligible. In stark contrast, the for-profit insurers condition care on ability to pay, and then still try to deny care to those who have paid.
The solution to our country's health care crisis isn't cutting Medicare — it's strengthening Medicare and expanding it to cover everyone.
This is going to be a tough fight, but the overwhelming evidence is on our side. Working with allies, we're hopeful that we can defend and strengthen existing Medicare and, in the process, prepare the way for the long-overdue expansion of Medicare into a single-payer system for all.
Meanwhile, we will continue our longstanding, peerless work on drug and medical device safety, pressing for the removal of unsafe drugs and devices from the market, and pushing for improvements in FDA operations. In 2012, our lobbying and advocacy made the new medical device safety law much better than it otherwise would have been, with some of the most troubling proposals urged by industry excluded and new provisions that will improve medical device safety added.
We also urged the FDA to take numerous dangerous products off the market. Example: Aricept 23, a high-dose version of the Alzheimer's drug Aricept. The high-dose version has not been shown to be more effective than the older, lower-dose version — but it is associated with much worse, potentially fatal, side effects. Drug companies Pfizer and Esai sought approval for the higher-dose version because the patent monopoly was expiring on the older version. On Election Day, the FDA rejected our petition. But our record on these things is that time usually proves us right, with federal regulators often acting very belatedly in response to our early, evidence-based warnings.
And, in the wake of the meningitis outbreak associated with unsafe conditions at a New England compounding pharmacy, we've led the charge for the FDA to use its enforcement powers to crack down on compounding pharmacies that are operating as commercial-scale drug manufacturers. These companies have, in effect, operated in a regulatory black hole, escaping meaningful FDA oversight — despite the FDA's existing authority over them — because they pretend to be mom-and-pop pharmacies formulating drugs for individual patients.
We're also going to continue advocacy to make the workplace safer and healthier. The Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that over 3 million workers are injured on the job each year. More than 4,000 workers die from these injuries. As many as 50,000 additional deaths occur annually as a result of occupational illnesses. Among other initiatives, we're going to press states to adopt rules requiring construction companies to demonstrate strong safety records as a precondition of obtaining government contracts.
This is exciting and important work, I hope you'll agree. And I'm just getting started. Keep reading.
THE MYTH OF "FREE TRADE"
The implementation of NAFTA in 1994 and the WTO in 1995 unleashed a new era of corporate globalization. While branded as "trade" agreements, these pacts formalized a supra-national system of binding global governance that provides multinational corporations new rights, limits governments' abilities to regulate in the public interest, and undermines wide swaths of domestic consumer, environmental, workplace and other vital safeguards.
Pacts like NAFTA even elevate individual corporations to the same status as the sovereign nations signing the agreements, allowing corporations to sue governments in international tribunals to demand cash payments for any policies that they claim undermine their new rights.
In 2012, negotiations heated up over the most potentially dangerous trade agreement yet, known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). If completed as envisaged, the TPP would be a NAFTA-on-steroids encumbering every country on the Pacific Rim. Now this negotiation to further expand on NAFTA's outrageous corporate rights includes the original NAFTA countries — the United States, Mexico and Canada — plus Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, New Zealand, Australia, Peru and Chile. The top U.S. trade official said nothing would make him happier than for China to join. Japan, Russia, Korea, Thailand and others are also possibilities.
While 600 official U.S. trade advisors who represent mainly corporate interests have access to draft TPP texts and a special role in the negotiations, Congress, the public and the press have been cut out.
Working with allies from around the Pacific, we have dragged the TPP into the sunlight and begun to awaken the public to its risks. And, at every negotiating round, including three in the United States in 2012, we have ensured that inside and outside the official venues, government officials are challenged with protests, technical presentations, and clever stunts and signs.
As the details of the proposal have emerged, political pushback is building in various countries to an array of extreme TPP proposals. In fact, the deal may not be signed as planned by the end of 2012.
In 2013, we will employ the same inside-outside strategy — combining technical analysis and advocacy inside the process with public education and creative organizing tactics outside — that has succeeded so far.
We cannot let the TPP formalize corporate rule worldwide.
The more the public knows about the TPP, the less viable it becomes. In June, we leapt into action when the text of the Investment Chapter — which gives foreign corporations the right to sue governments in foreign tribunals over regulations they allege impinge on their expected profits — was leaked. Thanks to our expertise on NAFTA's extreme investor rights, we could quickly generate a comprehensive yet accessible analysis that showed how the TPP proposal replicates the failings of the NAFTA model and gives corporations even more rights. This leak and publicity was a major stick in the spokes of TPP negotiations.
Another major hang-up in the negotiations has been the U.S. insistence on pushing pro-monopoly proposals on behalf of Big Pharma. We have educated lawmakers and officials in other countries about the impact of such measures on drug price affordability, and how expanded patent and other monopoly protections will undermine their ability to deliver essential medicines to their people.
We have worked with members of Congress and government officials around the world to alert them to the dangers of the TPP. Their growing opposition to the corporations-rule-the-world version of the TPP is essential.
TPP negotiations will intensify even more in 2013. It will be a race against time. If the extreme secrecy remains and the public in TPP countries does not demand accountability, a deal could be reached before most people even know the damaging consequences. Alternatively, if the word spreads, it will not be politically viable to finish a NAFTA-on-steriods TPP.
Meanwhile, we are on the offense at the World Trade Organization, where more than a decade of our relentless campaigning helped derail an effort to expand the WTO's power and scope. Now we are pushing forward on a WTO "turnaround" — trying to fix the existing rules. One such effort will result in a debate next year at the WTO about how the international body's existing rules could threaten key financial regulations. This topic is now formally on the WTO's agenda.
And, in Congress, we will be working with allies to block a revival of Fast Track anti-democratic trade authority. Fast Track, which delegates away Congress' constitutional authority over trade policy, is how we got into damaging deals like NAFTA and the WTO. President Obama has suggested he will ask for this retrograde trade power-grab authority. We have worked with congressional champions to create an alternative trade authority, to ensure that trade agreements are in line with the values and priorities of the American people, in areas ranging from not promoting more job offshoring to ensuring strong environmental, financial and food safety rules and affordable medicines.
I'm glad you're still with me.
CURTAILING CORPORATE WRONGDOERS
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business associations, and their friends in Congress, are now carrying out a major campaign to roll back or block an array of health, safety, environmental, financial and other regulatory protections.
Over the past year, with allies, we defeated far-reaching anti-regulatory bills that would have blocked ALL new regulation.
We also managed to derail more reasonable-sounding legislation — and therefore more likely to pass — that would have handcuffed financial and other key regulators.
Unfortunately, this fight isn't going away. Over the next year, we're going to continue our effective coalition and lobbying efforts. We're also going to be involved in more litigation, including to force agencies to issue rules on which they have backtracked in the face of industry pressure.
Above all, perhaps, we're going to push to redefine the regulatory debate. Big Business has done a good job of framing the issue as about jobs — despite loads of evidence that regulation does not affect employment levels and the very obvious fact that it was lack of financial regulation that triggered the Great Recession.
Our aim is to reframe the debate by focusing on corporate wrongdoing. We anticipate the introduction of strong legislation to crack down on corporate crime and wrongdoing, and that will be a key vehicle to move attention from the imaginary problem of unreasonable burdens on Big Business to the very real and pervasive problems caused by out-of-control corporations. Along with our legislative push, we will emphasize that corporate wrongdoing has real-life victims.
ACCESS TO JUSTICE
The civil justice system is the most important, least credited, countervailing force to excessive corporate power.
The courts afford victims a venue to seek individualized justice and impose a basic level of accountability on those with the power to inflict harm.
Do wrong to someone, and you must pay for the damage you cause.
The civil justice system gives victims a right through the discovery process to find out what corporate wrongdoers knew and when they knew it. In countless instances, the discovery process has yielded information that drives public opinion, gives insight to regulators and pushes the regulators to act.
The civil justice system is a non-regulatory, self-generating system that establishes rules for appropriate corporate conduct, forces corporations to internalize the costs of the harms they cause, punishes those who behave egregiously, and drives other systems to restrain corporate power.
Not surprisingly, corporations hate it. (At least when used by victims of their wrongdoing; they are quite happy to use the courts against individuals or to settle business disputes.)
For more than three decades, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Big Business groups have been working to limit access to justice. They've had some significant success, to be sure. But Public Citizen's advocacy and litigation has been key to preserving a functioning civil justice system. We continue to defend the existing system and to expand access to justice.
We're involved in numerous important cases that directly affect access to courts by victims of corporate wrongdoing. We serve as co-counsel in Genesis Healthcare v. Symczyk, for example, a case on which the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments yesterday. That case raises the issue of whether a corporate defendant can end a Fair Labor Standards Act collective action simply by making a settlement offer to the named plaintiff in the case for the value of the named plaintiff's individual claim. If the Court says corporate defendants can end collective actions in that way, it will be much more difficult for employees to bring such actions.
We're working in Congress to make sure that corporations don't strip away individuals' rights to go to court. Over the past year, for example, we've helped block legislation that would limit patients' legal rights against hospitals, nursing homes, drug and device manufacturers, and doctors in medical negligence cases.
We're also working to stop companies from using sneaky language in form contracts — the kind you enter into with a rental car company, credit card company, cell phone provider and much more — to deny consumers access to the courts. These provisions, called forced arbitration clauses, say that if the company harms you, you have to bring your case in a private arbitration system, not in the public courts. And they commonly deny you the ability to join together in a class-action suit with others similarly harmed. Right now, our focus on forced arbitration is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which has authority under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform bill to ban such provisions.
Remember when I said at the start of this message that this overview only provides a partial accounting of what we do? I'm leaving out most of what our Litigation Group does.
But let me just note these two facts: The Litigation Group has argued 62 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court; and, through co-counseling, holding moot courts, and amicus briefs, our attorneys are involved in roughly one-third of the cases that come before the High Court.
HOLDING WALL STREET ACCOUNTABLE
More than two years after passage of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, Wall Street remains out of control.
Our challenge is to push for robust implementation of Dodd-Frank requirements, defend the rules that have been issued, and build support for more far-reaching measures, including breaking up the mega financial institutions.
Thanks to industry pressure, congressional meddling, insufficient resources, bad court decisions and also insufficient agency zeal, most of the rules that Dodd-Frank mandated have yet to be issued. We're going to push not just to get the rules out the door, but for tough standards that will crack down on Wall Street abuses.
Key areas of concern will be winning new protections through the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, reining in out-of-control CEO and top executive pay, and pushing for meaningful implementation of the Volcker Rule, which aims to partially reinstate Glass-Steagall-type rules — the Depression-era law whose repeal helped pave the way for the financial crisis.
We will be heavily involved in litigation to defend Dodd-Frank rules that have been issued. It is now apparent that Wall Street and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce intend to sue and block almost every Dodd-Frank rule issued. They recently successfully challenged a modest rule that would have lessened speculation in oil markets, for example. And they are challenging some rules that merely require reporting of company operations as a violation of corporate First Amendment rights! We'll be involved in these suits.
We're not only going to play defense, however.
The Wall Street reform legislation almost totally fails to address the problem of industry concentration. This past year, we called on financial regulators to use their authority under the Dodd-Frank Act to break up Bank of America. Going forward, we'll keep pushing on Bank of America, but also working on the broader policy front, by advocating legislation like Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown's Safe, Accountable, Fair & Efficient (SAFE) Banking Act. The basic idea is to cap the size of big banks and break up the largest. There is a very strong undercurrent of bipartisan public and congressional support for this approach; we intend to make real headway in 2013.
We will also intensify campaigning around a financial speculation tax. You pay sales tax on a cup of coffee, why isn't there a sales tax on stock and derivative transactions? If there were, we could raise hundreds of billions of dollars, with a very progressive tax.
If you look at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce website (don't bother), you'll see that the leading Big Business trade association takes on for itself a far-reaching agenda. That's one reason why I think it makes sense for Public Citizen to have such a broad agenda. If we aim to curb corporations' power meaningfully, we have to look broadly at the many places from which their power emanates.
That's another reason I'm giving you so much to read today.
RUNAWAY COMMERCIALISM
It's easy enough to mock commercialism run amok. (Tattooed advertisements, anyone?) But it would be a serious mistake to dismiss this rampant commercialism as farce or mere annoyance.
Excess commercialism encourages needless and excess consumption, on a scale incompatible with a sustainable society. When the products being marketed are inherently unhealthy, risky or subject to abuse, people and society are worse off when the "Buy More" message works, as it typically does. Think direct-to-consumer drug ads. Or the marketing of junk food. Or the pushing of dangerous mortgage loans through deceptive marketing efforts.
And the problem goes beyond sales. The commercial takeover of public space intrudes corporate values into the public sphere. It is bad enough when the mall replaces the commons as a place for people to meet. But now the commons itself is frequently being corporatized and commercialized. Commercialism degrades and undermines civic values, and offers instead the idea that everything is for sale. Intruding ever deeper into the lives of children, commercialism teaches the next generation to value and engage with others based not on who they are, but on what they have.
Public Citizen's Commercial Alert project aims to keep the commercial culture within its proper sphere, and to prevent it from exploiting children and subverting the higher values of family, community, environmental integrity and democracy.
Our campaign on infant formula marketing is designed to stop formula makers from marketing in hospitals and other health care facilities. While there's a medical consensus on the importance of promoting breastfeeding, the formula makers seek to cloak their commercial promotions in hospital garb, making it seem like hospitals, doctors and nurses endorse the use of their products. We've launched a campaign to get the formula makers out of health care facilities and to encourage hospitals to refuse to permit their facilities to be used for inappropriate marketing. The initiative is helping push a growing move toward baby-friendly hospitals; we'll be amping up the campaign significantly in 2013.
We're also tracking a rise in commercial incursions into schools, and pressing school boards to stand strong against advertising firms and their deceptive claims to offer new revenue streams for cash-strapped education systems. In 2012, we issued a report that showed no major school district was raising more than .03 percent of its overall budget from advertising — a pittance that comes at a high cost in degrading schools and conveying inappropriate messages and values to kids. Covered in The New York Times and elsewhere, the report is helping schools reject the schemes of advertising hucksters.
It will not be easy to reverse commercialism's march deeper and deeper into every recess of society and interpersonal interaction, but it can be done. To take one important example, we've made dramatic gains over the last decade in curbing tobacco marketing to kids.
The world can live with tattoo advertisements. But it cannot tolerate an unbridled commercialism riding roughshod over public health, authentic interpersonal relations, civic values and planetary well-being.
CLIMATE CHANGE AND ENERGY
We face no bigger challenge as a species than averting catastrophic climate change.
So far, we're failing.
The reasons have absolutely nothing to do with lack of information. Although the complexity of climate science means there's lots we don't know, the most important matters are well established: The human-caused release of carbon and other pollutants is warming the planet.
We're already suffering severe consequences from climate change, though they are generally unrecognized.
But existing drought, hurricane damage, dried up lakes, food shortages and more are nothing compared to what's coming if we don't fundamentally alter course.
The reason we're not is simple: the economic and political power of the polluting industries (including, of course, their ability to wage effective propaganda campaigns).
Public Citizen has been prescient in urging investment for the needed clean energy revolution; pioneering in our advocacy for a decentralized model of energy generation and distribution that returns power to communities from centralized utilities; prophetic in our warnings of the dangers of energy deregulation (think Enron); and proudly uncompromising in identifying and taking on the oil, gas and coal corporate barriers to a clean energy transformation.
Our Texas office continues to wage successful fights to expand dirty energy production in Texas, helping stop new coal plant construction and now working aggressively to stop construction of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. Over the next year, the tar sands controversy will heat up; and whether the climate-threatening pipeline is built will depend not just on decisions in Washington, D.C., but actions on the ground in Texas (including a decision over whether land can be taken from property owners and given over to the pipeline companies). We're going to do everything we can to stop the pipeline.
Over the next year, we aim to build on our achievements and intensify our work on climate change. We see opportunities on two fronts.
First, the Environmental Protection Agency is under court order to issue climate change rules. Industry is fearful of what the EPA may do, and this is going to spur a new congressional debate over climate change policy. We think progress can be made in advocating for a comprehensive approach that puts a fee on carbon pollution and returns a dividend to citizens.
Second, we plan to organize consumers to debunk the dirty energy industry's policy arguments. The industry claims we should construct the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline or open new offshore drilling because it will reduce energy prices. These claims are untrue. Industry also says that measures to avert climate change will overly burden consumers. Also untrue.
However, veracity aside, there's no question these messages have had an impact on the policy debate. We plan on launching a much stepped-up consumer truth-telling campaign in 2013.
MAKING CHANGE HAPPEN
Public Citizen was established with the explicit purpose of engaging all branches of government and employing any and all citizen advocacy tools: public education and mobilization, research and exposure, effective use of the media, litigation, and lobbying. At Public Citizen, all of these advocacy strategies are second nature, and we deploy them as needed as part of integrated campaigns.
We know that research breakthroughs, incisive arguments, tough lobbying, effective use of media and excellent lawyering can change the terms of debate and win big victories.
But we also know that the biggest victories don't come just from being clever or principled.
They come from mobilizing the public.
It's when we do things together that the "impossible" becomes possible, the "unreasonable" moves to the mainstream, and we effect progress toward a more just, democratic, healthier and sustainable country and planet.
All right, that's about it. If you made it this far, let me ask you to take one more step with me.
It's clear that we have our work cut out for us. If you want to help, one thing you can do right now is make a generous contribution to support all we will do together.
It's that time of year, and I'm counting on you.
Thank you for sticking with me.
Onward,
Robert Weissman
President, Public Citizen