And discouraged about the future. They feel themselves helpless. They feel theyre powerless. Theyre cynical about politicians, which, of course, just strengthens politicians vulnerability to powerful corporate and other lobbyists in washingtonon, d. C. When i lost a lot of friends in traffic accidents as a young man, i looked into how they could have been saved. D. And they could hae been saved by seatbelts and they could have been saved by a a whe series of engineering devices that we now take for granted in our cars c collapsing steering columns, better r brakes, betr tires, head restraints, padded dash panels. All of these and more were developed by engineers a long, long time ago, but they werent applied because the companies, as somethose of you who are a little older remember the companies were selling style and horsepepower. Ththey werent selling engineeeering integegri, and as a result, hundreds of thousands of people were killed, and millions were injured in ways that todays carswhich could have been yesterdays carscould have prevented. Now, when i went to washington, i was hitchhiking to washington to try to get Congress Interested in holding hearings, and it never occurred to me that i could not take on General Motors and defeat them because i believed i had the facts. They were certainly understandable by pepeople; everybody drove, everybody knew friends or relatives who were killed or injured. And everybody knew that American Ingenuity was pretty good, that they didnt have to build psychosexual dreamboats that could kill you in a 10 or 15mileanhour colollision because your head would hit sharp edges on the dash panel with lethal impact. And i remember i was hitchhiking once and a truck driver picked me up right outside delaware, and he said, where are you going . And i i said, im going to washington to go see some members of congress. And he said, what for . I said, because i want to federally regulate the Auto Companies so they have to meet safety standards. I thought he was going to let me out on the road right then and there. [scattered chuckling] but, you see, i never exaggerated the power of these ccorporations because, if you exaggerate their powerand they are powerful a and they know exactly what they want. They want to control the environment of their business activitieies so that they c cane more money and get more bonuses and, perhrhaps, give more didividends to their shareholde, and they do that in a very strategic way to this day. They strategically want to control the environment that they operate in. If the governments part of the environment, theyey want to put their officials in high positions in government. They want to contribute Campaign Money to members of congress. And if consumers are a potential drag, then they want to have more exciting, emotional advertisements and try to get them to buy their cars. And if the labor is considered an obstacle, well, theyll try to make their influence known ththere. And if they dont wanto pay a certain level of taxes, they will shape and strategically plan the tax. And if they want to have members of congress who are receptive to them, they will enter through their executives and Political Action committees, the Campaign Cash that is needed. And if they want the engineering schools in our country not to be too curious about why automotive engineering was never risen to the level of a ph. D. It was all civil or mechanicaland if they didnt want m. I. T. Or caltech to research the lack of Safety Engineering design in cars, well, they just give a lot of money to m. I. T. Or caltech. And i saw that personally when i was trying to get engineering help for my work on unsafe at any speed. But i never exaggerated their powewer becaue i had a very, very realistic view of the power of people. And i realize that corporations, for all ththeir power, they dot have a single vote, and that what members of congress wanted wwere votes. A and so people bee alert and ththey began to rereae that it wasnt always the nut behind the wheel in crashes and injuries on the highway, that the engineering sysystems of highways and vehicles were very critical in minimizing crashes and, if they occurred, minimizing their injuries, such asas a seatbelt, then the Public Interest would prevail. Now, that served me pretty well because i had my feet on the ground and i knew i had a lot of work to do. I had to get the Technical Community behind what we were doing, i had to get it out to the media, i h had to hae contacts with senators and representatives who remembered where they came from and had a pro bono publico in their mind, and i had to have some contacts with the white house. All that happepened, and we got more done in 10 years on the consumer, environmental, and worker safety front, under freedom of information front, on support for science and technology for the people, in terms of pushing for more benign forms of energy, pushing for detection instrumentation to detect coaldustst levels in mines, for example, pushing for safer automotive technologies, aviation technologies. And in doing that, i thought we were going to really go to the next level. And what was the next level . The next level was to have full Health Insurance for everyrybody; nobody out, everyby in, with free choice of doctor and hospital. That would have saved about a million american lives in the last 20 years. Where do i get that . The Harvard Medical School study showed and this is a peerreviewed study in the journal of American Public health, december 2009that because people could not afford Health Insurance to get diagnosed and trtreated in time,e, 45,000 americans die every year, 80800 a week. Completely preventable. Nobody dies in canada or japan or taiwan or germany or england or sweden because they dont have Health Insurance. That could have been accomplished by a Democratic Party as good today as it was in the 1960swasnt that great, but byby comparison, it was much betterand a Republican Party that had some liberal elements in it in 1960 compared to todays draconian conglomeration of political ignorance, arrogance, stupidity, and cruelty in congresess. [applause] so. I can footnote all this if we had time. [laughter] now, the first thing we have to ask ourselves is, can 1 1 of te American Peopleone out of a hundred; lets say 3 Million Peopleorganized back home where you are, and Congress Watchdog groups steer congress along the whole line of redirections that a majority of the people support . A majority of the people support full medicare for all, including a majority of doctors and nurses. A majority of people support raising the minimum wage to levels of 1968, adjusted for inflation. It would be 10 now an hour; its, federal, 7. 25; a little higher he i in california. A majority of people want law and order against corporate crime, fraud, and abuse, whether its wall streetstyle or houstonstylyle. A majority of people want a tax system that does not provide perverse incentives, horrendous complexity, waste of our time; a tax system that starts with the principle that we should tax first, before we tax labor, that which society likes the least or dislikes the most. So wewe should first tax pollution. Even exxon prefers a carbon tax. We should tax speculation on w wall street, which has reached horrendously frantic levels, and computerdriven derivatives 700 trillion last year. Trillion dollars lastst year. And theres no sales tax. Here in california, what do you do . You go buy furniture, clothes, you pay whatat, 7 . 9. 8 sales tax . Tomorrow, somebody can buy a hundred Million Dollars of intel derivatives and pay not a cent. Thats not fair. We had a transaction tax in this country in 1905, and it was in the thirties undnder roosevelt. And then, for a variety of reasons, it was phased out. But do wwe really want that kind of specucution . No. So one way you do its to tax it. At one half of 1 and other countries are thinking about this, too, and japan already has one, small one. One half of 1 will bring in n 300 billion. Isnt that preferable to taxing work . Or you should tax corporate crime morere. We shoud tax addictive prproductsts more. Things that we dont like, we should tax before we tax labor, things that we presumably like, which is work. A majority of the people dont believe in unconstitutional wars against countries that dont threaten us. And 7. [applause] 70 of the American People, even though the propaganda is on the other side, and we dont have an Opposition Party that is on the side of 70 of the American People, want out of afghanistan yesterday. Even though both parties were complplicit, but mostly the republicans, in invading iraq under bushcheney on a platform of falsehoods, deceptions, and coveruups which are now a part of american history, incontrovertible, half of the country was against it just on their own intuition, their own what are we doing . Iraq doesnt threaten us. Its run by a frightened didictator surrounded by a dilapidated army who we supported to invade iran years ago and who was our ally because he was anticommunist, and wed give him lists of suspected communists, who he slaughtered. He was surrounded by much more powerful neighbors. Why are we invading . I mean, people figured it out that way, some of them, half of them. 300 retired generals, admirals, National Security officials, famous diplolomats, including jim baker and brent scscowcroft and marine general zinni and the head of the former National Security agency, bill odom, spoke out and wrote against invading iraq before it happened in march 2003. A majority of the people in this country think that theres something inflated about our military budget. [scattered laughter] all right. Well, theyve read the pentagon audits and the gao reports and the 60 minute exposes and so on. Its horrendously inflated. Waste, fraud, abuse is only part of it. Were still building costoverrun military Weapons Systems dedesigned for the sovit union era of hostility. Like, the f22 should never be built. You could put it on this stage. Thats how much 200 million of elecectronics cost, profit in overruns. Why are we building more submarines, Nuclear Submarines . One trident submarinenuclear warheads can destroy 200 cities. Thats beforore it reloads. Why are we building more aircraft carriers, 15 billion a carrier . We got 13. The next country to challenge us is italyly, has two. [laughter] its the military Industrial Complex that eieisenhowower ward us against. People dont like that. Theyd rather have that money go where eisenhower wanted it to go in his famous cross of iron speech that you can look up on the internetapril 1953, when he said, is this the way we want to live . We can wipe out the soviet union. They can wipe us out. And then he did what no other president did. He listed how much a bomber cost, a tank cost, a cruiser cost, and translated it into schools and clinics and Public Transit systems and hospitals. A majority of the people think congress should have skin in their game. This is one which i almost got unanimity on when i was campaigigning. I said, how many of you think, since congressss likes to buck it over to the white house about getting us into war, they dont want to deal with article 1, section 8, which gives them the exclusive right to declare war, how mamany of you think that any Time Congress and the white house want to plunge us into war, constitutionally or unconstitutionally, that immediately all ablebodied and agerelated children and grandchildren of all members oof congress are drafted . [scattered chuckling] see . That would tend to concentrate their deliberations on capitol hill with thorough hearings by the Senate ForeignRelations Committee and the house foreign relation committee, and some of those retired military diplomats security would have been up there with all the media to transmit their views back to the people. How many people here think that we should have civic training courses and civic experiencnce for middleschool d highschool children all over the country . You know, physical education is being dropped alll over the country. Ourr children are getting fatter and fatter, theyre getting more diabetes, they are getting demoralized, it restricts their potential in life at a young age, theyre predisposed to high blood pressure, theyre being exposed by electronic child molesters called Food Processing companies. [scattered chuckling] teaching them how to nag their parents at a very young age to buy junk food, to drink junk drink, while theyre watching violent programs thatat show thm how to kill. A colonel who used to teach at west point, col. Grossman, was so offended by these child programs and vicious toys that he wrote a book called teaching our children to kill. Do you know any parents that arent bothered by that . Do you know any parents who want to have their children exposed to clever ads that nag them . Thats the word thats used for prizewinning ads toward children on madison avenue. It has a a high nag factor. [scattered chuckling] how about restoring our Civil Liberties . You think the majority of the people dont want arrests without charges, throwing people in jail without lawyers, many indefinitely . Invasion of your privacy. Going to your librarian and finding out what books you signed off on. And ifif the libibrarian notifies you, the librarian can be criminally prosecuted under the patriot act. You think a majority of the people want government to be able to invade your home without a warrant and not have to tell you for 72 hours . Theres a huge consensus in this country on ththings that matter when you get down to specifics where they y live, work, play, pray, sleep, and raise their children. Its when its at the abstract level of ideologies that the polarization exists, and those are promoted in order to control peoplpl divide them against one another, divert them. You know, i sometimes meet conservatives who say, im againstwere against government regulation. I say, do you have a car . Yeah. What if the company discovers a serious defect, like a sticking throttle for a million cars, and doesnt tell you, and all of a sudden, your cars are going through other cars and trucks and walls . Do you think the government should force them to do it . Not many people would say, absolutely not. We want the freedom to go through a windshield. [scattered chuckling] you think the American People dont want a Law Enforcement expansion on corporate crime, fraud, and abuse . If you learnrd how few prosecutors there were in the Justice Department against environmental crimes, you wouldnt believe it. Last time i counted, it was 78. 78 lawyers. Can you imagine all the pollution laws that are not being enforced and being violated . Just the water permit laws, for heavens sake, are chronically violated b by water polluters. You know, the double standard in corporate crime is really almost beyond belief. Did a anybody any of you see this, um. This documentary that won the Academy Awards . Im sure some of you did. Here we go. Inside job. Its called inside job. Well, you must have seen the Academy Awards. California, you know. [scattered chuckling] ok, well, the producer, charles ferguson, he won the Academy Award for best documentary in 2011. Hehe goes on the stage, ad the audience is a billion people worldwide, and he says, 3 years after a horrific financial crisis caused by massive fraud, not a single Financial Executive has gone to jail, and thats wrong. Now w look at the contrast. In december 2007, roy brown, a 54yearold homeless man, walked into a a Capital One Bank in shreveport, louisiana, without a visible weapon and told the t teller to give him money. The teller handed him m 3 ststacks of bills, but brown tok only a single hundreddollar bill. He said he was homeless and hungry. The next day, he surrendered d to the police voluntarily, telling them that his mother hadnt raised him that way. He pleaded guilty. You know what he got . 15 years in jail. Wow. 15 years in jail. Happens all over the country. The big boys get off. We are underenforcing the criminal justice laws against corporations. Theres no 3 strikes and ouout for a corporation. No 3 strikikes and out. Theres no probation for a corporation, hardly ever. And the executives, they have shields of law firms to defend themselves. And its getting worse because there were several hundred savingsandloan executives prosecuted, convicted, and sent to jail 20 years ago, and some enron executives were. But they have so gamed the system, the Corporate Lawyers, its extremely difficult to put them in jail. And by the way, if f ty went to jail, they would improve the prospects for prison reform. [laughter] and the food would be better. [laughter] the governments buy almost everything we buy. You know, its called government procurement. They buy food, they buy clothing, they buy motor vehicles, they buy energy. They buy construction materials. And they can do specifications where they can stimulate innovation, and we got airbags that way. The Auto Companies controlled department of transportation under reagan, and we couldnt get airbags. So i went over to the General Services administration, and i said to the administrator, who, luckily