Becoming the Party of Change

By Howard Dean, AlterNet. Posted June 2, 2005.

Editor's note: The following is excerpted from Howard Dean's June 2 speech at the Take Back America 2005 conference in Washington, D.C. This transcript has been edited for clarity.

We need a four-year campaign, not a seven-month campaign for the presidency. We need to be everywhere. We need to get out our message, and we need to talk to people about why it's important to be Democrats. And we need to have a positive agenda. We can't just talk about all the things that are wrong with George Bush's presidency, although I do happen to have a list of them right here in front of me.  

We've really got to talk about what we're going to do differently, but I want to start by talking about pensions and Social Security.

You know, the president rules by polls. He drives the agenda based on polls. The polls told him that he could get away with privatizing Social Security if he told old people -- I'm now in that category, as I've turned 55 -- that we're going to be okay, that the 20- and 30-year-olds aren't. They made a fundamental mistake thinking the 20- and 30-year-olds were dumb, and that they wouldn't notice.

It wasn't enough for the president to try and wreck the public pension system that we have. It wasn't enough for him to try to turn over Social Security for the same people who brought us Enron; his good friends and political contributors. Now we find that under this president's watch, private pension plans have been grossly underfunded. What does this president want? Don't Americans deserve after a long life of work, don't they deserve a retirement that will be there for them?

This week the Labor Department estimated that in 2004 the underfunding of pension plans grew to $450 billion. Sixty percent of companies take advantage of outdated accounting rules to avoid making annual contributions to them. The president wants to take away our Social Security, and then he starts taking away the private pension plans too? What does he think ordinary Americans live on after they get to be 55 years old?

However, I said I wouldn't just criticize the president; that [we needed to offer a positive agenda as well]. Here's what Democrats need to stand up for: we need to have pension portability, so that as we move from job to job pensions follow us along. Pension plans ought not be controlled by companies, they should be controlled [by the people who own them].

Enron began around the time Bush took office. Forty thousand Americans lost their pensions. Another tens of thousands lost theirs just last week, when the courts took away the United Airlines workers' pensions. This is a serious problem. The president has had his time, he's done nothing... We have a positive plan of portability and independent control of pensions outside the corporations that abuse the money. This is stealing to let pension plans go down like this. That money does not belong to those companies that use it to bail themselves out of bankruptcies. It belongs to the people who earned them. We want these pensions in America to be independently run, so that they aren't looted by CEOs who are in the throes of bankruptcy who make $30 or $40 million a year. That is wrong.

The [Republicans] talk about a culture of life. What about a culture of corruption in this country? We have the leader in the Republican Party [in the House of Congress], who the president just endorsed as doing a fine job, and who the chair of the Republican party endorsed as doing a fine job.

I happen to think that's true; the Republican definition of a fine job is to be reprimanded three times in a row [by the House ethics committee]. The Republican definition of a fine job appears to be if your leader is under investigation and three of his aides have been indicted for allegedly funneling $600,000 of corporate money into Texas campaigns. That's how Republicans do business. They think it's fine. Americans don't think it's fine. We need to get the culture of abuse and corruption in Washington out of here.

And we will do that. We need to be the party of reform -- campaign finance and election reform. I used to say during the presidential elections that if you want to have real campaign finance reform, don't wait around for a politician to do it, just go out and do it yourself. Send us $25 over the Internet. We need to train more people to do that. If middle-class and working Americans worry about their loss of control and Republican control of the House and the Senate realize that they can fix that by sending over $25 once in a while, giving to a candidate that they like, then we can take back America. We'll buy back America from the corporate interests, $25 at a time, because there are a lot more of us than there are of them.

Howard Dean, former governor of Vermont, is the founder of Democracy for America, a grassroots organization that supports socially progressive and fiscally responsible political candidates.

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