The eligibility criteria for getting listed on this page is one or more of the following:
- held or holding a public elected office
- running for a public elected office
- published something or received special recognition for public service
These are just guidelines. The final right to decide who is listed is reserved by The Democracy Foundation.
This is not an exclusive list. Other people who are not listed here may also endorse NI4D.
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, political activist, author and lecturer. He is an Institute Professor and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Endorsement:
Endorsement: I am writing to endorse formally the National Initiative for Democracy.
Noam Chomsky
Daniel Ellsberg
Daniel Ellsberg is a former American military analyst employed by the RAND Corporation who precipitated a national political controversy in 1971 when he released the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret Pentagon study of government decision-making about the Vietnam War, to The New York Times and other newspapers. He was a recipient of the Right Livelihood Award in 2006.
Endorsement: I am happy to endorse the project.
Mike Gravel
Maurice Robert “Mike” Gravel is a former Democratic United States Senator from Alaska, who served two terms from 1969 to 1981. He founded The Democracy Foundation. In order to promote the National Initiative for Democracy, he ran for president in 2008.
Endorsement: Marcus Cicero, over 2000 years ago, defined freedom as participation in power. If you don’t participate in power, you are not free. Whoever has the power owns you. If you want to be free you have to participate in power.
Power is lawmaking; if you don’t participate in lawmaking, all you can do live by the laws that are made for you. Either you live by their laws or you go to jail. Those who make the law have the power to make you free. On election day, you give your power away.
Follow the logic: If freedom is participation in power and power is lawmaking, then freedom is participation in lawmaking.
The key to freedom is the National Initiative: it gives the people the tools to make laws, to vote on all the issues that effect their lives. Now THAT is freedom. The crux of the National Initiative is to share power and have freedom.
Ralph Nader
Ralph Nader is an American attorney, author, lecturer, political activist, and candidate for President of the United States in four elections. Areas of particular concern to Nader are consumer rights, humanitarianism, environmentalism, and democratic government.
Endorsement: For over a decade, given the failures of elected politicians, Mike Gravel has been engaged in some extraordinary research and consultations with leading constitutional law experts about the need to enact another check to the faltering checks and balances – namely, the National Initiative for Democracy, a proposed law that empowers the people as lawmakers.
Richard Stallman
Richard Matthew Stallman is an American software freedom activist, hacker, and software developer. In September 1983, he launched the GNU Project to create a free Unix-like operating system, and has been the project’s lead architect and organizer. With the launch of the GNU Project, he started the free software movement and, in October 1985, set up the Free Software Foundation.
Endorsement: Direct democracy is one of the things we need to establish, to take back control of the US government from the megacorporations that effectively own it now.