COLUMN LEFT / EDMUND G. BROWN JR. : Democrats’ Platform Is Toothless : Beguiled by the corporatists, the party apparatchiks have written off ordinary Americans.

The lights are dimming for Democracy. The party’s convention platform committee met last weekend to consider amendments and vote on a platform draft for the 1992 presidential election. Taking refuge in gooey, imprecise language and cryptically calling for “a third way,” the committee, under the corporate-sponsored umbrella of the Democratic Leadership Council, revealed its intentions by what it excluded from the text far more than by what it included. Absent was any recognition of the dangerous concentration and abuses of political and economic power of the past decade.

In contrast to the party’s traditions over the last 100 years, today’s party apparently is expected to be without concern over the massive wave of mergers and acquisitions that have left many corporations so burdened with debt that the American people have had to pay the price in plant closings, cruel layoffs, depressed wages and cutbacks in research and development. Yet there’s not a word in the platform about the need to enforce the federal antitrust laws that have been virtually shelved by the Republican regime of George Bush.

The party also overlooks the corporate crime wave that has seen billions of dollars looted by financial institutions. The platform is at a loss for words about stopping the dangerous levels of corporate criminal activity in environmental, consumer and workplace sectors. Comprehensive corporate crime proposals were voted down with extreme prejudice.

While properly focusing on the need to reform the poverty welfare system, the platform committee ignored a far larger dollar amount devoted to Washington’s corporate welfare budget. These corporate entitlements--bailouts, subsidies, loan guarantees and bargain-basement leases--distort investment flows, coddle poor management and discriminate against businesses that are standing on their own feet, all at enormous expense to the taxpayer.

Although all kinds of studies show Americans to be upset and exploited by marketplace abuses, the platform committee refused mention of any consumer protection plank. Ask anyone you know if they think that auto insurance abuses, contaminated drinking water, hazardous products, deceptive advertising and other scams are not damaging our quality of life and family budgets.

The platform does no more for workers than it does for consumers. Its weak language on the free-trade agreement with Mexico will not protect working people from runaway jobs. Tough provisions to put the well-being of American communities above the profits of meganational companies were also gaveled into oblivion.

More than 20 amendments were offered to the platform. These were not wild-eyed proposals to radicalize the party. Hardly. The amendments fell well within the philosophical framework of the party of Roosevelt and Kennedy. They included establishment of a 100,000-member civilian conservation corps, an immediate ban on clear-cutting ancient forests, specific energy efficiency goals, strengthening the organizing rights of workers and raising the minimum wage by $1.

At the end of the day, the committee finally brought up the “humility agenda”--and it was promptly voted down. This 11-point plank was aimed at responding to voter disgust and alienation with the political process. For example, it would have required television stations to provide free air time to qualified candidates and it called on government itself to register all voters and make Election Day a holiday.

The party should lead by example and break through the cynicism, so the “humility agenda” also called for rolling back the congressional pay raise, and for term limits, state referendum and recall procedures and a $100 limit on campaign contributions. In short, the party should be on the side of real change and open up our democracy. But the platform committee did not take kindly to dissent or opposing points of view. Its job, it appears, was to protect the party from clear and measurable commitments on which it might be judged. Like aging apparatchiks, the party custodians recoiled with alarm and irritation at the merest prospect of change.

It is not surprising that the noun justice appears nowhere in the platform draft. Though there are strong statements about the rights of minorities and a woman’s right to choose, for the most part evasions and omissions were calculatingly chosen to deprive the presidential debate of important alternatives. This further feeds the public revulsion about politics as usual. To add insult to abdication, the platform invokes Thomas Jefferson’s revolutionary spirit. The memory of our Democratic Party’s founder is thus used as a verbal fig leaf to cover the shame of his stunted political descendants.