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During the 2000 Presidential campaign, I heard Green Party candidate Ralph Nader say all the right things about corporate power and who actually calls the political shots in the United States and yet I could NOT feel any excitement about him or even consider taking him seriously.

The main reason was that I knew he was talking the talk but didn't walk the walk in 1982 when National People's Action did a campaign to try and ignite a movement across the country called Reclaim America.

The concept for Reclaim America was born after the election of Ronald Reagan to the Presidency. NPA wanted to let everyone know that the United States government was NO longer in the hands of our elected officials but rather under corporate control. NPA said that President Ronald Reagan was a puppet whose strings were being pulled by corporate puppet masters.

NPA leaders met with and asked the major unions for support in the form of lending their name, troops and money. National union officials wrote polite letters - wishing us well and letting us know that we could add their names to the list of supporters for Reclaim America. That was it.

NPA leaders then approached and asked Ralph Nader, who had been supportive in his role as a consumer activist in the fight to get banks to reinvest in neighborhoods. He was not interested in meeting with NPA leaders to talk about supporting Reclaim America.

I remember another influential national figure saying that while he agreed in principle with the NPA Reclaim America Campaign, he was right on the mark with his prediction that "NPA was twenty years ahead of everyone else."

NPA has never waited to get into a fight - if we smell an issue and it's hurting our neighborhoods, we fight - even if it is by ourselves. NPA has always been on the cutting edge of fighting on issues. The Reclaim America campaign involved neighborhood leadership traveling by bus for 5 days from Chicago to Cleveland to Philadelphia to Washington - ending up on Wall Street to make the connections between our government and corporate control - all the while looking for those corporate executives who were running the country.

As a part of the process, NPA troops invaded the offices of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, across from the White House in Washington, DC. The US Chamber was then and still is the most powerful corporate lobby group in the United States. NPA leadership met with one of the Chamber's vice presidents demanding that they convene a meeting of the top twenty US corporations to discuss the NPA neighborhood agenda. The US Chamber said they needed to check out who NPA was and what we wanted - and then maybe they would meet.

NPA told the Chamber "never mind" and went to the corporations directly. On September 14, 1982, NPA took over Wall Street-literally wall to wall on Wall Street-in New York City's lower Manhattan with nearly 3,000 people marching past hard hat construction workers and the headquarters of what was then the nation's big banks, JP Morgan and Chase Manhattan. NPA marched up to the New York Stock Exchange and they shut it down and slammed the big doors shut when we tried to enter!

NPA certainly did not stop there and has been around since President Nixon was in the White House. NPA has outlasted six presidential administrations-Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush and Clinton-and we've kicked them all in the ass to get what was needed in our neighborhoods.

As we plan for NPA's 30th annual conference in March, 2001 our challenge is to unleash the power of our imagination as we cut another swath across Washington, DC and deliver a message to whomever lives in the White House-Bush, Gore, or Nader-that NPA and neighborhood based organizing is here to stay!