The Connecticut Citizen Action Group, or CCAG, is a public advocacy group prominent in Connecticut politics. Founded by politician and consumer advocate Ralph Nader and future Congressman Toby Moffett in 1970, CCAG seeks to promote social, economic, and environmental justice.
The organization has done extensive campaigning for clean elections, consumer protection, universal healthcare, environmental protection, and against government corruption and war. It is Connecticut's oldest and largest non-profit public interest group, with over 20,000 citizen members within the state.
Some of CCAG's past legislative victories include obtaining expiration dates on dairy products in 1972, passage of the nations second "bottle bill" (5 cent returnables on bottles and cans) in 1978, blocking the Interstate 84 expansion to Rhode Island in 1983, passage of the HUSKY (Health Care for Uninsured Kids and Youth) medical program in 1997, and the 2005 passage of the Citizens Election Program.
They are not affiliated with any political party and have no set ideology, but regularly endorse electoral candidates and political movements.
The organization is currently based in the West End of Hartford, Connecticut and regularly runs a team of canvassers.
Famous quotes containing the words citizen, action and/or group:
“The duty of the State toward the citizen is the duty of the servant to its master.... One of the duties of the State is that of caring for those of its citizens who find themselves the victims of such adverse circumstances as makes them unable to obtain even the necessities for mere existence without the aid of others.... To these unfortunate citizens aid must be extended by government—not as a matter of charity but as a matter of social duty.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“Temperamentally, the writer exists on happenings, on contacts, conflicts, action and reaction, speed, pressure, tension. Were he a contemplative purely, he would not write.”
—Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)
“He hung out of the window a long while looking up and down the street. The world’s second metropolis. In the brick houses and the dingy lamplight and the voices of a group of boys kidding and quarreling on the steps of a house opposite, in the regular firm tread of a policeman, he felt a marching like soldiers, like a sidewheeler going up the Hudson under the Palisades, like an election parade, through long streets towards something tall white full of colonnades and stately. Metropolis.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)