By Lee Gottlieb
SOME CLEAR THINKING
Ralph Nader is doing it again. He has announced that he is running for the presidency, but this time as an independent candidate, and not the representative of the Green Party.
The consumer advocate still firmly believes the Democrat Party has lost its way and its ideals; that it has compromised too much with the Republican Congress, and that it has wrongly contributed to the passage of laws that help big business and harm American workers.
He still wants to prosecute corporate crime more aggressively, still wants fairer wages for workers, still wants to develop a more active, effective electorate—and is still the best man running for the office.
No matter what people say about him, he is still the only candidate who is not a professional politician, still the only one who addresses the real problems of American workers—other than Dennis Kucinich, of course, whom the mainstream media deliberately ignores, or undervalues, but who is a professional politician—and still the only one who is thoroughly believable.
The governor of New Mexico says that Nader's announcement is an "act of total vanity and ego," and many democrats believe that Nader will cost their party the election, as they believe he cost them the last one. That's one side of the coin.
The other side claims that every ordinary citizen who clung to the Democrat Party and voted for Gore, despite knowing that it was the party of mediocrity and destructive compromise, deliberately relinquished their best opportunity to create the positive changes in law they wanted.
The Americans on the back side of the coin believe it is those Americans who—by not voting for the man they knew would best represent them—gave the Republicans their long-awaited opportunity to destroy remaining New Deal programs.
There are many forces in life that influence a person's character, but there are three human traits over which an individual has complete control at all times regardless of these forces. They are dignity, integrity, and honesty.
I voted for Ralph in the last election for all the reasons given above. I did not compromise my dignity by voting for a man whom I thought just another mediocre, political opportunist. I did not compromise my integrity by voting merely to win an election when I knew such a win would not produce the dynamicism necessary to create positive change in government, and I did not compromise my honesty by voting for a candidate I didn't believe the best man for the job I knew must be done.
Here I am, four years later, seemingly facing the same dilemma: do I vote for
the democrat candidate for whom most democrats will cast their votes—giving the Party an opportunity to win the election—or do I vote for the man whom I believe best for the job I want done?
This would be a true problem for me, if conditions were identical to those the country faced four years ago. But they are not, for the destructive forces unleashed by the Republican Party during these four years have revealed the uncaring greed fueling the party's engine.
Under the current Republican Administration the republic has been transformed from a nation with a huge fianancial surplus to one possessing enormous debt; from a nation claiming to desire universal peace to one aggressively initiating war upon other nations and killing thousands of innocent people; from a nation advocating environmental health to one allowing the polluters to write their own laws; from a nation advocating individual rights and justice to one imprisoning people merely upon suspicion, and prosecuting them in secrecy; from a nation understanding the necessity of separation between state and church and the danger of religious control of government to one shifting public funds and the responsibility of government's social programs to religious groups.
Above all, it has been transformed from a nation admired by most other people of Earth to one feared by all.
The mainstream media does its part in trying to confuse the public not only with its pseudo-distinctions between republicans and democrats, or conservatives and liberals and radicals, or those on the right and those on the left, it would also like us to believe that the Republican Party has been temporarily hijacked by members of the party on the far right.
But the absolute truth is that the distinction between the two political parties has always been—and remains—the distinction between those with wealth and those without; between those who own the natural resources of the country and those who work these resources to produce the foods of survival; between those who own the machinery of production and those who work the machinery to produce the things that make our lives more comfortable; between those who control the money supply of the republic and those who depend upon money to survive.
This is the difference between the two political parties, pure and simple. So has it always been, and so will it always be.
Because of these truths, and all the frightening conditions the Republican Party has foisted upon our country, I reluctantly will forego my dignity, integrity, and honesty and I will cast my vote for whichever candidate the Democrat Party nominates, for it is more crucial to throw the Republicans out of the White House than it is to satisfy personal needs.