What a Nader campaign really means to this electoral process [View All]

[Ardee]

I am really and truly sick unto death of people making knee jerk comments about Nader, comments from people who have, in all probability never read a freaking thing he has written or heard a damn thing he has said.

These are the sort of things he stands for:

Friday April 2, 2004
Dear Conservatives Upset With the Policies of the Bush Administration

There is an old saying in southern American politics which goes like this: 'you dance with those who brung ya.' Have the corporate Republicans in Washington forgotten 'who brung ‘em?' That question is being intensely discussed in conservative-libertarian Republican circles and writings.

Many conservative Republicans are feeling these days that the Washington, D.C. Republicans are taking them for granted. You know what happens when that happens – you get taken! The first basic sign of a platform fissure between the conservative base and the big business Republicans came with the 2002 Texas state Republican Party platform which requires candidates to read every page and initial that it has been read. In an October 2, 2003 letter I asked President Bush whether he supports this platform. This defiant document announces over twenty domestic and foreign policies diametrically opposed to what the Bush Administration is doing or not doing.

Since that time the sources of conservative upset have become more pronounced. Conservative Republicans are furious with the Washington, D.C. Republicans for fiscal irresponsibility on a scale that, to them, would have been unimaginable even for Democrats. From inheriting a budget surplus in January 2001, the Bush Republicans have produced nearly half of a trillion dollars in annual deficits, ballooning the national debt and rocketing the annual debt service payments each year to about $318 billion—paid for by your taxes.

Already, around 30 conservative Republicans in the House of Representatives are in near revolt, despite the iron grip of Rep. Tom Delay (Rep. Texas), having voted against the Medicare-drug bill and its enormous subsidies to the drug industry and other companies. Even so, these legislators did not know at the time that the cost was $540 billion, not the $400 billion that was communicated to Congress by the Bush Administration over the objection of their chief actuary, late last year. Other budgets that can have any relation to national or homeland security are rising in all directions and are out of control according President Bush’s own Office of Management and Budget Analysis which is trying vainly to subject them to some cost-benefit rigor.

Besides federal deficit spending as far as the eye can see, there is the accompanying growth under Republican rule of so many subsidies to corporations that the government does not even have a catalogue of their costs. Conservative Think Tanks and other studies estimate costs of hundreds of billions of dollars annually in all their complex versions—cash transfers, bailouts, handouts or grants, giveaways, loan guarantees, loan forgiveness, tax expenditures and so on. In 1999, Cong. John Kasich (Rep. Ohio), then chair of the House Budget Committee and a critic of wasteful military spending held the first Congressional hearings on corporate welfare. Afterwards he threw his hands up in despair at getting the Republican leadership to take his warnings seriously. He retired from Congress in 2000. Conservatives were vociferous in their criticism of the pending energy bill, which has passed the House, for its $50 billion in subsidies to the profitable fossil fuel and atomic power industries. Using taxpayer money to pay companies to make a bigger profit is not in accordance with conservative principles.

Many conservatives believe that the Patriot Act is too extreme a law and is a threat, as the Texas Republican Party implied, to our domestic liberty under the 'guise of preventing terrorism.' Big Government surveillance, unannounced sneak and peak searches of citizens’ homes and businesses, and the rise of legions of government snoopers rub genuine conservatives the wrong way. Moreover, they hear President Bush making statements supporting a more extremist Patriot Act II and renewing the most liberty-suppressing provisions of Patriot Act I when it is up for renewal in 2005.

http://www.votenader.org/