Independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader chided the two major parties and criticized corporate control in government Sunday night during a campaign stop in Buffalo.
Nader took on issues ranging from the war in Iraq to drug company price gouging and raising the minimum wage in front of a packed house at the Dnipro Ukranian Home on the Lower East Side.
He said the Democrats and Republicans only differ on one or two big issues, polarizing the country by those few issues rather than taking a dramatically different approach than their opponents.
Nader added he thinks the Democrats are no longer are a progressive party, but only driven by what they view is wrong with the Republicans.
"They define themselves by the worst of the other instead of defining themselves by the best," he said.
Before his speech, Nader fielded questions regarding his candidacy and alleged that the Democratic Party has tried to prevent his ticket from making the ballot in several states.
"No campaign has had to deal with more tricks and attacks by the Democratic Party than the Nader-Camejo campaign," he said.
Nader said the Democratic Party paid for phony lawsuits contesting signatures on ballot petitions in Pennsylvania and Illinois and also intimidated signature-gatherers in Michigan. He condemned the Democratic Party leadership for what he alleged were constitutional crimes.
"These are part of an epidemic of tricks by the Democratic Party and its chairman Terry McAuliffe and fully supported by Senator John Kerry," he said. "No one would believe these ballot access laws are trap doors for the two major parties to stop a competitive third party candidate from getting on the ballot."
Nader further criticized the Democratic Party, saying they were no better than Republicans in accepting the support of corporate special interests.
"You will never hear Kerry or Bush talk about the shifting of too much power to corporations, of there being too much corporate power," Nader said.
During the speech, Nader attacked both parties equally, lamenting lost activism of the times during his earlier career.
"The two parties have carved the country up into Democrat and Republican districts in their quest for political monopolies," he said. "It takes away the voice of the average voter."
Nader called the "quagmire" in Iraq the key issue in the current election and outlined his plan for a systematic U.S. removal from Iraq.
He added that Democrats no longer represented change on the war front either.
"A vote for George W. Bush has always been a vote for war, and now unfortunately a vote for John Kerry has also become a vote for war," he said.
Nader not only criticized the war in Iraq, but also targeted the war on terror as well, claiming it was creating terrorists rather than easing the terror problem.
"Beware a government that pursues stateless terrorists in a way that creates stateless terrorists," he said. "John Ashcroft has arrested 5,000 Arab Americans and Americans in this country and convicted two, and one was overturned."
Nader covered many issues in his speech. After talking about the war he shifted focus to the need for a universal health care system in the U.S.
"These days drug companies are charging Americans the highest prices of any people in the world because they can get away with it," he said. "They can't get away with it in Canada, in Mexico, or in Western Europe. This is a pay or die system here."
Attacking corporate influence in Washington inevitably led Nader to attack light prosecution of recent corporate fraud cases. Alluding to the Enron, Worldcom and Tyco corporate fraud cases, Nader said the two major party candidates have allowed the issue to become invisible over the course of the campaign.
"You don't hear Kerry and Bush talk about harsher punishment for corporate fraud," he said. "The reason is because they get corporate campaign advisement from these corporations."
Photo: Courtesy of Matthew Messina, from the RMBERS' Instagram page
