Politicians lie. Everyone knows this and they accept it. Voters often vote for what they call the “lesser of two evils.”In nearly every election campaign, you will find alternatives if you look for them.Because this is so, I would like to compare three candidates in particular in order to shed some light on misrepresented facts, and to give the other guy, Ralph Nader, a small push that the mass media of this country is largely unwilling to give. George W. Bush wants to give a 21 percent tax cut to the top 1 percent earners of the nation, who are now paying 33 percent in federal taxes at a time when the CEO’s wage vs. that of the entry level worker is 415 times greater. Compare this figure to that in 1940, when the CEO made only 12 times more.Gore, like many other politicians, wants to leave Social Security alone, and he claims that he would like to maintain our fiscal responsibility. That’s good.Bush wants to take $1 trillion out of Social Security, bankrupting it by 2023, in order to set up a Social Security trust with private funds, simultaneously promising benefits for seniors.Nader knows that in other nations with privatized systems, over 20 percent of costs go to overhead, while our current system expenses are less than 0.8 percent of the costs for benefits and over 95 percent of employed workers are insured.Moreover, most privatization advocates assume rapid stock market growth, which can’t be guaranteed, along with a down-spiraling of overall economic growth.As far as campaign spinning is concerned, Bush claimed in the first debate that Gore outspent him, when in fact, Bush’s campaign shadowed Gore’s two-to-one.On the stump, Bush promises $1.5 trillion more than what is already preposterously outlined in his plan. Gore tells the sixth grade teacher in St. Louis that he will keep his promises.I hope he doesn’t keep promises the way he didn’t for the people of East Liverpool, Ohio. Within one of the states he needs most, he refuses to honor his first environmental commitment after the 1992 election.He was to close the WTI hazardous waste incinerator, but he didn’t and he blamed this on the Bush EPA, falsely claiming that his authority to do so was thwarted, while giving approval for full operation to the very incinerator’s operations, months after failing parts of the test burn.Nader, man enough to run a campaign solely on public money, just breaking $5 million, has never cowed to the very corporate interests that have the interest of their wallets in mind. He has proven time and time again that he has a voice.Bitter smokers, he helped create smoke-free environments to help those of us who are helpless around smoke. He was denied by police force from debates. Even with a perfectly acceptable ticket in his hand, one that would be honored by security, had it come from the hands of any other citizen, he was denied his First Amendment and civil rights, to give an interview for the local college television station in St. Louis, upon their request.Two front runners, either one assured very good chances of winning this election, appear to be scared of finding an alternative time and place for debate. It scares me that the American people can’t decide for themselves who they can listen to and what they can know.
Valerie Howland is a senior English and psychology major from Conneaut, Ohio.