[Marxism] Nader: DP will do anything to keep me off ballot

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

A Newsweek poll now joins Time in showing Kerry trailing by ten points.
I am cautious about accepting these polls at face values -- they are
used to create facts as much as report them.  Of course, this hasn't
worked for years in Venezuela, where the outcome actually makes a
difference in the lives of millions of working people and the pollsters
are now completely discredited. That will happen someday here too, but I
suspect that their day of judgement is not yet.

Whoever wins, the Bush administration will continue to weaken without
sharp changes in the international and economic arenas in favor of US
imperialism. The Democratic Party campaign has done its patriotic duty
by helping them to recover some of their balance and confidence, but it
won't be enough.

>From the standpoint of the ruling class, however, there is probably
growing doubt that Kerry could do better. For example, the fact that
half a million party marched against the war and Bush in New York City
highlighted the limits of his capacity to keep even his supporters off
the streets in protest. And the low level of enthusiasm for Kerry in the
march was probably a danger signal for his campaign.


While the Kerry campaign was busy helping the Bush administration
stabilize the administration, giving added legitimacy to the occupation
of Iraq and war against the country's people, pushing the antiwar
movement off the streets during vitally important months, echoing the
Republicans on almost every major issue, and walking on their knees
begging big business to put them in the White House this time, what was
the Kerry campaign doing with its spare time?

Ralph Nader has a good part of the answer.  No doubt if Kerry loses (and
that is still far from a foregone conclusion), we will be told that the
reason was that competing with Nader kept him from going far enough to
the right to carry Mississippi and Idaho, or something of the sort, and
the Democrats will make suppressing third parties an ever bigger
campaign.

And in the unlikely event of a 2000 type near-dead-heat -- something I
think the rulers of this country will work hard to avoid and probably
will avoid, whoever wins -- the Democratic frenzy against the right of
the citizenry to vote for anybody but the two parties will reach an even
greater height.
Fred Feldman

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A60689-2004Sep3.html

Parties to Injustice

Democrats Will Do Anything To Keep Me Off the Ballot
By Ralph Nader

Sunday, September 5, 2004; Page B03

This summer, swarms of Democratic Party lawyers,
propagandists, harassers and assorted operatives have
been conducting an unsavory war against my campaign's
effort to secure a spot on the presidential ballots in
various states. It is not enough that both major
parties, in state after state, have used the
legislatures to erect huge barriers, unique among
Western democracies, to third party and independent candidacies. Now
they are engaging in what can only be called dirty tricks and frivolous
lawsuits to keep me and my running mate, Peter Miguel Camejo, off the
ballot while draining precious dollars from our campaign chest.

This contemptuous drive is fueled with large amounts
of unregulated money, much of it funneled through the
National Progress Fund, an ostensibly independent
group led by Toby Moffett, a former Democratic
congressman who is currently a partner in a largely
Republican lobbying firm called the Livingston Group.
By contrast, to defend ourselves from the assault, we
have to draw on funds that are limited and regulated
by the Federal Election Commission.

News reports show that the National Progress Fund and
other so-called independent 527 organizations (named
for the section of the tax code under which they
incorporate) were operating openly at the Democratic
National Convention. They held meetings to discuss the
best strategies and tactics to push the Nader-Camejo
ticket off the ballot and they raised money from
Democratic fat cats to accomplish their goals. It is
evident that these "independent" groups are actually
not independent but working closely with the
Democratic Party.

In addition, chair of the Democratic Party of Maine,
Dorothy Melanson, testified under oath in a public
hearing before Maine's secretary of state last Monday
that the national Democratic Party is funding efforts throughout the
country to stop Nader-Camejo from appearing on ballots.

These ties with Democrats don't prevent the 527s from
accepting help from entrenched corporate interests, or
even Republican quarters, to finance challenges of the signatures we
have collected to meet the requirements of ballot access. According to
reports filed with the Internal Revenue Service, Robert Savoie,
president of Louisiana-based Science & Engineering Associates, donated
$25,000 to the National Progress Fund in June. A month before, Savoie
gave $25,000 to the Republican National Committee.

In Pennsylvania, where a court last Monday barred us
from appearing on the ballot, signature challenges
have been mounted by Reed Smith, a law firm whose
political action committee primarily gives to
Republicans. A lawyer from the firm boasted to the New
York Times that "8 to 10 lawyers in his firm were
working pro bono on the case, 80 hours each a week for
two weeks, and could end up working six more weeks."
The firm is counsel to 29 of the top 30 U.S. banks, 26
of the Fortune 50 companies, nine of the top 10
pharmaceutical companies, and 50 of the world's
leading drug and medical device manufacturers.

The melding of these interests demonstrates that it is
the corporate-political duopoly that is working to
limit voters' choices for this November. For all their
talk about free markets, the major parties do not
tolerate competition very well. They don't want voters
to be able to consider a candidate who advocates
health care for all; a crackdown on corporate crime,
fraud and abuse; a shrinking of the
military-industrial complex and corporate welfare; a
living wage for all full-time workers; and a
responsible withdrawal from Iraq.

The zeal of these ballot access sentries comes from a
refusal to respect the rights of millions of voters to
have the opportunity to vote for candidates of their
choice. With their organized obstruction of our
campaign's efforts just to get a place on the ballots,
these authoritarians want to deny Americans more
voices, choices and agendas. The voters are the
losers.

Watching their bullying maneuvers and harassing
lawsuits around the country, I marvel at the absence
of condemnation by Sen. John F. Kerry or Terry
McAuliffe, the Democratic National Committee chairman.

Sen. Kerry told us that he would look into this
situation seven weeks ago but we have not heard back
from him yet. Around the same time, McAuliffe told me
in a phone conversation that he actively approved of
these organized efforts, one of which is ironically
called the Ballot Project. He urged me to run only in
the 31 states considered to be locked up by one of the
two candidates.

Challenging the signatures of your rivals is an old
political tactic, and when you're collecting hundreds
of thousands of signatures, there are bound to be some
that don't withstand scrutiny. But the Democrats are
not just seeking compliance with harsh election laws.
They are using dirty tricks to intimidate citizens.

That's the way it seemed to a 58-year-old supporter of
ours in Oregon. On Aug. 12, 2004, she was at home with
her two grandchildren when she answered a knock on her
door and found a man and woman who she said began
threatening her with jail if there was any false
information on the petitions she was collecting for
our ballot access. These people, who called themselves "investigators,"
were dispatched by a law firm that has worked extensively with Oregon
trade unions that have supported Democratic candidates. In many states
our signature gatherers have been subjected to similar treatment in what
is clearly an orchestrated campaign.


And some people who merely signed Nader-Camejo
petitions have also been pressured. One person in
Nevada got a call from someone who urged him to admit
that he was tricked into signing our petition. When
the petition signer said he had signed voluntarily,
the caller continued to try to persuade him to claim
that he had not signed the petition. After numerous
requests, the caller identified himself and admitted
he was from the Democratic National Committee in Las
Vegas. A call to the number on the caller ID was
answered, "Hello, DNC." We have similar reports from
around the country.

Ballot access laws are so arbitrary and complex that
they leave small parties open to legal pestering. In
Arizona, large Democratic donors hired three corporate
law firms to file frivolous challenges to our clearly
ample number of signatures. For example, 1,349
signatures of registered voters were invalidated
because the person who collected them had given his or
her correct full address but had neglected to include
the correct name of the county. The purpose of these
exercises are, in lobbyist Moffett's words, "to
neutralize [Nader's] campaign by forcing him to spend
money and resources defending these things."

A covey of Democratic operatives in Illinois convinced
the election board to disqualify signatures because
the registered voters had moved since registering to
vote even though they still lived in Illinois. The
Democratic speaker of the state House of
Representatives sent state employees, contractors and
interns to review and challenge our ballot access
petitions. The speaker wouldn't say -- when asked
either by reporters or in a Freedom of Information Act
request my campaign filed in July -- whether these
state employees took leave from their taxpayer-paid
jobs.

In other states, Democratic operatives are using a
grace period after the filing date and directly
calling voters who signed, pressing them to withdraw
their signatures or say that they were misled so that
the Democrats could allege fraud later in court.

The Democratic Party's machine is operating in many
other ways, too. Its apparatchiks were waiting at the
Virginia secretary of state's office on Aug. 20 to say
that our signature gatherers did not arrive in time,
when in fact they arrived with 25 minutes to spare.
The head of the state Elections Division, who happens
to be the former executive director of the Virginia
Democratic Party, refused even to accept our petitions
until she was ordered to do so by the state attorney
general.

To excuse and distract from this accumulation of
organized misdeeds, the Democrats are feeding the
press the Big Lie that the Republicans are bankrolling
and supporting us. If the Republicans were to spend
one-quarter as much to support us as the Democrats are
spending to obstruct our access to ballots and our
supporters' civil liberties, we would be on all 50
state ballots by now.

We have not been accepting signatures obtained through organized
Republican Party efforts in the three or four states where we have
learned of such activity.

We are trying, of course, to win over some Republican
and independent voters who voted for George Bush in
2000 but are furious with him over endless deficits,
federal regulation of local education, corporate
subsidies and handouts, the sovereignty-shredding
World Trade Organization and North American Free Trade Agreement, the
big-government- snooping Patriot Act and, lately, the Iraq quagmire.

In 2000 about 25 percent of our vote came from people
who told exit pollsters they otherwise would have
voted for Bush. Yet the most recent independent review
of our current campaign found that only 4 percent of
our donations came from people who have also given to
the Republican Party. The Center for Responsive
Politics found that this group of 51 people gave
$406,000 to the Republicans and $53,000 to
Nader-Camejo. Amusingly, however, the center found
that our Republican backers gave even more, $63,000,
to the Democrats.

When I talked to Kerry, I cautioned him that if he did
not order a stop to the dirty tricks of his Democratic underlings and
allies, he may face a mini-Watergate type of scandal. For Democrats and
Republicans who care about civil liberties, free speech and an equal
right to run for elective office, this festering situation should invite
their very focused demands to cease and desist.

Hand it to the Democrats to keep some costs down,
though. A contractor they hired in Michigan to make
phone calls to check the validity of our tens of
thousands of signatures outsourced the work to India.

Author's e-mail: kzeese@xxxxxxxxxxxxx

Ralph Nader is an independent candidate for president
and author of "The Good Fight: Declare Your
Independence and Close the Democracy Gap" (Regan Books/HarperCollins).

C 2004 The Washington Post Company


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