won't read this in mainstream press

[Dan Scanlan <dscanlan@xxxxxxx>]

Nader whips up frenzy of admirers
$10,000 raised in event at UW

By Samara Kalk Derby
September 16, 2004


At the end of a rousing speech in Madison Wednesday night,
independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader turned the podium over
to a protege who worked the room with the skill of an auctioneer and
the passion of a preacher at a revival meeting.

Greg Kafoury managed to raise about $10,000 from a hall filled
largely with UW students.

Kafoury, an attorney from Portland, Ore., ridiculed the campaigns of
John Kerry and George W. Bush. "Have they illuminated one mind? One
issue, even one phrase?" He described both mainstream campaigns as
colorless, odorous and tasteless, like a gas.

"How much illumination did you get from Nader in an hour?" he asked
to resounding applause from an audience that packed the Wisconsin
Union Theater.

"Is there anyone here who can give this campaign $1,000?" Kafoury
asked. Then he waited. A number of anxious minutes passed. Finally, a
young man with shoulder-length hair and glasses stood up. Eventually
another stood. When it was all over, six people had stood.
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Kafoury later took pledges of $500, $100, $75 and $50. Donors were
offered a copy of Nader's 2002 book, "Crashing the Party: Taking on
the Corporate Government in an Age of Surrender."

But there were more donors than books, prompting the candidate to
remark, "only in Madison."

Nader, a consumer advocate who ran in 2000 as the Green Party
candidate and is running this year as an independent, spent a lot of
time talking about corporate crime, corporate corruption and
corporate welfare. Corporations have a grip on the country like never
before, he said. Children are "growing up corporate," Nader said.

He blasted media conglomerates, pharmaceutical companies, Wal-Mart,
the Patriot Act, corporate globalization, how U.S. administrations
have handled the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and, of course, the
two-party system that offers up candidates who both back the North
American Free Trade Agreement and the World Trade Organization.

Nader said that he urged Kerry to come out in support of a living
wage law and the repeal of the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act and to
promise not to engage in "free trade" with dictators.

While 3,000 people died in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks,
more people die each month in the United States from work-related
problems, Nader said.

"I don't have intellectual patent rights on these ideas," he said at
one point. "I will give them to any one who wants to use them."

If Kerry adopted any of his issues, he said, "you would now be
singing bye-bye George Bush."

Instead, Bush is taunting Kerry about his votes on the Iraq war and
its funding. "This bumbling governor from Texas, who can barely read
his cue cards, is taunting him," Nader said.

He got one of his biggest reactions when he said: "We've got an
evangelical, messianic militarist in the White House."

Nader mocked Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney's emphasis on "God
and morals" and their slogans "compassionate conservatism" and "No
Child Left Behind."

"Have they done anything but leave children behind?" he asked.

During a similar rant later on, he said, "George Orwell, where are
you when we need you?"

Nader also bemoaned Democrats who are getting beaten in mayoral and
gubernatorial races throughout the country.

"Some guy with two biceps calls himself a Republican and runs for
governor of California. When are they going to be embarrassed?" he
asked.

Nader also criticized the "liberal intelligentsia," including The
Progressive magazine, for opposing his candidacy.

More than 70 members of "Nader 2000 Citizens Committee" this week
issued a statement urging support for John Kerry and John Edwards in
this year's swing states.

Prominent signers include Noam Chomsky, Phil Donahue, Barbara
Ehrenreich, Jim Hightower, Bonnie Raitt, Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon,
Cornel West and Howard Zinn.

They are "so freaked out by Bush, they are making no demands on
Kerry," Nader said.

Muhammad Umar Memon, a UW-Madison professor in the Department of
Languages and Cultures of Asia, was one of many people who donated to
Nader's campaign during the evening. He left the event inspired.

"If you wake him up when he's fast asleep he will give you a list of
issues off the top of his head," Memon said.

"It's a scintillating mind with a breathtaking clarity," he said.
"They look like pygmies to me, these bozos, Kerry and Bush. They
cannot speak a sentence."

And the young man who was the first to stand and donate $1,000?

It was Alex Correll, 22, a biology and French student at Edgewood College.

"I have a small amount of money laying around that my grandparents
gave me to invest in the stock market," Correll said after the event.
"Hopefully, I am investing in the future in a different way by
contributing to Nader."

Correll didn't vote for Nader in 2000. Instead, he was "conned into
voting for (Al) Gore." Correll says he is not going to do the same
this year.

This time, Correll says, he's not buying the line that he is throwing
his vote away by voting for Nader. He doesn't want to hear that "a
vote for Nader is a vote for Bush."

"A vote for Nader is a vote for Nader," he said.

E-mail: skalk@xxxxxxxxxxx