A vote for Ralph Nader is not a vote for George W. Bush; a vote for Nader is a vote for Nader. If you think Nader would make the best president, you should vote for him. Polls asking people which candidate they would select if they carried the deciding vote have indicated that Nader is favored by over 20 percent of the population - yet it seems that most of these voters fear another Bush presidency so much that they would prefer to vote against him. Sad. I will not vote defensively for Gore for several reasons.

Both Bush and Gore represent the status quo and, when all is said and done, their political legacies would be relatively similar. They both would continue to enable globalization while telling the public they have no control over it. They support economic sanctions and military dictatorships so as to ensure foreign slave labor for American corporations that fund both parties. Under Clinton, economic sanctions against Iraq have killed over 500,000 children in the last three years alone, while suppressing the Iraqi Democratic Front in continuation of our long-term support for Saddam's military regime. Supporters of these sanctions argue that if we were to lift them, more deaths would result from inevitable Iraqi expansion/domination in the region.

So what would Nader do? Nader would support, rather than suppress, the Iraqi Democratic Front that has been Saddam's major political and social opposition for years. Behind the stated objective of combating the Iranian nuclear threat, our military support for Saddam was also directed towards silencing this democratic opposition. The result of this is that the true force of this opposition has always been underestimated.

It is ironic that both major parties claim that we are defenders of democracy but the moment a democratic revolution brews in a region where we have established an economic stronghold, we fund its opposition. That their democracy would lead to basic labor laws, ending cheap American production, insures this. Thus, the argument that globalization is as harmless as foreign production simply provides jobs for the natives is a vast oversimplification. The bottom line is that both Bush and Gore would not hesitate to kill revolutionaries and peasants in order to ensure that these workers continue to work in subhuman conditions. Bush Sr. and Clinton have, in fact, killed in Columbia, Guatemala, El Salvador, Iraq, Israel, Cuba, Vietnam, and Laos by continuing oppressive American policies aimed at ensuring our own corporate economic interests. Remember these realities when you use mutual funds to pay for your college tuition. Those investments empower American corporations, leading to this oppressive foreign policy.

In reality our government isn't doing much better at home. We live in a country where we have had unprecedented economic growth but falling standards of living: every American city has a black ghetto; blacks are seven times more likely to be incarcerated than whites; literacy rates are among the lowest in the western world and vast numbers of its citizens are lacking adequate healthcare. Perhaps most disturbing is the fact that for the first time in American history, under Clinton, the majority of prison inmates are black even though blacks make up less than 15 percent of the population.

One legitimate argument for Gore relates to the abortion debate, but it is a minor point in terms of its true political relevance. This is because regardless of Bush's appointees, it looks as though there is no legal standing with which any Supreme Court justice could overturn Roe v. Wade. The reality is that all of Gore's and Bush's appointees would continue to support the status quo, with minor variances in terms of overall effect.

I don't enjoy being so cynical, but it seems to me that we need to seriously question our current level of comfort. This comfort promotes ambivalence towards understanding the oppression that has resulted from our prosperity. Questioning my economic security has led to an understanding of how first world prosperity is so intimately linked with third world debt. But my prosperity has not only been at the expense of peasants in Nicaragua, children in Iraq, and farmers in Colombia, but it has also been at the expense of close friends from different ethnic backgrounds. I live without fear of police brutality, in fact, I subconsciously feel safer knowing that the police state is on my side. I went to good public schools because income taxes raised more revenue in my city. And I now attend a good college because the American psyche has taught teachers and mentors to expect more from me than my Asian, Latino, Middle Eastern, and African-American friends. My gain has marginalized these Americans.

Since its inception, the US has been an imperialist rogue state with tunnel vision towards economic gain. Our "pre-eminent" position has come at the expense of Native Americans, African Americans, and a growing underclass all over the world. Al Gore and George W. Bush have shown no substantial interest in righting any of this. Nader has. Go to www.votenader.org and check out the Nader/La Duke platform. A vote for Nader is a vote for change, and this type of positive change cannot result from choosing the lesser of two evils.