A Third Party Vote is no Wasted Vote

Here's what I saw when I looked at the Common Cause eye popping list of the principal corporate, banking, and brokerage house donors to Barack Obama and John McCain--virtually the same names. The list reads like a who's who of the top Wall Street con artists, cheats, shills, and deadbeats. All of whom are now giddily gorging themselves at the taxpayer $700 billion (and still climbing) trough. This is the same bunch that Bush, Paulson, Pelosi, Dodd, and yes Obama and McCain tell us will lead us out of the financial and economic morass.

The bitter reality is that other than color, age, mild stylistic differences, and rhetorical flourishes, there is no substantive difference between the two; in fact there really couldn't be. They are two sides of the same corporate-entrenched Washington Beltway establishment. That's hardly a surprise. Politics is a billionaire's game dominated by mega corporate and labor PACs, strangled by high rolling special interest groups and lobbyists, and clamped down by equally mega defense and military contractors. To think that Obama and McCain could break free of their moneyed and Beltway chains and deliver on their anemic version of hope and change is to think that you can win the Big Spin lottery without buying a ticket.

The two candidates that have got it right in their cry for real reform i.e. out of Iraq, guaranteed national health care, tough re-regulation of banks and Wall Street, crackdown on corporate polluters, massive spending on education, infrastructure, and urban redevelopment, and real criminal justice system overhaul are not named Obama or McCain. They are named Nader and McKinney. A vote for either of them is not a wasted vote, but a vote for true hope and change.