Democracy — sponsored by corporate America

When people ask why I am running for president, I often offer a long, detailed answer about my belief that, in a democracy, the government should serve the interests of the people, not corporations.

This week, I can simply point to the long list of corporate sponsors of the Democratic and Republican national conventions: AT&T, AFLAC, Boeing, Comcast, Lockheed Martin, Citigroup, Pfizer, Eli Lilly and Wells Fargo, not known for their charitable giving.

Nowhere will the sellout of our democracy be more brazenly on display than in Denver, the site of the Democratic National Convention, where a historic barrier-breaking candidate will be named the Democratic nominee at, of all places, the Pepsi Center — the taste of a “new generation” indeed: a corporate generation.

Case closed.

The conventions have descended into a four-day-long infomercial for the two parties that epitomizes the shameless consummation of interests between Democratic and Republican parties and corporations (using the public’s airwaves to boot).

According to the Center for Responsive Politics and the Campaign Finance Institute, this year, “Private money, expected to exceed $112 million for the two conventions combined, will pay for an estimated 80 percent of their cost.”

It’s clear what message the Democratic and Republican parties are sending to the American people with these corporate “sponsorships.” What is not as well known is that Democrats and Republicans in Congress enacted legislation requiring an additional $32 million of taxpayer dollars to fund their two conventions.

Is it a coincidence that Congress recently passed a bill (FISA) that granted AT&T, Comcast, Verizon and other telecoms retroactive immunity from lawsuits for helping the government illegally spy on private citizens — and now the Democratic Convention is handing out free tote bags, compliments of AT&T? Coincidence or not, it reflects the ubiquitous presence of corporate power and influence on our political process.

After promising he would oppose FISA, and despite impassioned pleas from his progressive supporters, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) voted for it. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) skipped the vote entirely. Obama could have voted against it and delivered a rousing speech explaining why it is important to curtail the power of government, protect the privacy of citizens and hold corporations accountable for collusion in illegal acts. Instead the candidate for hope and change chose the same old evasive route of political calculation. The American people are now left with the shallow choices of little more than a war horse and a show horse.

If the American public cannot count on these two candidates to defend their Constitutional rights, and put the people’s interests above those of telecom corporations, or stop a senseless war the American public opposes, or impeach a wildly unpopular president and vice president, it’s hard to see why voters should put either of them in the White House.

Voters may be coming to these conclusions themselves. A July 2008 Zogby poll found that 44 percent of the public agreed that the American political system is broken and cannot be repaired by traditional two-party politics and elections.

The good news is voters have more choices.

This year, I am running as an independent. Former Democratic Rep. Cynthia McKinney (Ga.) is running as a Green, and former Republican Rep. Bob Barr (Ga.) as a Libertarian. All of us bring to the table issues and solutions that the two corporate-sponsored candidates will ignore or oppose.

Nader/Gonzalez supports real single-payer healthcare, a living wage, an immediate end to the war in Iraq, unequivocal defense of civil liberties, including the repeal of the Patriot Act, and accountability for the corrupt Bush/Cheney administration. These views are shared by the majority of Americans.

The bad news is that third-party candidates are being all but shut out by the mass media and locked out of the three presidential debates, making it difficult for American voters to learn about their other choices.

Americans are going to be kept in the dark as long as third-party candidates are excluded from the debates by the sole sponsor, the Commission on Presidential Debates. Though its website claims it is a “nonpartisan” nonprofit whose purpose is voter education, the CPD it is a bipartisan corporation created in 1987 by the two parties to promote their own candidates exclusively.

The League of Women Voters, the genuinely nonpartisan organization that used to sponsor the debates, recognized this deception back in 1988 when it quit in disgust and declared, “We have no intention of becoming an accessory to the hoodwinking of the American people.”

This week at our Super Rally in Denver during the Democratic convention, the Nader/Gonzalez campaign is calling on the League of Women Voters to return to its hosting of presidential debates and to sponsor three debates that will include all of the candidates.

As the Democratic and Republican candidates argue about how many houses each of them owns, their parties are vividly demonstrating that they have replaced the “demos” in democracy with corporate logos.

Nader is an independent candidate for president, longtime consumer advocate and best-selling author of Crashing the Party, Unsafe at Any Speed, and other books. He is hosting two “Open the Debates” rallies in Denver and Minneapolis during the DNC and RNC.