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Gore and Bush converge on most issues affecting Americans.

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Despite the effort of the Republican Convention to declare its compassion and diversity and the Democratic Party's attempts to distinguish itself as the "party of the people," the two parties and their presidential candidates and platforms have grown close or identical on many issues.

Ralph Nader and other Green Party candidates have repeated the charge that the two major parties have become a pair of competing factions of a single pro-corporate party, often to the skepticism of op-ed columnists and the protests of nervous Democrats.

A comparison of platforms and policies proves Mr. Nader and the Greens correct.  Both parties, and both Al Gore and George W. Bush agree on:

• Support for international corporate trade cabals like WTO, GATT, NAFTA, IMF, etc., with the power to override national and local environmental, labor, and human rights laws.

• Increased trade with China, despite human rights abuses and sweat shop and prison labor. The chief accomplishment of the 2000 China trade act is permission for American companies to move more factories to China.  The number of Americans in unions will continue to decline whether we elect Bush or Gore.

• Increased military spending, revival of Reagan's missile defense fraud, and military aggression around the world, which the Democratic Platform calls "forward engagement."

• Cuts in the social safety net -- the 2000 Democratic Platform guts the protections of the New Deal and Great Society, in favor of balancing the budget.

• Zero tolerance, mandatory sentencing, weakening of judges' discretion in sentencing, the death penalty, and growth of the private prison industry, whose profits require criminalization of more Americans in order to fill more cells

• The War on Drugs, with stiffer penalties for nonviolent offenses, incarceration of more young people (especially African Americans and Latinos) and their transformation into hardened criminals, and weakened Fourth Amendment search and seizure protections.

• Unrestrained corporate mergers, with further concentration of wealth and power.  During the Clinton-Gore Administration, mergers skyrocketed.

• Murderous and politically ineffectual sanctions against Iraq, resulting in the deaths of millions
  of Iraqis, including at least a half million children, according to UN figures; the embargo against Cuba, under the absurd premise that Cuba threatens national security.

• Rejection of a single-payer national health insurance program, without which the number of
  uninsured Americans will continue to climb (it's now 44 million).

• Despite Mr. Gore's convention promises to side with the people instead of oil companies, Mr. Gore pushed for the largest corporate hand-out in history, the Elk Hills oil reserve in California, a favor to Occidental Petroleum, in which his family owns a controlling share. He also wants to give Oxy drilling rights on U'wa Indian land in Colombia and in the Gulf of Mexico, despite human and environmental hazards. Mr. Gore refused to push for stronger fuel efficiency standards throughout the Clinton Administration, despite his rhetoric about global warming.
  
  On these and other environmental issues -- mining in Appalachia, bio-engineering and pesticides in food, the sugar industry's destruction of the Everglades, weakened Endangered Species Act, logging in the Tongass, replacement of regulation with "market control" of environmental protections -- Mr. Gore has made himself the envy of his Republican rival in serving corporate benefactors.

For More Information:

Green Party platform: http://www.gp.org
Nader 2000 Campaign: http://www.votenader.org
Association of State Green Parties: http://www.greenparties.org

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