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Matt Gonzalez/Ralph Nader at UCSB

by Hilda
On Sept. 28, 2008, Ralph Nader and Matt Gonzalez did an appearance at UC Santa Barbara as part of their campaign for the presidency on the Peace and Freedom party ticket. They are currently proceeding northward out of Los Angeles, and have more events planned in the central coast and San Francisco Bay area in the next few days. http://www.votenader.org/events/
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Gonzalez and Nader are putting in long hours, typically with three events per day, plus travel between sites. They will be in Santa Cruz at the Civic auditorium tomorrow Sept 29, and in San Francisco and Oakland on the 30th.

While receiving even less media coverage than his previous three runs for office (and he stated that the campaign wouldn't have happened this year if Edwards had received the nomination, due to his good positions on corporate power), Nader's volunteers got him on the ballot in 45 states. As Cynthia McKinney has the national green party nomination, Nader/Gonzalez are often on independent or other party tickets in the various states. For myself, I'm not sure if I'll vote for McKinney, Nader or Obama yet. I've voted Nader several times.

Matt Gonzalez gave a motivating introduction about the importance of being able to vote for the positions and government that you really want.

Nader is a great speaker, and was pretty much his typical self during this speech. It occurred to me that he has to give fresh-sounding speeches at perhaps 3 locations every day, and be ready to field a broad variety questions. So he looked remarkably energetic given this schedule. Their key issues for this campaign are getting both army and corporations out of Iraq, fighting corporate control (of course), single payer health insurance, blocking nuclear energy in favor of solar and other alternative energy forms, not bailing out banks, fairness in palestinian territories, and changing sentencing for nonviolent drug crimes. While everyone is very familiar with the argument that voting for a third party could put us at risk of getting a horrible candidate such as Palin, I think that the positions which Matt and Ralph put forth really evoke a stronger feeling of inspiration than the democratic vs. republican debates.

Below are a list of clips of Gonzalez and Nader speaking. There was a man with a 'fail' sign in the audience, but he was a liberal mumbling about how this isn't the right way to go. Nader said that many voters from McCain switch support to him. A heckler who was listening to an earpiece went on about socialism and christianity at length. He was saying that Nader's positions are all 'based on emotion', while he is rational, which is rather absurd. At one point, Ralph got a glazed expression during a question and said Obama, when he was responding about Osama bin Laden, but he was fast enough on the uptake to quickly make up a joke about it.

§Nader going onstage
by Hilda
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§media covers distractions
by Hilda
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§bailout
by Hilda
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Nader opposes the $700b corporate bailout, and also was saying he thinks that UC Santa Cruz has a more invigorated and active student body than Berkeley does these days. He's pretty much right.
§Gonzalez
by Hilda
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Here is the main part of Matt Gonzalez's talk. He talks about voting for what you want in a democracy
§Nader on Marijuana
by Hilda
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Nader talks about our screwed up criminal courts system, where we have more people per capita in prison than nearly all other nations. He recommends sending bankers who committed criminal acts to jail so that they become prison reform advocates.
§communists
by Hilda
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This might be wasting bandwidth, but this is a inner-driven heckler who had come out to elaborate on how Nader is a socialist who wants to enslave us like a wolf. Ralph asked him to provide a simple definition of socialism, with his being centralized control of the means of production (which he doesn't necessarily advocate. The man had a prolonged, unique definition of socialism, capitalism and liberty. Later came over and sat by me saying that liberals are intolerant.
§oops-label
by Hilda
Sorry - I mislabeled that. The clip above was a normal question about Colombia and Venezuela
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TITLE
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DAVE YOUNG
Tue, Sep 30, 2008 2:32AM
Jeff Elliott
Mon, Sep 29, 2008 11:13AM
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