HAMMOND—Shoring up Independent Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader’s resolve is never daunting, but it might not always be as easy as reading the newspaper.

Nader, who with his vice presidential candidate, Matt Gonzalez, stopped at the Cracker Barrel to talk exclusively with the Post-Tribune, pointed to the article before he even sat down. The two stopped in Indiana, then backpedaled to Lansing, Ill., as part of their weekend tour of the Midwest.

The article, which discussed leasing public assets, chills him to the core every time.

“This 75-to-99-year leasing turns colonialism on its head and is very bad for consumers; in this article, it says the tolls will rise to $25 by 2050,” he said. “It’s the corporate takeover of America. We’ve outsourced the military with Blackwater and Haliburton, and now the contract specialists who wrote those contracts are outsourcing their work to different countries.”

Working overtime

With seven states left to go in their quest to get on the ballot, Nader, 74, and Gonzalez are working overtime to get their platform to the masses. Supporters in Indiana will have to write-in their names as Nader-Gonzalez won’t be on the ballot.

Their platform includes items he says Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain have taken “off the table,” such as a 6-month, comprehensive negotiated military and corporate withdrawal from Iraq; single-payer, Canadian style free-choice health insurance; a living-wage and repeal of the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act; and a no-nuke, solar-based energy policy supported by renewable and sustainable energy sources.

Solar energy is a change he’s touted for years, and many utility executives to whom he’s spoken prefer wind power as the next energy source, he said.

Furthermore, once big companies have the same environmental standards, it removes the argument of one corporation getting preferential treatment over another.

In order to bring jobs back to Northwest Indiana and the rest of the country, for that matter, the fastest way to do that would be creating public works efficiency much like the “New Deal” did so many years ago.

More community policing

And instead of throwing more money toward law enforcement, he would rely more on community policing and rehabilitation instead of incarceration when it comes to many drug infractions.

Getting states to back off on abatements for new businesses may be a tough battle, but the public should know abatements are really just “icing on the cake” for corporations; corporations choose a site based on labor and location, not abatement.

Nader said he argued with Gov. Mitch Daniels over the Indiana Toll Road leasing, to no avail. Daniels did, however, listen to Nader when he suggested that all contracts forged with the state of Indiana be put online for the public to see. Indiana’s the first state in the country to do that, he said.

Mostly, Nader and Gonzalez want to see the country stop the speculation using the country’s capital.

“Betting on bets upon bets,” he said, produces nothing when the capital can be redirected to where it needs to go, such as infrastructure.

As for the other two candidates, Nader declined to discuss them outside of their issues. Gonzalez did, however, speak to his own credentials as the vice presidential candidate.

“I was President of San Francisco’s City Council, which has twice the budget and population of Alaska and Delaware,” he said.