Ralph Nader knows when to cry foul. We would do well to heed his latest alarm, sounded Sunday at the FleetCenter and last night at Harvard Law School, about the growing confluence of money and power in our democratic politics.

Nader's appearances protest his exclusion from the presidential debates. Shut out by his single digit poll numbers, Nader failed to clear the 15 percent qualifying mark established by the Commission on Presidential Debates. Whether or not he merits inclusion, circumstances surrounding the UMass debate lend credibility to the principal sentiment driving Nader's campaign: Unchecked corporate power has co-opted instruments of government at the people's expense.

The real story of last night's debate was not the candidates but the audience. A few token UMass students not withstanding, those who sat in the public seats paid heavily for the privilege--$100,000 was the going rate for debate tickets.

That donors were let in and the public kept out comes as par for the course in an election where corporations and wealthy individuals spend three to four billion dollars to push their interests ahead of yours.

From the billiard table, hot tub and steam shower bought for the vice-presidential mansion by Pricewaterhouse-Coopers, Coca-Cola and General Motors to George W.'s mixing of politics, oil and baseball, corporate influence infiltrates candidates' lives in ways so subtle even they may not be fully aware of their culpability. And while politicians might tell you otherwise, companies aren't spending their money for nothing.

Building this bridge to corporate control is a flawed set of campaign finance laws so porous corporations don't even have to do anything illegal to gain undue influence. This whole edifice, built upon a shoddy Supreme Court decision in Buckley v. Valeo equating money with speech, has given rise to a system in which the only speech that matters is money.

Like deals with the devil, politicians cannot easily extricate themselves from the vicious web of campaign contributions that simultaneously supports and constrains their political careers. When Sen. John S. McCain (R-Ariz.) tried, special interests drove the Straight Talk Express right off stage. And those completely outside the system, like Ralph Nader, struggle to survive, barely able to afford the $80,000 it takes to rent the FleetCenter, itself the result of public subsidy and private ownership. It was FleetBank, after all, which put up $100,000 to sponsor the presidential debate Nader can't afford to be in.

When hosting a debate between savvy presidential campaigns requires a savvy business campaign in which a community of corporate citizens, not citizens, raises the necessary cash, it is time to reexamine the role of business in the practice of government.

So here we are mired in this corporate politics of ours, holding debates at public schools to which the public isn't invited, between candidates self-selected by a process that deliberately excludes those who call attention to it. And we wonder why the net worth of Bill Gates, Class of 1977, equals the combined wealth of the poorest 120 million Americans, how it came to be that the lone superpower has the highest rate of child poverty in the developed world and why the percentage of the federal budget spent on education, infrastructure and research has fallen by almost half over the last 25 years.

Until our body politic rids itself of this corporate cancer, the one-quarter of one percent of the electorate that supplies half of all campaign contributions will continue to place limits on our social progress. It's time we place limits on them.

While George W.'s compassionate conservatism puts purpose back into prosperity and Gore's hollow populism fights the powerful forces, take care to listen to the call of Nader, whose politics, however incomplete, speak truth to power in a way Gore and Bush cannot.

Christopher M. Kirchhoff '01, a Crimson editor, is a history and science concentrator in Winthrop House. His column appears on alternate Wednesdays.