Recently, a letter appeared over the Internet by film-maker and corporate critic Michael Moore, intended for all voters but especially for the non-voting majority of Americans

You may remember Moore as the film producer and director of a movie called "Roger and Me" which was a diatribe against a steel company that abandoned a mid-western American town.

In his letter, Moore claims that 80 percent of Americans did not vote in this year's presidential primaries, for either party. That's 180 million Americans.

Many of that majority are turned off, he writes, because the two parties offer no substantive difference in important political positions. "They both," he writes, " support NAFTA, WTO, the death penalty, the Cuban embargo, increased Pentagon spending, corporate welfare, sleazy HMOs, greedy hospital chains, 250 million guns in our homes, more bombings of Iran, the rich getting richer and the rest of us declaring bankruptcy."

He calls non-voters the largest party in the nation, a party that could sway an election even if only a relatively small number of them decided to vote.

Moore's argument is that it's okay if you are a Democrat and you vote for Gore. Go ahead, he says. He's looking to the non-voting majority to vote for Green Party candidate Ralph Nader.

He's also encouraging 18 year olds who've never voted before to vote for Nadar.

The Democrats have abandoned the old Democratic coalition that got so many Democrats elected in the past. The coalition was made up of labor unions and workers, minorities, people on welfare (mostly single mothers), educators, youths, certain ethnic and religious groups, environmentalists and, in a very general sense, the poor, the dispossessed, those who had no voice in the affairs of the corporate world and have even less now in the globalized corporate world.

The Democratic Party no longer champions the causes of these groups. Thus, they are beginning to look more and more like Republicans.

"Corporate America has merged and morphed itself to such an extent that just a handful of companies call all the shots," wrote Moore. "Six companies run by six men control the majority of the news we now get from newspapers, television, radio and the Internet. One out of every two books is bought at a bookstore owned by one of only two companies."

It's Nader, he says, who represents our last hope of getting our country back from the clutches of the powerful few.

The hard question is, if you are one of the minority who usually votes, do you vote for Gore or do you run the risk of voting for Nader and giving the edge to Bush?

If you like what Nader says, you can at least talk to people who don't usually vote and urge them to get out and vote for Nader.

But do you need to do more than that? Is it time to begin building a third party that will champion these forgotten causes and begin to get our country back from the clutches of the powerful few?

I think it is. I-a life-long Democrat-plan to do the unthinkable in the upcoming election. I'm not voting Democratic. I'm voting for the candidate of the people-Ralph Nader.

Tom Kane, Staff Writer