This is not a football game. Democrats versus Republicans. The world is not a doubles tennis match. Buddhism and Hinduism versus Islam and Christianity.
Alternatives are coming online and a third party in the United States will make so much sense to the great majority of people when it happens.
There are those that don't vote and think the whole thing is rigged. I loved when Ross Perot said "it's time to clean out the barn" when he was referring to the two parties.
I don't see three branches of government I see a Congress and Senate that has always had lawyers; attorneys, whatever you call them, as more than one third of its members. Despite the fact that lawyers are less than one half of one percent of the general population.
Then there's the JUDICIAL branch; which is what? Judges and lawyers. WTF! Then there's the executive branch which was recently occupied by constitutional scholar and former editor of the Harvard Law Review, attorney extraordinaire, Barack Obama.
Therefore it is apparent to me that there has already been a coup in this country. Lawyers and the companies they protect; Oil and Gas/international shipping/"defense" contractors/mining and all extractive industry and the rest.
A strong third party can break up the cycle of lawyer / lobbyists with their crony capitalist sideboards. Eating America like a tapeworm. Both sides of the fake news, right versus leftist, Civil War 2. Both sides can get behind an effort to confront the illegitimate wealth accumulated the last 40 years.
There are those that say; don't vote. I'd say voting is the bare minimum a person living in a free country should be doing. Beyond that is your civic participation. People organizing food banks and volunteers for animal adoption rescue and rehabilitation. Much is getting done by people putting a couple hours a week into volunteer work.
These are your pillars of society, along with the essential workers. I'm going to see if I can convince you to get behind a strong third party.
Democrats are seriously out of touch with the working class and right wing revisionists are completely ridiculous and now they proclaim that Kamala Harris was named after a Hindu demon goddess (sigh). How do you even start unpacking that bullshit?
We don't, and we will spend time on beneficial action instead. I would love to hear your ideas on what a dominant third party would look like. People have never been so ready.
There has to be a third party. Obama seemed like a legitimate Progressive politician within the Democratic Party and he got my vote in 2008. If only the Green Party had the wits to run a Bernie Sanders/ Ralph Nader ticket in 2012 when it became apparent Obama was a corporatist, it would have energized the entire political arena and would have gotten people past the #weakstreammedia talking points. There is an extremely limited spectrum of viewpoints.
Jill Stein and Cheri Honkala are two outstanding people who led the ticket during the next election and I voted Green Party in 2012 along with many others who were shocked that Obama preferred Goldman Sachs to the general population. Saddened that, whether by choice or design, he became a cheerleader for big corporations.
We ended up with two corporatists running in 2012 and two international crooks in 2016 and two out of touch geezers in 2020.
The Green Party has 200 people in elected office, primarily in Maine, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, ,but never as congressional representative or Senator. Bernie Sanders has spent more time in congress than all the green party candidates combined.
I wrote in Bernie Sanders in 2016 because the two major parties offered no real choice. As Bernie said "Our movement." Word wars. Prepare for battle.
The GOP is held at arms length by most thinking people, at least until the worst of the republicans can get deloused and deprogrammed and become part of our culture again.
So how do we create a dynamic and powerful third party, keeping in mind that people who register as independents have now reached a majority? I 40%/D 31%/ R 29%?
Theodore Roosevelt in 1912.
President Taft (1908-1912) had turned conservative corporatist while still flying
the Progressive colors and this chafed TR's sensibilities. Wilson was a such a cold fish in TR’s eyes, despite Woody being the progressive governor of New Jersey, that TR decided to run against these feckless toadies.
Worth
noting was that all three candidates considered themselves Progressive and when
Roosevelt didn’t get the nomination he decided to start an official Progressive
party, that June, and got like, 23% of the vote. So you have to wonder when glennbeck and tedcruz demonize Progressives, who is paying them to do so.
Here's the story of the Third Party effort in 1912. Just a flesh wound: 9 fun facts about that time Theodore Roosevelt was shot in Milwaukee (milwaukeerecord.com)
It’s nickname was the Bull Moose Party and Henry Wallace in 1948 was the last to run for president as a Progressive. Anti war, advocates for workers rights and strong unions, the deep state was ready to sideline any effort by Progressives and particularly, any aspirations of FDR's socialist agent of fortune and vice president, Henry Wallace.
The Idea of "Conspiracy" in McCarthy-Era Politics (archives.gov)
The wave of reforms by Progressives in the early 1900's modernized our society and then the successes of New Deal Programs saved our country.
So how
can we all unite as a third Party? And which one?
Movement for a Peoples Party MPP is making a go at being a third party of substance and has now registered its first state to run in, and that was Maine. But then I start to wonder about the 46 states the Greens are already registered in and why not unite with the Green Party? The Greens aren’t winning the big elections and they need to have a bigger tent.
Unfortunately, many Greens are city slicker liberals looking to reduce the ire of reformists and the fire of activists. The kind of people that think Grizzly Bears should live amongst people, just not where they are. Their attitude has turned off many voters with their inclusive, city people issues.
Greens project that latte lifestyle and
that’s not what the majority of us are. Most independents are a blend of suburb
and country and we think for ourselves and are generally DONE with the red and blue parties. We are sick to the bone with the maltreatment of the working class.
During
the first Progressive Age of Reform, (1890-1920), rural people and middle class
business people led the first Progressive Movement and today, the Progressive Era 2.0, is locked and loaded with an army of rural people who have been foreclosed on and bankrupted small business entrepreneurs of every stripe will join the forces of reform. This is not the America we grew up in and people feel in their bones. Big businesses goal is to supplant government and create an authoritarian peasant/billionaire neo feudalism and that has been accomplished.
It
appears the Movement for a Peoples Party MPP, was inspired by Bernie
Sanders in opposition to the two Wall Street parties, but what does Bernie say about the People Party? The Run Bernie Run Movement started
around 2005 and people realized he was one of the few fighting for our liberty in Congress and as the first page of 2021 opens, he is too busy to think about a third party in the midst of getting help to working families.
The reality of the working class, the independent, discerning, essential worker, wonders how they can be independent when they can’t afford rent? The stagnation of the minimum wage is a drag on all incomes and the middle class has shrunk from 60% to 30% of the working population since the Reagan Era of Greed began.
Democrats cowered to Newt Gingrichs Contract on America and couldn't counter the astroturf issues of the Tea Party in 2010.
Single Payer,
Medicare for all? Everyone gets treated when they need it, now that sounds like true independence to me. The actual blessings of Liberty. "...
MPP sounds like it has the staying power with some of my favorite people involved; Nina Turner Chris Hedges and Cornel West, but will the Green Party ally with them or will we have a mass of third parties getting nowhere? This is the basic question I am trying to answer. The working people, the essential workers, need to be in any debates in the future, but who will speak for us? Only a strong third party can do that.
Democrats have so much baggage and think about it, why do we have to have one party or the other dominating everything? A third party will prevent the two major parties from becoming more powerful than they already are, that's why. Wealthy millionaire lawyers of the two parties no longer represent us.
Republicans were going for the power overwhelming and it will be long discussed how the GOP nearly stole America with its White Nationalist nonsense and how they packed the court with a gaggle of ill-humored conservatives. Witness the crumbling façade of Manifest Destiny in 2021.
So here we are, we
have the floundering Greens, the languid Democrats, the rotten to the core GOP,
the not quite there Libertarians. Independents and Progressives are wondering
when this clotted nihility is going to end. Third party or bust. Our lives, our voices.
The American
Progressive Party, (The Bull Moose Party of T Roosevelt) is currently involved more with
policy than electoral politics and does not run many candidates. Progressives
are sharp and good thinking people and we need to build a third party for the working class. The Independent Majority.
I would like to see what people think about a third party and I would love to hear your opinion.
Let’s conclude The Green Party is the nexus for change. Most of America is basically aware of the message of the Green Party and back their environmental efforts and the standards and safeguards suggested by the Ten Key Principles. Green Party effetes however, seem more concerned with plastic straws and private part issues than Redwood Trees and Oil Spills if you know what I mean.
Especially marginalized by these city slicker metrosexuals, are the earth lovers. The Earth Warriors are keeping the pilot light of ecosystem stewardship lit and we are everywhere. Hopefully making our move in 2021.
We need
a green party with environmentally wise rural people involved. You can’t just
demand jobs like liberal minded city people do, they have to be created by demand and small business markets. Look into Market Socialism. When the chemically
dependent mega farmers deplete all the topsoil what will people in the future
use? We needed to have had farmers for our congressional representatives, not lawyers, the last 50 years.
I read a great article by Bill Hogseth who is a farmer/environmentalist. Here is how Mr Hogseth illustrates the basic lack of support Obama gave to his fellow farmers.
“ Rural voters appreciated Obama’s repeated campaign promises to challenge the rise of agribusiness monopolies. But as president, he allowed for the continued consolidation of corporate power in the food system. His Department of Agriculture balked when it came time to enforce anti-monopoly rules such as those in the Packers and Stockyard Act, and failed to enforce Country of Origin Labeling, which would have allowed independent farmers and ranchers to better compete within the consolidated meat industry.
The Obama Justice Department and Federal Trade
Commission presided
over a series of corporate mergers in the food and
agriculture sectors, including the Kraft-Heinz and JBS-Cargill mergers. Taken
together, these moves signaled that his administration did not have the backs
of family farmers……… We see the wealth of our sweat and soil being sent away to
enrich executives, investors and shareholders. End the investor
economy.”
I'm suggesting Progressives join the Green Party and
the Green Party kicks it up a notch and becomes the Green Progressive Independent
Party. GPI. Name change and a much bigger engine.
I thought a great name for a winning third party would be The Independent Majority Party. IMP ... creating a fuss. The name exudes confidence and free thinking independent minds can drop all labels and simply be the Independent Party, but then I realized we don’t have to build a huge national presence with a new third party such as MPP when The Greens already have done the ground work. I'm suggesting we all join the Green party and change it from within to create an effective Peoples Party.
The Greens are tainted with European
style Socialism which embraces Marxism and I will tell you right now your basic
American Suzy Lunchbox is not going to be calling herself a Marxist. Not today, not tomorrow. Communists are calling for Left Solidarity but no one was impressed by Mao or Stalin that I have talked to.
I insist, as Russell Means notes in a speech to the Congress, that Communism and Capitalism are two failed euro-centric economic systems.
American workers may call themselves socialists, a la Eugene Debs and Lafollette from Wisconsin, but I have worked in three corners of this country and talked to thousands of people in most of the occupations, and these people would find calling themselves communists a laugh riot. Serious people; witty brilliant people working for far less than they deserve, (the investment class has been siphoning off the people who do the actual work), will propel a third party.
I have learned so much from the workers of America and have heard their struggles these last 50 years and not a one of them talked about Karl Marx. The essential workers could give a shit less about economic philosophy but could articulate what is wrong with America better than the city slicker Marxists who are belly aching online, trying to usurp the workers revolution.
It’s a city thing. A college thing. A trendy thing now with the ubiquitous red and black banner bullshit. It’s not gonna work fellas, not in the vast majority of America. Green and Black baby, here we come.
Bill Hogseth: "Farmers’ share of every retail food dollar has fallen from about 50 percent in 1952 to 15 percent today.
….. a future for rural communities in which food production is localized, energy is cheap and clean, people have good jobs, soil is healthy, Main Street is bustling with small businesses, schools are vibrant and everyone can see a doctor if they need to. Here in Wisconsin, we can look back in our state’s rich history of progressive populism to a time when politicians like Bob LaFollette, our former governor and U.S. senator, understood that concentrated wealth and corporate power are a threat to people’s livelihoods.
What can we agree on? Name three issues we can unite on.
a)
b)
c)
CURRENT ARTICLES FROM VARIOUS SOURCES
Lost in the middle: Will the arrogant certainty of "centrism" destroy America? | Salon.com
