[GPSCC-chat] Fwd: A Voters' Revolt Against Two-Party Rule (SM, OpEdNews.com)

[Wes Rolley]

A welcome rant from GPUS Press Secretary.

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	A Voters' Revolt Against Two-Party Rule (SM, OpEdNews.com)
Date: 	Fri, 29 Oct 2010 16:00:10 -0700 (PDT)
From: 	Scott McLarty <scottmclarty at yahoo.com>
To: 	dcsgp at yahoogroups.com



A Voters' Revolt Against Two-Party Rule
The real lesson of 2010: End the stranglehold of the Titanic Parties on US elections

By Scott McLarty
OpEdNews.com, October 29, 2010
http://www.opednews.com/articles/A-Voters-Revolt-Against-T-by-Scott-McLarty-101029-859.html


It's time to face the music. There is no hope for real change as long as politics in America is stuck in the two-party groove.

Most Americans recognize that the Democratic and Republican parties have failed to serve the public interest. According to a September 17 Gallup poll, 58% of Americans said a "third major party was needed" while only 35% believe that the Democrats and Republicans adequately represent the public (http://www.gallup.com/poll/143051/Americans-Renew-Call-Third-Party.aspx).

Maybe the 58% have concluded that they've been ignored by a pair of political parties awash in corporate money and influence, and that the gap between the wealthy and the rest of us will keep growing regardless of which of the two parties is in power. Maybe they've realized that a country with a population as large and diverse as the US should have more than just two parties.

In the 2010 election, Democrats have offered no credible message about "change we can believe in," about helping Americans regain control of their lives, restoring accountability and the rule of constitutional law, or ending the wars. Meanwhile, Republicans repackaged disastrous Bush-Cheney ideas as Tea Party populism and appealed to the worst prejudices of some voters about Barack Obama.

GOP intimidation pushed Dems into further compromises and betrayals of their own voting base. The only consistent reason to vote for many Democrats on Election Day 2010 is "We're not as awful as the Republicans." Or as Jon Stewart said on The Daily Show, "Democrats this year seem to be running on, 'Please baby, one more chance.'"

It's dishonest to claim there's no difference between Democrat and Republican. But the parties stand for a very narrow range of ideas, with positions on important issues of the day that often coincide.

Sometimes, Democrats and Republicans seem to disagree sharply, but the premises underlying their respective arguments are the same. Consider the health care reform debate. Although Dems passed a health care bill over the objections of anti-reform Republicans, both parties agreed that our health care should remain under the control of the for-profit insurance industry, which flooded both parties' congressional and presidential candidates with generous campaign checks.

Obamacare imposes mandates, requiring Americans to purchase insurance from for-profit insurers, a legally questionable idea first proposed by Republicans during the mid 1990s, and does nothing to hold down medical costs. The debate was rigged from the start. Whether Democrats passed their bill or the GOP succeeded in blocking it, the real winners would be the insurance and pharmaceutical cartels.

Democratic presidents during the past two decades have used their power to fulfill much of the GOP's agenda, accomplishing what Republican presidents left unfinished.

Which Democratic president enacted NAFTA, the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, the antigay 1996 Defense of Marriage Act and 'don't ask, don't tell', the 1996 Effective Antiterrorism and Death Penalty Act, and the 1998 Telecommunications Act (allowing ownership of media by a tiny number of conglomerates); expanded the war on drugs and for-profit prison system (incarcerating record numbers of Americans, especially young black and brown men); signed the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act (setting the stage for the recent economic crisis); and began talks with Republicans on cutting and privatizing Social Security? Bill Clinton, completer of the Reagan Revolution.

Which Democratic president escalated the Afghanistan War, protected Bush officials who okayed torture and other abuses of the US Constitution and international law, maintained warrantless spying on US citizens, hired Wall Street front men like Tim Geithner and Larry Summers, authorized more taxpayer-funded Wall Street bailouts and new taxpayer-funded nuclear plants, appointed a 'Catfood Commission' to explore Social Security reductions, opened up more coastal waters to offshore drilling, promoted the myth of 'clean coal' and permitted more mountaintop removal mining, and left a substantial residual occupation force, including military contractors, in Iraq? You know who.

By retreating from their stated values and traditional constituencies, Dems have opened up the space for ever greater Republican extremes. If you were appalled by Bush-Cheney, imagine the next Republican White House. Sarah Palin gives us hint of what to expect, even if she has no hope of winning the nomination. (Fascism is an ugly word -- let's call it Foxism.) And think about how quickly Democratic leaders will adopt the next GOP administration's worst ideas.

This pattern is long overdue for an interruption. The drift of bipartisan politics towards repressive and belligerent extremes, towards more corporate power and less accountability to the public and to the law, will continue until the two established parties -- let's call them the Titanic Parties (coined by 2010 California Green gubernatorial candidate Laura Wells) -- lose their stranglehold.

What we need is a voters' revolt. We'll see a real change for the better when voters stop voting exclusively for Titanic Party politicians declared acceptable by the major media, and instead vote for candidates they actually agree with.

In many races, there are already Green, Libertarian, Socialist, and other alternative party and independent candidates on the ballot. But voters often don't get to learn about these candidates. Or they assume that such candidates are unelectable and therefore not worth voting for.

The revolt will occur when a critical mass of voters becomes frustrated enough to abandon the Titanic Parties.

Some Democrats, especially progressives, insist that we keep voting Democrat to hold the GOP at bay. Sure, we're all alarmed by the prospect of another Republican White House and Congress. But this kind of thinking has resulted in a Democratic Party that routinely takes progressive votes for granted.

Courageous Dems like Dennis Kucinich, John Conyers, and others have been marginalized within their own party, thanks to the Democratic Leadership Council, the blue dogs, and the Rahm Emanuel crowd. They mainly serve to herd progressive voters behind Democratic nominees who reject their agenda.

Progressive, pro-environmental, and antiwar voters who can't see beyond the Democratic Party have cooperated in their own defeat. Most of the crowd at the "One Nation, Working Together" rally at the Lincoln Memorial on October 2 offered no challenge to President Obama or the current Democratic Congress. Not one speaker suggested that, if President Obama ended all military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and called the troops home, we'd have enough in the federal budget to cover urgent human needs.

"After spending millions to assemble a multitude, Big Labor, the NAACP and the usual Black entertainers -- Reverends Sharpton and Jesse Jackson -- could not fix their trembling lips to utter one demand to the Power in the White House, whose disfavor they fear even more than they dread the white nationalist hordes of the Tea Party," wrote Glen Ford in Black Agenda Report ("Ignominious Surrender On The Mall," October 6, http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/ignominious-surrender-mall).

There is no hope for rehabilitation of the Democratic Party, certainly not as long as corporate money remains the center of gravity in US politics and Dems keep signing onto GOP agenda in a vain attempt to seize the middle ground. The party's leaders try to appease the GOP and appeal to Republican voters because they assume that Democratic voters will always remain faithful, having nowhere else to turn. Take away that assumption, and the whole dynamic of US politics changes.


Agenda for a Voters' Revolt

A voters' revolt against two-party rule must begin with the existing alternative parties, which already have some infrastructure and a degree of electoral experience.

Should the Tea Party play a role? Those Tea Partiers at the local level who regard themselves as independent of the GOP and have protested the bailouts of the financial firms responsible for the recent subprime mortgage crisis and economic meltdown are very much part of the movement. Unfortunately, the Tea Party movement has been hijacked by GOP operatives, by the influence of Fox News and money from corporate billionaires like the Koch brothers, and by phony populists and corporate royalists like Sarah Palin (who endorsed the bailout in September 2008), New Gingrich, Glenn Beck, and Rush Limbaugh. (See "Tea Party ‘founder’: Palin, Gingrich a ‘joke’" by Daniel Tencer, The Raw Story, http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/10/tea-party-founder-slams-tea-party/)

We should also be wary of Thomas L. Friedman's vision of a third party representing the "radical center" between Democrat and Republican ("Third Party Rising," October 2, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/opinion/03friedman.html). What Mr. Friedman imagines to be a gap is really an overlap, occupied by politicians who -- in the name of moderacy and bipartisanship -- are the most willing to serve corporate lobbies..

Greens, Libertarians, authentic Tea Partiers, Socialists, and other alternative parties and their allies can unite in coalition, without sacrificing their own political platforms, to set the framework for a voters' revolt. The first step would be a list of demands including the following:

• A call to elect candidates outside the Titanic Parties to Congress and state legislatures.

• Inclusive candidates' debates and abolition of the Commission on Presidential Debates (owned and run by the Democratic and Republican parties), based on the principle that voters have a right to know about all the names they'll see on the ballot and a right to vote for whichever candidates best represents their own interests and ideals, without the two-party limit.

• Various election reforms, including Proportional Representation, Instant Runoff Voting (which offsets the danger that a minority party or independent candidate might "spoil" for one of the two major parties), and other alternatives to winner-take-all elections; far-reaching campaign finance reforms; tamper-proof open-software computer voting machines; punishment for public officials who conspire to manipulate vote counts.

• Passage of the MoveToAmend amendment, which would abolish corporate 'personhood' and overturn the Citizens United ruling (http://www.movetoamend.org).

• Repeal of ballot-access laws in many states that hinder alternative parties and privilege Democrats and Republicans: for an outrageous example in one state, see "Some political parties remain outlaws in Pa." by Oliver Hall in The Philadelphia Inquirer (http://www.philly.com/inquirer/opinion/20101018_Some_political_parties_remain_outlaws_in_Pa_.html).

• Repeal of rules in some states that limit the number of candidates on the ballot to two in the general election (and fierce opposition in states, like California, where such rules have been proposed).

• Rejection of the notion that voters must vote for candidates judged by polls or media commentators to be the most winnable, which reduces voting in elections to the level of betting in a horse race.

All or most of this list -- which presupposes no political ideology beyond a dedication to fair elections -- will appeal to fair-minded Democratic and Republican voters. Organizers of the voters' revolt should remember that the villains are not the voters of any party, but the Titanic Party hierarchy and the corporate paymasters, media, and debate sponsors who've used their influence to limit the range of allowable candidates and ideas.

Alternative parties are interested in the direction of our nation in the coming decades, unlike the two Titanic Parties, which can't see beyond their own rivalry. Democratic and Republican politicians and their apologists are primarily worried about whether the pendulum of public support will swing in their direction in the next election. A voters' revolt isn't only about the next election, it's about future generations and a hope that the 21st century won't be limited to the narrow, dreary politics of the two big parties.

Many of us in alternative parties have waited for a voters' revolt for years. We imagine a landscape of ideas, with a lively public debate that isn't restricted to two sides approved by corporate sponsors. We know that the election of a few alternative party candidates to Congress would cause a seismic shock, confronting Democratic and Republican Congress members with the reality that they're no longer each others' sole competition.

The only real democracy is multi-party democracy. What can we do to ignite a voters' revolt, in 2010 and beyond?








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