There comes a time in an abusive relationship when it is no longer possible to continue. I have reached that time with the Democratic Party. Today I unregistered from the Democratic Party and registered in the Green Party.
Before I explain why I'm no longer a Democrat, I want to make it clear that I am not advocating how to vote in the upcoming presidential election. I now advocate voting Green in every local, state, and congressional district. Unfortunately, we live in a country where the presidential system is a winner take all choice and does not allow for party negotiations to choose the head of government such as in the prime minister system of Canada or England.
In the Presidential election, the differences between Kerry and Bush are not large, but they are also not inconsequential. I think that in the interests of collaborative party politics between those parties on the humanitarian side of the Republicans, Bush must be given a sound beating. So I think voters must consider this when voting. But it is imperative also that on the day after the election if Kerry wins, then Kerry must be sent a million emails and letters telling him he did not earn the victory and does not have either a personal or party mandate. (Moveon.org are you listening?) Kerry must be told in no uncertain terms that the vote against Bush was NOT a vote for Kerry. Because the vote is against Bush, Kerry will be a loser even if he wins. We the people will have to let Kerry know that he will be a one-term president if he doesn't start listening to the people.
That being said, I'm now convinced that the Democratic Party can not be redeemed from within. By selecting John Kerry as its presidential candidate the Democratic Party is clearly and irretrievably in the hands of Corporatists who do not have any viable or even coherent economic agenda for working people. I still like and love my Democratic friends, but this single fact should be enough for any reasonable person in the USA to leave the Democratic Party. It is not sane to continue in a relationship where one is abused over and over again with the promise of reform and doing better after each incident of abuse. My brothers and sisters in the Democratic family have promised that the fathers of the party will get better and stop beating up on the rank and file. I was insane to believe this and continued to be a Democrat. As of today, I am sane and leave the Democratic Party.
Corporatism is the signal political tyranny of our time, like slavery before it, it is a judicially created doctrine not present in our Constitution. Corporations and the Corporatists who profit from them in their interlocking mutual support society on the boards and management of them control our government with as much intolerance and brutality as the Communist party controlled the Soviet Union.
Only that brutality is hidden within the velvet glove of a charade of democracy controlled by those Corporatist interests. No words can be too harsh in criticizing the perversion of democracy and the tyrannical domination of society that the Corporatists have perpetrated today. One can not speak too strongly against the stranglehold on our government that corporations and the Corporatists who control them have. During the struggle against slavery, there were those who suggested that the cause of abolition was better made by less harsh criticism. "Would you argue more and denounce less, would you persuade more and rebuke less, your cause would be much more likely to succeed." However, I can only respond as Frederick Douglas said on the Fourth of July 1852 ( http://www.redandgreen.org/speech.htm ), "But, I submit, where all is plain there is nothing to be argued." It can not be argued by any rational person that Corporatism is not the single greatest threat to civil liberties, the environment, peace, and justice, both domestically and internationally that we face in the world today.
The common thread throughout my list of seemingly disparate grievances against Kerry and the Democratic Party leadership is that each and every item has the hand of Corporatism behind it as a political prop. As stated in The Black Commentator (http://www.blackcommentator.com/45/45_dixon.html), "It is the mission of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) to make it financially attractive to Democratic candidates and office holders to take stands diametrically opposed to the interests of their constituents, to sound and vote more like corporate friendly Republicans." I know many local Democrats who are the nicest and honest people one could know, who continue to believe that the Democratic Party can be rescued. I can no longer share their belief.
My list of complaints focuses on Kerry and his positions because he represents the Democratic Party leadership which have remained ever unfaithful to the rank and file who are the base of the party. I applaud the dear souls like Dennis Kucinich who hope against hope that by long and tireless work the Democratic Party may come around.
I, however, have awakened from that dream. I am convinced that the Democratic Party leadership is so throughly and inextricably entwined with Corporatism that the fundamental difference between Democrat and Republican policy is simply how well or how cruel to treat the working class without giving the vast majority of the people any democratic control over the real corporate wealth and power that rules our government.
For me, the selection of John Edwards at he Democrats vice- presidential candidate was the last straw. The manipulations of the party platform against the rank and file who favor the repeal of the Patriot Act, who want withdrawal of troops from Iraq, and who want a Department of Peace were the cherries on the cake. So here is my list of major items of disaffection with the Democratic Party.
1) The large majority of Democrats oppose the war in Iraq and know that there was and is no legal reason to be there. Yet John Kerry and the party leadership blocked from the party platform a provision calling for the speedy removal of troops from Iraq.
2) Kerry picked John Edwards for the Vice President candidate. Edwards voted to give Bush his war powers.
http://www.michaelmoore.com/iraq-yes-no/index.php If Kerry had picked someone like a John Lewis, Daniel Inouye, Jesse Jackson, Jr., Barbara Lee, Ann Richards, or Patty Murray I could have kept hopeful that the Democrats might come around. But I am tired of Democrats not picking women or people of non-European ancestry for the VP spot. The party had the chance to do something different, yet Kerry picks another European-American man, and a Senator who also voted to give Bush war powers in Iraq at that! There is nothing wrong with Edwards being a trial attorney, Honest Abe Lincoln was a trial attorney, but Edwards. was a special guest at the most recent Bilderberg meeting shortly before Kerry picked him as his running mate. No principled person supporting working people would attend a Bilderberg meeting. And a political party must stand for the principle of changing the face of politics even over the claim that there are no women or non-European men who have the stature to be a VP candidate. When fundamental principles and rights are involved, there has to be a strength to say winning isn't everything.
3) The war in Iraq is illegal and Kerry refuses to acknowledge that simple fact. Instead, Kerry wants to increase troops in Iraq. John Kerry broke his "promise" to oppose the war in Iraq if Bush did not get UN authority, and instead Kerry remained silent until it was clear to him that rank and file Democrats opposed the war and even then he only says the war isn't being fought correctly.
4) John Kerry believes in the phony "war on terrorism." The war on terrorism is ethically wrong, philosophically absurd, logically erroneous, and practically worthless. Terrorism is a tactic not an enemy. We should be arresting the criminals who perpetrated 9/11 and brining down their organization, not creating a false boogy-man called "terrorism" to frighten people into giving up our liberties.
4) Kerry supports the illegal wall in Israel and has sold out to the pseudo-Zionists and political hoodlums in the USA who use the holocaust as a political trade in personal power. Israel has a unique status as a nation created by international law, and at this date Israel should continue to exist only as long as it abides by the international law that created it. Israel is piling up reason upon reason to make itself nothing more than a rogue nation that is illegitimate in its very existence. The torture of captured Palestinians must stop! The Palestinian occupation is illegal and must stop immediately! And occupation will stop as soon as the USA stops giving weapons to Israel. Israel must be told, "No protection for illegal occupation, torture, and oppression.!"
5) Kerry doesn't support gay marriage. The benefits of the civil contract of civil marriage is a human right not a religious sacrament. People who want a religious marriage can go to their church, but people who don't want a religious marriage shouldn't be forced to follow superstitious religious beliefs about marriage being only between a man and a woman. Anyone who witnesses the reading of the Bible in the US Senate can see for themselves that the opposition to gay marriage is simple superstition at work. Kerry's opposition to gay marriage is similarly superstitious and anti-reason.
6) Kerry doesn't support single payer universal health care.
7) Kerry is an unashamed imperialist. John Kerry supports continuation of NAFTA, and also the IMF's and World Bank's policies of USA economic imperialism domineering the undeveloped nations with such inhumane policies as privatizing water resources.
8) John Kerry is against repeal of the US PATRIOT ACT. This phony legislation has no redeeming value. John Kerry supports the fascist Department of Homeland Security and uses the jingoist language of "protecting the Homeland.". Kerry's campaign papers say "The most basic responsibility of government is to provide for the common defense." Nope, that is not the "most" basic. There are six basic responsibilities of government stated in the preamble of the US Constitution, defense is only one of the six, and they are all equally basic. Kerry supports the use of the Orwellian weather report of threat level color warnings. This is a tool of fear to intimidate the people.
9) John Kerry supports the other phony "war," i.e., the so called war on drugs, and has not condemned government raids on medical marijuana users.
10) John Kerry does not support real campaign reform including broadcast access for candidates. Kerry did not protest when the media pulled their reporters from the other Democratic campaigns of Kucinich and Braun. Kerry doesn't want other candidates into the debates. Kerry doesn't support Instant Runoff Voting.
11) Kerry condemned the Viet Nam war in 1971 but now hypocritically calls Viet Nam "an exception" when Viet-Nam-style military adventurism has been the rule in Panama, Grenada, Afghanistan, Iraq, and most recently Haiti, among others. For instance, Kerry doesn't condemn the US military presence in Uzbekistan which is only there to secure oil and natural gas contracts while we prop up the dictator who is every bit as inhumane as Saddam Hussein ever was.
12) John Kerry won't disclose or discuss his participation in the secretive Skull and Bones group in which he is a member along with President Bush; he won't apologize for it; and he won't resign from it.
13) John Kerry doesn't understand why FDR said "But I know, and you know, and every independent businessman who has had to struggle against the competition of monopolies know, that this concentration of economic power in all-embracing corporations does not represent private enterprise as we Americans cherish it and propose to foster it. On the contrary, it represents private enterprise which has become a kind of private government, a power unto itself - a regimentation of other people's money and other people's lives."
Kerry owes the telecommunications industry and many other giant business interests, is number one in receiving lobbying money in congress, owns one million in WalMart stock, etc., so he can't be trusted to give a fair deal to working people. (Kerry even introduced tomato paste bills for legislation.)
14) John Kerry opposes free public colleges and wants tax credits instead. Kerry wants to institute a poor person's draft and use college education as a carrot for recruiting poor kids into a "national service" plan under the fascistic title of "A New Army of Patriots" while letting rich kids out of such recruitment schemes.
The only fair plan is to either institute a national service draft of all kids equally, including the children of the rich and powerful in Congress or provide free education without discrimination on the basis of wealth.
While the differences between Bush and Kerry are not inconsequential, it is time for Americans, and Democrats especially, to realize there is a different direction to go. We are brainwashed in this country to believe that the "two-party" system is legitimate no less than people were brainwashed in the Soviet Union or Iraq to believe that a one- party system was legitimate. If viewed without the jaundiced eye of our brainwashed belief in the two-party totalitarian system, we would see that important issues of public debate fall outside the Republican-Democrat preserve. The political reality is three dimensional, not one dimensional or even two-dimensional. Primarily, the notion that government must be profitable for every type of business in order for business interests to support government is one of them. Economic anarchy is no benefit to mankind.
Republican business interests court the superstitious religious fundamentalists and mis-guided populists in order to support the large profits of corporations. Democratic business interests woo the gullible civil liberty supporters in order to support the large profits of corporations. Caught between superstition and gullibility, the giant corporations win every time.
Among the current alternatives, only the Green Party seems to have the necessary integrity and insight to address the hopes for liberty and the fears of tyranny in the context of the need for social responsibility adding up to the understanding that the greatest threat to liberty and prosperity for both Americans and the world comes from the trans-national Corporatists who dominate and oppress world governments and markets for personal power and greed.
It's time that the USA wean itself from this communistic, fascistic, and totalitarian style of two-party control of the state and open up the electoral system to multi-party politics. If Bush wins because too many people voted for the Green Party candidate David Cobb or the independent candidate Ralph Nader I won't be complaining. Why not?
Because the Democrats haven't understood the meaning of Instant Runoff Voting and why coalition politics is necessary. The Democrats want to force voters into an either-or choice between two Corporatist parties instead of letting people associate in their natural affinities and then see which candidates have the broadest support.
That's not democracy.
This is no political conversion on my part. I've always believed this way and have only belonged to the Democratic Party as one of the gullible who saw the Democrats as a hope for the future based on its New Deal past. But the Democratic Party is now controlled by those who only give lip service to the core ideals of the New Deal in which Franklin D. Roosevelt outlined an Economic Bill of Rights in his 1944 State of the Union address:
"We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. `Necessitous men are not free men.' People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made."
I do not idolize FDR with uncritical adoration. What was good about the Democratic New Deal, FDR and the Democrats appropriated directly from "third" parties, essentially the Socialist Party, in order to respond to the people's authentic concerns. Today, the Democratic leadership is too ensconced and self-assuredly complacent to do anything more than to offer empty homage to those ideals of social responsibility.
Regardless of how you vote in the presidential election, please stop supporting the continuing political abuse by the Democratic and Republican Parties. Register in the alternative party of your choice and tell the Democrats and Republicans they have lost touch with the people. I strongly suggest you join me in registering Green.
Gregory Wonderwheel
Santa Rosa, California.
