The Self-Defeating Argument That The Democratic Party Represents Meaningful Change

Both morally and politically, the Democratic Party has failed after forty years of pivoting to the interests of corporations and the wealthy, and a great deal of people are now taking action to fix that. Bernie Sanders, despite having been prevented from becoming the new face of the party last year by pro-Clinton Democratic leaders, he and others are making another go at reforming the Democrats. And should this effort fail, these progressives will still have the option of letting the already sinking ship which is the Democratic Party go underwater and rally around an alternative organization.

Unfortunately, a good chunk of the Democratic base appears to be satisfied with their party's current form. During the 2016 campaign, more Democrats were found to be satisfied with Hillary Clinton than there were Republicans who felt the same about Donald Trump, and 56% of Democrats feel that their party represents them. While that latter figure would no doubt shrink to less than 50% if it were to include all of the left-leaning individuals who no longer affiliate with the party, an overhaul of the currently neoliberal Democratic leadership will be difficult for as long as so many Democrats remain unaware of what their party represents.

So in this piece, I'm going to attempt to change the minds of those who believe the Democratic Party in its current form represents a serious threat to the corporate state. I've made this argument many times before, but in those cases a mistake I might have made is focusing only on the actions of the party's leaders. A more effective way of proving the Democratic establishment represents the oligarchy is pointing out the fact that the oligarchy works to accommodate it.

The reality is that if Democrats were a party of the people, the political system in its current form would not allow them to have any power. When Bill Clinton said at the Democratic National Convention in 1992 that "I have news for the forces of greed and the defenders of the status quo: your time has come and gone," had he meant this genuinely, said forces would have immediately started doing everything to sabotage him. His campaign would have been attacked and/or ignored by the corporate media, he would have been shut out of the presidential debates and had a difficult time getting onto all of the ballots, and either Bush or Perot would have prevailed. So is the case with every other corporate-funded Democrat like him who claims to want systemic governmental change.

Just look at what's happened to the few politicians in the last several decades who have actually tried to bring about what Clinton promised. When Ralph Nader tried to enter a 2000 presidential debate simply as a member of the audience, the Commission on Presidential Debates, a private organization run by evidently very partisan representatives of the Democratic and Republican parties, barred him from entering the area. Something similar happened to him in 2004 when Democratic officials hurt his campaign by filing pointless and resource-draining lawsuits against it. Nader wasn't the only candidate like him who was sabotaged during that election cycle, as evidenced by the successful attempt by the corporate media to wreck Howard Dean's campaign. Another instance of this systemic effort to block out non-corporatist candidates occurred in 2012, when the NYPD, which has a history of attacking those who threaten the neoliberal order, arrested Jill Stein for trying to enter the site of the New York presidential debate.

But never has the oligarchy-friendly nature of the modern American electoral process been made more apparent than in 2016. While some have tried to claim the fact that the DNC officials who expressed bias against Bernie Sanders had little control over the results of last year's primary proves the contest wasn't rigged, WikiLeaks' findings were only one part of the picture.

Throughout the primaries, pro-Hillary Clinton election officials often went out of their way to sabotage Sanders, starting with the first contest in Iowa wherein widespread reports surfaced of voter suppression and a highly suspicious "re-staged" vote count took place. Similar (and successful) efforts to rig the primary against Sanders occurred in Nevada, Massachusetts, Arizona, New York, the Nevada State Democratic Convention, Kentucky, Puerto Rico, and California. Lesser but still consequential instances of electoral fraud took also took place in many other states, as evidenced by the numerous statistically impossible Democratic primary vote models which favored Clinton in every case. Another way Sanders was felled by a corporate-controlled political process, predictably, was the media blackout which plagued his campaign.

And then, to add insult to injury, Sanders' ideological successor for the 2016 election Jill Stein was sabotaged as well, with the corporate media having launched a smear campaign against her and the Commission on Presidential Debates having deliberately chosen polls which underestimated her support while deciding who could participate in the debates.

Judging from these and other ways the oligarchy has rigged our electoral process to benefit candidates and parties that represent it, one can only conclude that the best way to tell if a candidate or party doesn't intend to protect the people's interests is to see whether or not the media and the major political institutions are trying to get them out of the picture. And clearly, the Democratic Party fails this test simply because of the fact that it's succeeded in the current political system.

Fortunately this sad state of affairs, wherein one can only trust a politician to uphold the popular interest if they're being shut out of the political process, will have a good chance of changing in the very near future. Economic inequality is now at a level not seen since the late 1920's, right before the public rose up to bring about the New Deal, and a similar event is certain to take place within the next few years. But in order to make this overthrow of the corporate power structure effective, we'll need to take a firm stand against the corporatists who currently control the Democratic Party.

We Can't Let Hillary Clinton Spoil This Election

It was almost sixteen years ago, on November 7, 2000, that Al Gore spoiled the 2000 election.

Though Ralph Nader's supporters urged those in Gore's camp to be pragmatic, reminding them that voting for a major party candidate in most states would be pointless and that building the Green Party was important for advancing progressive goals, but too many of them wouldn't listen. Though Nader had enough support to receive 5% of the vote, which would have given the Greens increased ballot access and federal matching funds in the next election, thanks to Gore he lost that opportunity. Democrats have since tried to deny this mistake, falsely accusing the Greens of swinging the election to Bush, but they just can't escape it; because of the unnecessary number of people who voted for Gore in 2000, the country has paid a terrible price.

Thankfully, though, Americans have a chance not to repeat that mistake in 2016.

To be clear, I do not want Donald trump to win any more than I wish George W. Bush had become president. Bush was by far less competent and responsible than Gore, and in the case of Hillary Clinton vs Donald Trump, that difference is of course magnified a hundredfold. You just can't expect to admit an erratic, overtly tyrannical figure like Trump into the center of the republic's power structure without there being possibly fatal consequences for its future.

But as a great deal of people have become aware of since 2000, the other option isn't much better. While Trump denies climate change, Clinton's approach to addressing it is not at all adequate. While the prospect of having Trump make foreign policy decisions seriously introduces the possibility of a third world war, Clinton's plans for handling the situation in Syria could very well have similar consequences. While Trump's presence on the world stage and economic ideas would likely lead to an economic collapse, Clinton's pro-Wall Street policies would result in a repeat of the 2008 banking crisis. While Trump's proposals for cutting taxes on the wealthy would hurt the middle-class, Clinton's neoliberal stances on many other economic issues would increase inequality as well. Both are in service of big business and the military-industrial complex, both are opposed to reforming the system in a positive way, and while Hillary may be safer, both will take us on a dangerous path.

And if we again choose to give into the demands of the lesser evil because we're told it's the only way to stop the greater evil, evil will win either way.

You may or may not agree with my assessment that stopping Trump is the most important thing, but in the majority of cases, voting for Hillary Clinton will not be necessary to do so. The rules of the Electoral College make it so that the outcomes of presidential elections are determined by how many electoral votes, not popular votes, a candidate gets, which means that in all the forty or so non-swing states, voting third party will not pose any risk of swinging the election. In other words, unless you live in a battleground state, you should ignore anyone who tells you that a vote for Jill Stein is a vote for Trump.

This brings us to another tactic the Clinton camp is using to discourage people from voting Green: spreading the notion that there aren't enough Stein supporters to make a 5% vote share for her possible. While the online polls that show Stein having as much support as the major party candidates are of course completely unreliable, so are the conventional polls that put her around 2%; as I made the case for in a past article, mainstream surveys too often under-sample groups like young people and independents or involve asking participants questions which make them less likely to answer that they support third parties.

Additional evidence that Stein in fact has more support than is being reported comes from how 12% of independents, 13% of former Bernie Sanders supporters, and 16% of young people support her. These are all major chunks of the electorate, and if a poll were conducted which represented them adequately, I think it would very likely find that Stein has the backing of 5% or more of the electorate.

Sadly, this by no means guarantees that the Greens will receive that much of the vote two days from now. Nader had enough support to get him 5% of it as well, but many of those who wanted to vote for him were swayed by the Democratic spin that doing so would help Bush in every case. And barring something unprecedented, it looks like Democrats are about to spoil another election.

Except that's where the main point of this article comes in: something unprecedented is in fact at work.

This is not the same country it was sixteen years ago. Back then, politicians like Al Gore and the Clintons could promise to overturn the economic and political status quo, do everything they could to uphold it, and still rely on the loyalty of their base. But naturally, this dynamic could not survive for much longer; throughout the third millennium, the irresponsibility and greed of America's leaders has done too much harm for the pubic to ignore, and something in the political environment has shifted.

Since 2000, the leaders of both major parties have subverted the constitution and turned America into a surveillance state. They've made the world more dangerous and wasted trillions of dollars by engaging in a campaign of endless war. They've driven up economic inequality to historic levels by giving into the wishes of their wealthy donors. And most consequentially, they've caused the atmosphere's carbon levels to reach what may well be the breaking point for the future of climate stability. Thankfully, though, the injustice and danger of the situation that these decisions have created is only matched by the drive that the public has to change things for the better.

As was the case sixteen years ago, the polls show that the majority of Americans want to solve the problems mentioned above. What's different now is that they've grown so big that the public has become compelled to seek out alternatives to the established political paradigm. In recent years, populist sentiments in both America and abroad have reached a boiling point, with voters in much of the industrial world taking serious action to challenge the broken political and economic system. Though this revolt has too often taken a reactionary rather than progressive form, with the rise of demagogic figures like Donald Trump and Marine La Pen, the political climate has nonetheless become dramatically more favorable to leaders like Jill Stein since the beginning of the century.

Already, there are many signs that the Greens are in a better position than ever to pull off an upset. The party's ballot access is higher this year than in any previous election cycle, and as I've iterated throughout this article, their support is at a level not seen in a long time. Andrea Merida, co-chair of the Green Party of Colorado, has described these and other positive signs as "a mandate for the Green Party." And she's not the only Green leader expressing hope; Jill Stein published an op-ed recently which treated a 5% vote share for the Greens as a serious possibility and compared the position her party is currently in to where the Republican Party was in 1854.

So long story short, this is the first election cycle ever where Greens have the potential to break through the obstacles which have been put up against them and other third parties, and we must take advantage of that. If you are not in a swing state, I highly recommend you vote for Jill Stein, and if you are and still plan to do so, my own opinion shouldn't stop you. Because as Democrats like to say, we must not forget what happened in 2000.

How Jill Stein Can Get 5% Of The Vote

No, that is not a picture of one of Bernie Sanders' rallies. It's a Ralph Nader rally that took place in the summer of 2000.

The fact that Nader received a mere 2.74% of the vote gives people a false image of just how big a presence his campaign had at one point. During June of that year, the movement that he had generated among those who were disillusioned by the Democratic Party's descent into Clintonism had him polling at 6%.

But as the election approached, as always happens with third-party campaigns, more voters became focused on helping the major candidate that they preferred most, and his support fell. Though Nader didn't end up swinging the election, the Democratic spin that he had-along with the important goal of stopping Bush in 2004-effectively killed the Greens' hopes for overtaking the Democrats anytime soon.

Several election cycles later, Americans are finally learning the consequences of continuing to support the two-party system. This destructive paradigm has resulted in the two most detested figures in American political history being the nominees of both major parties, and even though 57% of the electorate wants a third choice, in all likelihood they aren't going to see one win this year.

Though factors such as record income inequality and an increasingly independent electorate make it so that a third-party upset in 2020 is dramatically more likely than it was in 2004, the current state of the race indicates that such an event will be somewhat difficult to realize. If Nader had received 5% or more of the vote in 2000, his party would have qualified for federal matching funds and automatic ballot access in the next election cycle, which would have significantly shaken things up. And though the Liberitarian Party's Gary Johnson is set to receive more of the vote share than that, Jill Stein of the Green Party-the only party with the ability to break the grip that banks and corporations have on society-is polling hopelessly far beneath that number.

Or at least, that's what we've been told.

A frequent complaint from insurgent candidates during this election (legitimate or not) has been that the process is rigged against them. This claim has had a lot of basis, particularly in the case of Bernie Sanders, who's campaign would have likely succeeded had it not been for the voter suppression, electoral fraud, and biased coverage from the corporate media that plagued the Democratic primaries. If you suspect that similar things are happening to Jill Stein, your intuition is correct.

First and foremost comes the way Stein has been treated by the mainstream media. As columnist Caitlin Johnstone writes about the attacks Stein has received from corporate news outlets:

Countless pages of editorial have been spent deriding Jill, Ajamu, and their entitled-white-privileged-but-also-basement-dwelling supporters. How exactly does that work, oh million-dollar media hacks? How can someone be overly entitled, but stuck living in their Mom’s basement, at the same time?
So there’s that. Just look up “Jill Stein anti-vax,” the creation of a neoliberal think-tank, and you will come up with pages and pages of superficial editorial and smear. On that one lie alone, there are thousands upon thousands of deceitful and maliciously manipulative words written on it designed to paint her as anti-vax without any actual evidence. That’s a tricky two-step. Takes a lot of creativity to make up such ornate lies.
They sure do spend a lot of time on us. Anyone who didn’t know better would think we were a threat.

The media's response to Stein has been more than simply about a concern that she'll swing the election. The fact that Gary Johnson-who's taking nearly as much of the potential support from Hillary Clinton as Stein is-hasn't endured such a smear campaign further confirms this. The reason for their hostility towards her, as Johnstone continues, seems to be about something deeper.

You certainly would not think that we were a footnote protest vote that will amount to less than a percent of the vote.
Of course, they use that line too. We are merely a percent or two in the polls. But their vitriol betrays them.
Their own polls betray them too. When you drill down in the data of a CNN poll, for example, you will find that they have exorcised all millennials, Gen-Xers, minorities, and anyone not living in a southern state, from their sample set.
That’s a whole lot of people they’re not asking anymore. Basically, if you’re not a fifty-plus white person from the south, you don’t get polled. Now, why is that, I wonder? Hmm. They could not be hiding something…could they?

The name of that piece is "Vote For Jill Because She Can Win." While I wouldn't go quite so far as to say that these things are proof Stein in fact has enough unreported support to do so, I do think it's clear that she has more support than it appears.

That CNN poll isn't the only one which has underestimated Stein's numbers. Many surveys, such as an August Ipsos-Reuters poll and the five polls that the Commission on Presidential Debates used to determine whether Stein and Johnson could debate, have been biased against likely Green voters, having included problems such as underrepresenting independents and young people. Other suspicious factors in how these polls are conducted, as Nathan Francis reports, have to do with how they tend to make unfair assumptions about the people that are participating in them.

One of the biggest factors in Jill Stein overperforming her polling could be in the models these polls use to predict likely voters. Guessing which poll respondents will actually show up on Election Day has always been something of an informed guess for pollsters, and they don’t sound terribly confident this year compared to the past.
“These methods, which have been around for so long, may be losing some of their accuracy because circumstances have changed,” Scott Keeter, a senior survey adviser at Pew Research, told the Atlantic. “Whether there has been a change in our politics in just the last two years that makes all of this less accurate is really impossible to answer at this point.”
And those likely voter models — the ones that are used to show Jill Stein’s low support — are generally weighted to expect fewer young and first-time voters. That happens to make up a large share of the Green Party’s base, so a model that fails to take these voters into account will have Jill Stein underperforming.

In short, the Real Clear Politics polling average, which currently puts Stein at 2%, is not accurate at all. Ignoring these "push polls" and unscientific surveys, she in fact has far more support than that.

Here's some amateur, but reliable enough, polling analysis of mine: 13% of former Bernie Sanders supporters now support Jill Stein. While it's difficult to say exactly how much of the electorate is made up of those in that crowd, seeing as about half of Democrats backed Sanders at one point and he won among independents, it's reasonable to assume that if you were to take all of the Sanders supporters and then calculate how much 13% of them is relative to the rest of the electorate, you will get a number close to or even above 5%.

A more certain demographic to look to to find how much support Stein actually has is young voters. Stein has 16% of the support with voters under 30 (to put that in perspective, if this group made up all of the electorate Stein would qualify for the debates), and since millennials make up 31% of the electorate, we can confidently say that counting young people alone, she has more than 4% of the support.

Stein supporters from those two groups, added to the other supporters that she has, gives her an uncertain, but crucial, amount of support above 5%.

So that's that. We've already succeeded in the first half of our mission to make Jill Stein succeed where Nader's supporters made him fail by getting her 5% or more of the vote. The support she needs to do so is already there, and those who run the corporate media, perhaps suspecting this, are doing everything they can to stop us.

And with thirty days until the election, all that we can do now is spread awareness of this fact so that those Sanders supporters and millennials who want to vote for Stein but feel like doing so would be a waste will vote for who they prefer on November 8. And if they feel like stopping Trump is the most important thing, tell them about how voting third party in most states will have no affect whatsoever on the race's outcome, and how Clinton can afford to lose their vote regardless because she's highly likely to win. Though the wind will be at our backs for a Green Party upset post-2016 even if we don't pull this off, we're going to need every advantage we can get.

Though the odds are stacked against us in this mission, as they were with Bernie Sanders' campaign, do not lose the belief that we can reach 5% until it's November 8 and you see that the election results show we've failed. Until then, it's a game of working and hoping. Because, as John Laurits said about the possibility that third-party voters can stage an upset this year in an article similar to this one, "Sure, it’s 'statistically unlikely' — but so is the fact that life even exists at all and yet here we are."

The Struggle For American Democracy Has Only Begun

According to PBS, Bernie Sanders is "gaining against Clinton in early polls." Salon's Bill Curry believes "Hillary Clinton is going to lose," primarily because millions of voters longing for a truly progressive candidate will nominate Sanders. POLITICO explained recently that Early-state polls hint at a Bernie Sanders surge, a headline that was unthinkable only several months earlier. Yahoo's Meredith Shiner calls Sanders a "progressive social media star and pragmatic legislator" and states that "Sanders also has a much more substantial legislative history" than any GOP challenger. In Iowa,1,100 people packed a gym to hear Bernie Sanders speak in May.

That was the first paragraph in an article from the columnist HA Goodman called It's Official-Bernie Sanders Has Overtaken Hillary Clinton In The Hearts And Minds Of Democrats. Published on July 25, 2015, it was the first Goodman published after he first started to believe that Sanders would win the nomination.

And up until a certain point, he had good reason to keep believing so; despite a rigged debate schedule and limited media attention, Bernie Sanders' poll numbers continued to go up. By January 31, the day before the voting started, Sanders' Real Clear Politics average had gone from 5.7% at the beginning of his campaign to 37.2%.

But after gaining momentum from his poll-defying near tie in Iowa and his blowout win in New Hampshire, something strange happened: with the help of Hillary Clinton supporter Harry Reid and his collusion with those who ran the polling places in Nevada, the state's contest was quietly stolen from Sanders. And as the primaries went on, things only got stranger. On Super Tuesday, the results in Massachusets were manipulated as well, along with those in Arizona, and, it turned out, Iowa. Though those were the only states so far that had experienced serious election fraud, there were many other factors, such as closed primaries and media manipulation, which, if subtracted, would have likely resulted in him being ahead at that point.

And before long, it looked like he was on his way to pulling ahead regardless. After a nine-state winning streak, which included a victory in Wisconsin that was both unthinkable a few weeks earlier and by an even larger margin than the polls indicated, his national poll numbers had risen to only one point behind Hillary Clinton. After the Wyoming primary on April 9, he only needed to win 56.5% of the remaining delegates to take the lead (and even if he didn't, he would still have a chance to win). And with the turning point approaching in the New York primary, despite the polls there, his chances were looking better and better as early voting showed him far surpassing expectations.

But the exclusion of independents from voting in New York, combined with the massive amounts of voting irregularities that occurred on the day of the election, all worked to steal the primary from Sanders on April 19, along with much of his chances for winning the nomination.

Despite the drop in Sanders' polls that followed, he dutifully continued into the predictably unfair April 26 contests, the blatantly rigged Nevada state convention, the suspiciously run primaries in Oregon and Kentucky, the practically predetermined Puerto Rico contest, and the clearly manipulated California primary.

Not all of the primary contests were rigged, but enough of them were that the results should be seriously called into question, and even if the highly unlikely outcome of this election were true, there's no question that Hillary Clinton won without a level playing field. Even Harry Reid thinks Sanders never had a "fair deal."

But Bernie Sanders' campaign is continuing in a different form, this one outside of the cruel game that the DNC has created for populist insurgent candidates, and this time it actually has a chance to win.

With three months until the election, Jill Stein and other Greens running for office won't get too much farther this year, but they will make crucial progress. Following the voting on November 8, which the Greens will most certainly take an unusually large share of, factors larger than any DNC propaganda campaign will begin to come into play. As I've written about previously, support for a third party alternative has been building up for decades, independents will soon outnumber both major parties combined, the state of the country points towards the coming rise of a populist third party, and there's even a historical precedent for what I'm predicting.

Everything indicates that a major Green Party sweep is inevitable in the coming years. But there's still one looming, uncomfortable question: can we expect the system to allow it after what happened to Bernie Sanders?

As I make a prediction similar to the one HA Goodman made last year, I keep in mind that the one thing he did not take into account was outright electoral fraud in favor of the candidate that the oligarchy backs. Who's to say it won't happen again in a different context?

I'm going to attempt to look into the future, imagining all of the methods of voter suppression that may (or will) be used against the Greens, and how we can defy them. All of these methods can be put into three categories, which I call false-appealing, smearing, and electioneering.

False-appealing

Twenty-four years ago, Bill Clinton said in his Democratic convention speech that "I have news for the forces of greed and the defenders of the status quo: Your time has come and gone." And eight years later, even after he had continued Reaganomics by signing NAFTA, killing welfare, and creating what later turned out to be the most dangerous deregulations in recent history, most on the left were still willing to believe his successor Al Gore when he said at the 2000 convention that "They're for the powerful-and we're for the people."

But by 2008, Democrats were finally losing patience with the corporatization of their party. After nominating Barack Obama in a wave of populism, they heard him say at the DNC that we're "a better country" than the one that allows Wall Street to crash the economy-and then saw him pursue a Wall Street bailout that set the stage for another financial crisis years later.

That was the beginning of the end for the Democratic Party's esteem among progressives. By 2009, the percentage of voters who affiliated as Democrats went from 35% the year before to 34%, and political independents edged them out after only being at 31% in 2008. Since then, we've seen a steady increase in independents going along with a steady decline of Democrats that stands apart from all the other times in recorded party affiliation history where a certain group has been in the majority. This shift in the electoral landscape can no longer be considered a trend, but a consistent pattern that's sure to continue, and it can only mean one thing: people are waking up to the fact that the Democratic Party does not represent the 99%.

But will enough of them wake up to end the Democratic Party?

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are locked into a battle of who's campaign can fail the least. While Clinton is at risk of being indicted before the election, a credible source has reason to believe Trump is actually sabotaging his campaign, so whatever the polls say, the race is too close to call. But whoever becomes the next president, I believe the ultimate fate of American politics will be the same.

Though it's unfortunate, what we need to indict the Democratic Party in the court of public opinion as a tool of the oligarchy is a major economic crisis. And we'll get just that, as this Truthout op-ed explains:

Although there is a role for banks to play in the economy -- they facilitate commerce, after all, when just doing "normal banking" -- 30-plus years of Reaganomics have made banks increasingly vulnerable and prone to crisis. Giving banks this kind of powerful role to play in the economy is just asking for trouble. Wall Street is literally a ticking time bomb, and when it explodes it will take the rest of the economy down with it.
This is not hyperbole -- it's fact, and we're seeing more and more evidence every day that the moment when the Wall Street time bomb will explode is rapidly approaching. As Greg Ip points out in the Wall Street Journal, housing prices and stock prices are now hovering around decades-long highs.
The last time they were this high? You guessed it: 2007, right before [the last] crash.

That was written on August 1. This crisis will most likely hit before Obama leaves office, and in that scenario, when he and the rest of the Democratic elite pursue Wall Street bailouts as they did eight years ago, they will create a political nightmare for themselves. According to a poll from three years ago, 96% of Democrats, 95% of independents, and 89% of Republicans at least see financial regulation as somewhat important. And though when asked the less general question of whether they wanted more regulation on companies, that number goes down to 71%, when middle and working class voters suffering the consequences of the lack of business oversight see their leaders pushing for bailouts, a lot of politicians, Democrats especially, will see their careers crippled.

And though Democrats were able to remain popular in 2008 despite having largely supported the bailouts, this time it will be very different. Like I said, whether Hillary Clinton will win remains to be seen, but after this election is over, she and her party will be in trouble. As the 2018 midterms approach, not just the Republicans but the Democrats will be seen by all but their most loyal members as the party of the rich. Before long, given all the factors I mentioned earlier, large numbers of voters will start moving to a populist third party, most likely the Greens.

Gone are the days when someone like Hillary Clinton can easily (or fairly) defeat a genuine progressive like Sanders, and soon so too will the era where corporate Democrats can skate on their party's "Liberal" brand and expect to succeed with the left. And Democrats are generally either in denial about this fact or assume it won't matter. “For every blue-collar Democrat we will lose in western Pennsylvania," says New York Senator Charles Schumer, "We will pick up two or three moderate Republicans in the suburbs of Philadelphia." To Democratic strategists, this plan of appealing to the center may seem like a safe and sensible approach, but when you look at the larger picture, Democrats are basically racing into an electoral ditch.

And so when the Greens start to enter seriously competitive territory, they won't have to worry about losing many supporters to the old Democratic trick of bait-and-switch liberalism. The Democrats will have lost all of their credibility in the minds of voters by then.

And as for those who will still cling to the notion that the Democratic Party represents them-yes, they will be there-you can show them the solid arguments I make against that in these previous articles:

The Case Against The Democratic Party

Yes, It Is Time To Leave The Democratic Party

Make No Mistake, The Democratic Party Is Dangerous

But it won't end there.

Smearing

Though the political and corporate establishment generally doesn't know about the coming electoral upheaval, lately they've been acting as if they're preparing for a long fight against populist insurgents. This is apparent in how the major media has been treating Jill Stein.

From biased polls that make it look like Stein has less support than she really does, to hit pieces on her, to outright mocking, such as the over-promotion of a poll that says Stein is tied with Harambe (which was conducted in the specific instance of Texas, a highly conservative state), the media is going after the Green Party candidate as much as they did with Sanders. The strange thing about it is that they know Stein has no chance of actually becoming president.

This signals that something deeper is going on.

I believe that Ralph Nader's success in 2000 can largely be explained by a failure on the part of the two major parties to offer candidates that excite and inspire voters, increasing the desire for another option (Ross Perot's 1992 campaign may be another example of this phenomenon). And since moderate and triangulating figures like Al Gore are exactly the kind of candidates the Democratic elite prefers, when Nader started to experience a surge in the summer of 2000, the establishment was taken completely by surprise-but it wasn't unaware of the threat to the two-party system that this signaled.

And so after the fictitious election results were certified, the liberal bourgeois found a convenient way to stigmatize Nader and his successors-the propagation of the idea that Greens are the ones who caused Bush to win. And regardless of whether this claim was based on reality, it's most certainly contributed to the virtual dominance Democrats and Republicans have enjoyed since then.

But even if they're able to repeat that spin this year with Jill Stein playing Nader's role-which they've already done to a point-it won't do much to help their case. As Chris Hedges said this year in an interview, our society is experiencing a radical shift of public sentiment in response to the unprecedented income inequality that's resulted from their past support of neoliberal politics. There's one ingredient lacking in this movement, though, which holds back its enormous potential: an avenue for it to unite around. "It’s with us already," Hedges says about the revolution, "but with this caveat: it is what Gramsci calls interregnum, this period where the ideas that buttress the old ruling elite no longer hold sway, but we haven’t articulated something to take its place."

A populist third party is the perfect means to bring this massive amount of political will under one roof, and no matter what the Democrats do at this point, the Green surge is coming.

But that can only get us so far-the power of media manipulation must never be underestimated, and as long as the mainstream press is controlled by the same forces that back the two-party system, insurgents will be vulnerable.

Still, even this weapon of the establishment, I believe, has grown weak with time.

Howard Dean was the Bernie Sanders of 2004. Or, more accurately, of 2003. In the months before the primaries started, the major media worked very hard to topple the anti-war, anti-big business onetime Democratic frontrunner, and they succeeded spectacularly. But when they tried again this year with Sanders, though things were made a lot harder for him, he still would have won without election rigging. This proves that in the modern political environment, where revolutionary sentiments are so strong and social media is popular, such propaganda is a lot easier for insurgents to overcome.

However, there are still several widely accepted myths about the Green Party that its opponents will take every opportunity to promote, and while whatever attacks on Green candidates that the media orchestrates are for the people of the near future to defend from, we can anticipate a few of them. Here are some of the strongest arguments for the Green Party that we'll need to use to beat the Democrats, ones which I'll elaborate on in future articles:

• The Greens absolutely can win. Post-2016, the combined membership of the two "major" parties will, in all likelihood, drop well below 50%. Though the Democrats will do everything to downplay the significance of this, it will greatly strengthen the case for third parties. We aren't going to start with anywhere near as much support as Democrats, of course, but if we put enough emphasis on that glaring fact, before long they'll be the ones who are "fringe."
• The Greens represent the views of mainstream Americans. No matter how much Democrats attempt to marginalize Greens, in terms of actual ideological appeal, we by far have the advantage. 61% of Americans favor higher taxes on the wealthy, 76% think that most free trade deals have been bad for the country, 58% want a federally funded healthcare system, 78% want Citizens United overturned, 57% think that GMO foods are generally unsafe, and in a poll that proves the Greens won't be hurt in the minds of voters by their environmental brand, 67% would pay higher taxes to reduce carbon emissions. I suggest you show any progressives who choose to align themselves with the Democratic Party the Green platform, or have them take the isidewith.com quiz that shows people which political party most aligns with their beliefs. 
• The Greens aren't dividing the left, the Democrats are. This is the logical conclusion of my first argument; when the Democratic Party diminishes enough, it will be easy to accurately convince liberal voters that since most of them don't even support the Democrats, voting for them only creates more division among the opponents of the Republicans. Which brings me to the last one.
• The Greens are in a much better position than the Democrats to stop the Republicans. Like the fact that Bernie Sanders would have been a better candidate against Trump than Hillary Clinton because of his trustworthiness and consistently progressive views, after the Democrats push for wildly unpopular Wall Street bailouts, they will be severely weakened, making Greens the politically superior option.

And if the defenders of the current party model start calling you a hippie, a communist, or a purist after you lay out your arguments, you'll know they've run out of real responses.

But even after that, the oligarchy will have one more card to play...

Electioneering

"Never be deceived that the rich will permit you to vote away their wealth," said the labor organizer Lucy Parsons. I can't find the date between Parson's birth in 1853 and her death in 1942 when she expressed that sentiment, but if she did so before the year 1900, she later found herself standing corrected.

The late 19th century was a dark period in American history. Even though the enterprise of slavery had been broken up, it had left the class that used to benefit from it with so much wealth that it seemed like no other force was powerful enough to challenge them. In 1886, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations were a "legal person," giving them the authority to make money by any means necessary whether that conflicted with state laws or not. In 1890, New Jersey became the first state to allow corporations to hold stock in other corporations, creating the economically unsustainable system of financial exchange that we now know as the stock market. That same year, John D. Rockefeller's standard oil controlled 88% of the refined oil market in the United States, just one example of the massive monopolization of business that had occurred. You can get a sense of just how bad things had become by thinking of the horrifying stories from that era of child labor, slave wages, extremely long work hours, and abominable living conditions.

And yet at the turn of the century, the people somehow managed to fight back and win. After the newly elected president William McKinley was assassinated on September 6, 1901, it turned out that his choice for a running mate had saved the country. The extent that Washington had been corrupted by corporate interests seemed too great to overcome, but because nearly all of the public was on the side of Theodore Roosevelt's populist agenda, the members of Congress went along with the president out of political self-preservation. In the next seven years, Roosevelt broke up most of the major monopolies, and though he still endorsed lower taxes, he paved the way for his cousin FDR to become elected later and turn America into a social democracy.

But how does this apply to populist insurgents now, when corporations have become so powerful that they can actually prevent modern versions of the Roosevelts from being elected within the two major parties? Again, we need to ask ourselves why the Greens won't go the way of Bernie Sanders.

According to Ralph Nader, apart from the media propaganda that I mentioned before, there are indeed many built-in obstacles to running a successful third party campaign. In 1988, the Commission on Presidential Debates, a private organization headed exclusively by Democrats and Republicans, took over all aspects of how the debates are organized. After the 1992 election, they changed the polling requirement for getting into the debates to 15%, a number that, as they knew, was nearly impossible for any third party candidate to reach. And though the environment will soon become a lot more friendly to third parties, making it entirely possible for the Greens to overcome that mark, I ask you to sign this petition to make the debate rules fair again.

But that's not even the worst of it. In 2004, Nader's independent campaign was severely hurt by the efforts of Democrats to drain money from it by falsely accusing him of widespread voter fraud. The playing field is also tilted against third parties in that many states require them to petition for ballot access, a process that Nader describes as "easy for the major parties to disrupt" by using the dirty tricks that I mentioned.

But once again, I believe that we can surmount all of these obstacles with our newfound political advantages. Because of a dramatic increase in donations, Green campaigns will easily survive when opponents try to force them to use up their resources, and with the wide popularity that they'll gain, they will no longer have much trouble getting petition signatures. Thus, they're guaranteed to gain major ground, and before long they'll surpass Democrats in the national polls.

And finally, that brings us to the one area where insurgents can really be shut out: election rigging. One can only imagine the methods Democrats will try to use to prevent Greens from winning, though the sabotage of Bernie Sanders certainly gave us a clue. There's one big difference, though, between the primaries and the general elections: in the general, it's extremely difficult to rig the process in favor of the losing candidate. George W. Bush's coup in 2000 only worked because the race was so close, and had Gore been leading in the polls as widely as I expect the Greens will be, the election fraud would have had to be much more widespread and obvious, and the American people would simply not have allowed it. Furthermore, the primaries are ideal for rigging, because they take place over a period of months in many different states, while a national election that takes place in a matter of hours is very hard for someone to try to steal and then get away with it.

All of this is not to say that our path to victory will be easy. We'll have to fight for it every step of the way. But if we succeed, which I think is likely, the country and the world will be forever changed.

And if you still doubt that that's possible based on a sense that the Greens are simply too far to the left to win, not only are you discounting the opinion polls I mentioned earlier, but you need to hear the story of how HA Goodman came to believe Bernie Sanders would become president.

In June of 2015, as Goodman recounts in an article, he was having lunch with a childhood friend when they started talking about politics. The friend, who was wearing a "Bernie" tee shirt, asked Goodman why he wasn't planning on voting for a candidate who represented everything he believed in, and Goodman's answer was that Sanders could not win because he was a socialist.

But some weeks later, after doing all of the research, Goodman realized that Bernie Sanders was not a Marx-style, ideologically extreme "socialist," but merely had an agenda similar to the Roosevelts. That was the start of his noble mission to help Sanders win, which lasted all the way up until the DNC role call vote on July 26, 2016.

The one thing Goodman was really wrong about, though, was assuming at the time that we would never get another Bernie Sanders in our lifetimes; he realized the flaw in that reasoning when he decided to start supporting Jill Stein, who, whether you also feel is worth voting for or not, is an amazing person and as much (or even more) of an advocate for change as Sanders. And Stein and her successors, whatever the outcome of this election, will be the ones who finish what Bernie started.

America Is About To See A Repeat Of The 2016 Michigan Primary

A photo of the ballot that Michael Moore used to vote in his home state of Michigan, which he shared on Facebook.

The race seemed all but decided beforehand. The polls showed that Hillary Clinton would win Michigan, as well as the demographics. But when it came down to the actual voting, Bernie Sanders won by a narrow but nonetheless astounding margin.

And though Sanders didn't win the nomination, the results in Michigan should be seen as the beginning of the end for the Democratic establishment.

As of today, the Green Party's Jill Stein is on the ballot in several new states and has gone slightly up in the polls from about a week ago, with encouraging signs for the coming weeks as the legacy of the Sanders campaign continues. Should these trends increase enough, they will have an effect that's both meaningful and immediate. But whether the Greens pull off a 2016 miracle or not, we are headed for another Michigan. And this time it will be on a national scale.

If the Michigan primary were held fifty years ago, Hillary Clinton would have won it easily. That was before free trade hurt much of the state's job market. That was before the corporate executives who controlled its economy made off with far more than their fair share of its wealth. That was before the deregulation of the big banks lead to a catastrophic financial crisis, further giving its residents reason not to support the kinds of politicians that made this all possible.

You can probably guess where I'm going with this.

America's Michigan story started in the 1980's, when Reagan dismantled American industry and started a series of tax cuts on the wealthiest of households. You know the rest of this history, and you're most likely living with its consequences. But what you may not know is that a political realignment has slowly been taking place during the last three-and-a-half decades. This shift, which can largely be measured in party affiliation and public opinion polls over the years, is one which I've already explained in detail with this article and this article. What I haven't mentioned is just how close it's come to reaching a breaking point.

Compared to the rest of the country, Michigan's economy is undeniably worse. But determining poverty levels isn't all about looking at the rate of unemployment. Half of Americans are living under or near the poverty line, and as inequality continues to escalate on a truly obscene scale, most of the rest shouldn't expect to keep their living standards in the coming years.

The tipping point for America's transformation into a Michigan-like environment for Sandersist populism may be the Trans-Pacific Partnership. If passed, the deal will hurt American jobs and consumer protection more than NAFTA did, making an all-too tangible case for many (or most) middle and working class voters to abandon the Republican and Democratic parties. And though barring a Green Party comeback on the part of Bernie Sanders, anti-free trade Donald Trump is all but certain to win the general election, it's reasonable to assume Trump will be persuaded into signing the TPP by neoliberal advisors like Mike Pence.

Other policies that we can likely expect in the next few years, of course, are further big business deregulation, upper-class tax cuts, and wars that serve the military industrial complex. But though 2016 might not be the opportunity most Americans are looking for to stop and undo these things, a time is coming when the corporate-run electoral system won't be able to deflect any populist threat to themselves. Because as Chris Hedges said in a July 26 Democracy Now interview in reference to how Ralph Nader's 2000 Green Party campaign wasn't understood by most at the time, "I think now people have caught up with Ralph."

"About" may be a relative term. But if the two major parties don't learn the lessons from Michigan, it will soon be too late for them.