Why Independent of the Major Parties?
Why Independent of the Major Parties?
1. The major parties have proven themselves incapable of working for the common good of the people of Illinois and the United States. The public interest is at best third on their list of priorities after paying back their campaign contributors and paying off the political debts that they accumulated day by day while they were rising to the top of the Illinois political pyramid.
An obvious example is the energy crisis and its related wars and environmental disasters. This oil and fossil fuel fiasco has been with us for at least thirty-five years, since the gas lines in the early 70’s. It could have and should have been solved by now, yet the leaders of the major parties have made virtually no progress toward that goal. This is true even though the technology is and has been available to get our country off oil and other fossil fuels. (see for example, Scientific American, November, 2009 issue)
Their failure to solve the energy problem has been a disaster for our country, both domestically and internationally. It has led to apparently endless wars and virtually unlimited resources spent in the Middle East. Make no mistake, the region would not interest policy makers in the least if its only resource were apples or lettuce instead of oil. If that were the case the probability of the United States getting involved in these costly wars there would have been zero, about the same as the probability of a war with a country like Greenland.
The United States could have avoided these problems if the major parties had lived up to their responsibilities to the public instead of their overriding obligations to the oil and energy companies. Alternatives should have been developed over the past thirty-five years. This bipartisan failure on energy policy is a triple failure. First, we could have had clean energy. Second, the war money could have been left with the people for their own investment purposes or spent on domestic needs such as roads, schools, hospitals, exercise centers or dozens of other positive things. Third, our soldiers and Middle Easterners would not be getting killed and maimed.
2. The same analysis is applicable to healthcare reform, job creation, free trade, and every other major issue. The parties have tended to the narrow desires of their true friends, their money sources, instead of the public good. The healthcare provisions that would have benefited individuals have been withdrawn one by one for the benefit of the Senators’ corporate campaign financiers. Examples are the public option, provisions to lower premiums and co-pays, medicare for the unemployed under age fifty-five, limitations on price gouging by prescription drug companies, and outlawing the importation of prescription drugs.
The Senate’s shenanigans on healthcare do not rise beyond the level of legalized bribery. It became so ridiculous that the conservative local newspaper in Peoria described Senator Joe Lieberman, the former Democrat party leader and vice-presidential candidate, as a “wholly owned subsidiary” of the health insurance industry. Lieberman could not muster enough political courage or sense to oppose the invasion of Iraq in 2003, but he did find the courage to insist that the healthcare bill prohibit the importation of prescription drugs from Canada. The net effect is that your grandma, and other people like her, get to pay $200 or $300 for their prescription instead of $50 and the drug companies get billions of extra dollars over the next ten years.
We heard no babble by the wealthy and super-wealthy Senators about the benefits of free trade when importing prescription drugs was discussed. The benefits of free trade are for their corporate contributors, not your grandma and not your children, whose best job opportunity, thanks to the economic policies of the major parties over the last thirty years, is much more likely to be some minimum wage job at a big box store or a fast food conglomerate. Free trade is the hammer the major parties pulled out of their tool box to justify dismantling the industrial economy over the past thirty years and shipping tens of millions of good jobs out of the country to virtual slave labor countries, like China and Mexico and so on. It’s a justification for the benefit of the people that matter to them, not grandma or US workers. The leaders of the major parties babble incessantly about creating jobs, but it is well known that they are doing their best to help their owners create jobs over in China and down in Mexico, and a hundred other places, anywhere beyond the reach of our labor laws and fair labor standards, not here in the United States.
3. The major parties have used their failed, draconian war on drugs and anti-crime jingoism to criminalize black culture and life with devastating effects on minority communities in the United States. A high percentage of minority group males under age thirty spend time in prison, the vast majority for nonviolent “crimes”. Can anyone imagine keeping this policy in force for decades if a similar percentage of non-minority males were imprisoned for non-violent offenses before the age of thirty? No, it’s insane. It wouldn’t happen. But it is a useful tool for the manipulation of voter fears which explains why it continues as policy.
4. The last elected Republican and Democratic governors, the very tip top of what the major parties have to offer, tell us all we need to know about party politics in Illinois – the state where our governors make our license plates. One is in federal prison and the other is on his way. This is no surprise to anyone who has lived in Illinois for a few years. That’s why people do not want to be involved in Illinois – the deceit, lies, thievery, and dirtiness of it all. This is your chance to overcome that and begin taking your state back from the parties.
5. Your right to vote is, as a matter of law, a fundamental federal constitutional right by rulings of the United States Supreme Court. Yet both parties preside over a system of gerrymandering voting districts in Illinois that is designed to cheat many citizens out of that fundamental right and give incumbents easy districts for reelection. This truly shows the party leaders’ utter contempt for the citizens of Illinois. They shamelessly make tremendous efforts to cheat you out of your vote, your fundamental constitutional right, for their own benefit because they can get away with it. And they have. This system should be illegal under the Voting Rights Act. It would be if its language and interpretation were not also controlled by legislators and other officials of both parties.
The major parties also work hard to keep their power and limit your choices by passing legislation that creates outlandishly unfair impediments to ballot access by independent and third party candidates.*
6. Our leaders in the Federal Reserve, in the Wall Street investment banks, and Congress drove the economic bus blind drunk over the cliff in 2008. The major parties’ response was to give the same people a new bus – huge bonuses in the private banks and appointments to high offices in the government. They are promoting a bipartisan “jobless recovery” (Bernanke’s term) which explicitly shows who counts to them. The bipartisan 1999 repeal of Glass-Steagall Act banking regulations, that separated commercial and investment banking activity, was a major contributor to the economic collapse in 2008. But the Democrats and Republicans have failed to institute new regulations to prevent the reckless speculation that was ushered in by the repeal. As a result, banks are now using the money that Congress gave them to help with economic recovery to speculate in such things as foreign currency markets instead. Such gambling can result in huge pay bonuses for them but nothing for us. The money was meant to be spent and should have been spent for such things as loans to small businesses that would encourage job growth, not gambling on foreign currency markets. Failure to institute reasonable regulations also puts us at risk of another economic crises, for example, triggered by the commercial real estate market, because nothing has been done to curtail speculative investment.
The Democrats and Republicans are incapable of solving the problems that this country faces and promoting the public good. That is not even at the top of their priority list. It comes in a distant third after getting election money and paying off political debts. Don’t be fooled again. No one has to tell you what voting for Democrats and Republicans again and expecting a different result is. Why not vote for yourself for a change? Vote for bottom-up democracy.
*For an interesting read on this subject see the book, Grand Illusion, The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny by Theresa Amato ,2009
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