It’s time for Americans of all political persuasions to unite and demand real presidential debates, with the participation of Green Party candidate Jill Stein and Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson.

Three debates are planned, the first on October 3. The Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD), which controls the debates, is determined that only Barack Obama and Mitt Romney will be allowed in front of the microphones.

That’s because the CPD is owned and run by the Democratic and Republican parties and the two parties’ corporate funders. The CPD took over the debates to limit the stage to their own candidates and to make sure that no challenging questions get asked.

The League of Women Voters, which sponsored the debates before the CPD took over, has called this situation “a fraud on the American voter.”

But we don’t have to remain silent about this affront to democracy and fair elections.

• Challenge the Commission on Presidential Debates!

Visit the ‘Occupy the CPD!’ web site and sign on to the statement. Tell the CPD that the debates must include every candidate who is on enough ballots to win the White House and who has demonstrated a minimal level of support — either 1% of the vote in a credible national poll or qualification for federal matching funds or both. Jill Stein and Gary Johnson meet all of these criteria.

• Challenge the Media!

Tell TV and radio stations that Americans voters are not stupid, that our heads won’t explode if we see more than two candidates or if we hear more than two sides (or even just one side, sometimes) on important issues.

Tell them that media organizations don’t have to play by the CPD’s rules, that they can schedule their own debates that include the Green and Libertarian candidates. They can also schedule off-site follow-up debates and interviews with Stein and Johnson after the CPD debates.

Tell them that news broadcasts and talk shows should invite alternative party candidates like Jill Stein and Gary Johnson who express ideas that are outside of the narrow Democratic-Republican spectrum.

• Challenge Progressive Organizations and Web Sites!

Any progressive, ecological, or antiwar web site, periodical, radio station, or organization or labor union that doesn’t demand a real progressive voice — Jill Stein — in the presidential debates is engaging in self-censorship.

Too many of these groups are so married to the Democratic Party that they’re willing to silence their own ideals by pretending that only Obama speaks for them.

Don’t let them get away with this hypocrisy. Give them a piece of your mind, by writing letters and comments in response to their articles. Give them another piece of your mind when they come around asking for contributions.

• Challenge the Polls!

The CPD has used results from public opinion polls that only ask questions about Democratic and Republican candidates and exclude other parties to justify its arbitrary debate policies. Such polls are misleading.

• Challenge Yourself!

Stop believing the media hype and lies that we only have two choices on Election Day.

Stop believing nasty and dishonest political ads on TV and the radio, a result of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision (2010) that allows wealthy and powerful corporations to advertise without limit for their favored candidates.

Stop believing that American politics is limited to two parties, both of which accept millions in corporate contributions.

Stop believing that we can fix the economy, that we can fight global warming, that we can stop invading other countries by voting for either a pro-Wall Street pro-war Democrat or a pro-war pro-Wall Street Republican.

Start believing that you have the power to change the direction of our country!

“Obama has betrayed our hopes for change, but I’m worried that Romney might win.” Many of us fear a Republican victory, but it’s time to be afraid of the Democrats too.

Both parties keep moving further to the right. The result is more war, more redistribution of wealth from working people to the One Percent, more erosion of the Constitution, more disregard of global warming and other threats to our planet. This describes Obama as well as Romney.

We can keep rubberstamping the two-party status quo for the rest of history. Or we can build a strong pro-peace pro-environment party that supports working Americans and accepts no corporate money.

We can start by demanding a place in the debates for Green presidential nominee Jill Stein. We can be true to our democratic principles by demanding inclusion of all qualified presidential candidates, like Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson, in the debates.

Democracy and fair elections mean the right to know which candidates best represent our ideals and interests — and the right to vote without being told we only have two choices.

• Challenge Your Family, Friends, and Neighbors!

Please forward this message widely so that we can build a movement for opening the debates that the CPD and the media can’t ignore!

More information:

Occupy the CPD!

Jill Stein Campaign
Green Party

Gary Johnson Campaign
Libertarian Party

“Ryan’s a corporatist. Ryan is anything but a conservative. ['Corporatist'] is my word for what they’re calling crony capitalists — they expand government in the service of corporate interests. It’s the merger of big business with big government where the big government is in the service of big capitalism.” — Ralph Nader

“In the Soviet Union, capitalism triumphed over communism. In this country, capitalism triumphed over democracy.” — Fran Lebowitz, Social Studies

No election year is complete without a parade of politicians telling us that the free market is the panacea for the country’s economic woes.

Republicans are more blatant in their promotion of market solutions. Mitt Romney, in his nomination acceptance speech, declared that the White House should be inhabited by a business-oriented president, i.e., one who understands and bows to the market. Democratic Party leaders are more nuanced in their language, until you peel away the rhetoric and consider their actual policies and actions.

It’s time we took a look at what Gov. Romney, his fellow Republicans, and their Democratic opponents mean when they talk about the market.

If we examine the legislation that Congress and various presidents have promoted and passed, it’s clear that “free market” for politicians of both parties is code for something quite different from what most people believe it means.

For most Americans, the model for market competition is a group of similar businesses, perhaps located on Main Street, that compete for customers. Two shoe stores on the north and south ends of town both want customers, so they compete by adjusting their prices, offering more and better merchandise, and advertising. Why should government interfere, when both shoe shops, the employees they hire, and customers’ feet benefit from such competition?

At the level of major corporations — multinational companies, Wall Street, Big Oil, agribusiness, defense contractors, and various conglomerates — the Main Street model is a propaganda tool.

The deregulation that Republicans and Democrats have enacted has little to do with popular conceptions of the free market. On the contrary, deregulation enables corporations to buy up their competition, especially smaller companies. The result of leveraged buyouts and other forms of acquisition is that businesses combine to form monopolies and virtual monopolies, with economic (and political) power concentrated in fewer and fewer boardrooms.

Monopolies are the enemy of competition. When a single company or a tiny number of companies (ExxonMobil and Chevron, for example) possess so much horizontal and vertical control over markets, no real competition takes place.

This is hardly a secret, but politicians of both parties still pretend that such concentration benefits everyone, despite so much counter-evidence. A good example is Comcast’s exclusive ownership of cable TV rights in Pittsburgh and other communities, allowing it to get away with high prices and poor customer service. Another example is the 1996 Telecommunications Act, signed by President Clinton, which deregulated ownership of media and allowed a small number of large media firms to buy up several TV, radio, and newspaper companies in single cities, giving them greater control over what news we’re allowed to see, hear, or read.

The proliferation of Walmarts in recent decades is classic faux free market: supported by local Democratic and Republican elected officials with tax breaks, subsidies, and taxpayer-funded changes in infrastructure, Walmart undercuts small local businesses with dirt-cheap prices, draining the area economy and turning Main Street into a ghost town, while paying employees sub-liveable wages with no benefits.

What Mitt Romney means by “free market” is unrestrained power for corporate bureaucracies. He has a special affinity for this idea, as co-founder of Bain Capital, a private equity and public market investment firm.

We shouldn’t confuse companies like Bain Capital with Main Street businesses like the shoe-store example above. For companies like Bain and execs like Mr. Romney, small businesses exist to become fodder for larger companies. The damaging effect of this kind of predatory capitalism on jobs and local economies in the US has been reported by Tim Dickinson in Rolling Stone and other journalists.

Sam Smith, in the August 25 edition of Undernews, wrote ‎”Personal to campaign media: Please stop referring to Mitt Romney as a businessman. He’s not; he’s an investment banker who makes money off of businessmen and through buying and selling their businesses. As any business owner can tell you; this is miles from the same thing.”

The “Market” Agenda

Bain Capital, like many financial sector firms, is less a business in the usual sense and more the blunt expression of an idea — the free movement of capital, without regard for its effect on civil society or the environment. Both Republican and Democratic parties serve the doctrine of unrestrained corporate power and it’s easy to see why. Browse the web site of the Center for Responsive Politics for a glimpse at the hundreds of thousands of dollars that top corporations contribute to politicians of both parties to maintain their influence.

The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision (2010) affirmed the legal status of corporations as “persons” under the 14th Amendment and allowed them to advertise without restriction for favored candidates, granting corporate elites even greater leverage over major-party politicians. As a result, the differences between the two parties are mostly factional: within a narrow and sometimes nonexistent range of disagreement, they compete over the best way to serve their top benefactors. (See “Closer Than You Think: Top 15 Things Romney and Obama Agree On” by Bruce A. Dixon in Black Agenda Report.)

They render this service with various kinds of legislation and public policy:

• Massive taxpayer-funded subsidies and tax breaks: If we judge by the money they make from heavily subsized energy firms, the Koch brothers are welfare queens par excellence. Citizens for Tax Justice has published lists of major corporations, like Verizon, General Electric, and Pacific Gas & Electric, that pay zero or near-zero taxes despite billions in profits.

• Deregulation: The classic example is President Reagan’s loosening of laws governing the savings and loan industry in the 1980s, which led to a crisis that vaporized the life savings of hundreds of thousands of Americans. President Clinton’s signature on the 2000 Commodities Futures Modernization Act and repeal of Glass-Steagall eliminated rules that would have prevented the 2008 meltdown, a fact missing from the visionary speech he delivered at the 2012 Democratic National Convention.

• Bailouts: Americans are still outraged at the unconditional multi-trillion-dollar bailout of Wall Street in 2008, which was supported by both John McCain and Barack Obama. Some of the bailed out firms used the money to buy up smaller companies, further consolidating themselves as “too big to fail.” President Obama went on to appoint Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, economic advisor Larry Summers, and Chief of Staff Mike Daley — Wall Street operatives and advocates of the policies that triggered the crisis.

• Impunity for corporate crimes: At least the savings and loan execs whose actions caused the crisis in 1980s were investigated and brought to trial. Neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney intends to hold the Wall Street fraudsters behind the Subprime Mortgage Crisis responsible and ensuing meltdown accountable, nor will they allow anything more than token aid for homeowners who face foreclosures.

• Privatization of public services and resources (often for free, at fire-sale prices, or with no-bid contracts): When Atlanta and Detroit handed their water utilities over to private contractors, the results included brown water and higher bills for consumers. Wall Street firms and their pet politicians, including top members of President Obama’s Simpson-Bowles Commission on Fiscal Responsibility (“Catfood Commission”), seek reductions in Social Security that will force working Americans to invest their retirement savings in the high-risk Wall Street casino. Both Romney and Obama favor cuts in Social Security and Medicare. The privatization of prisons has created a financial incentive to lock up more Americans, to the point where the US has the highest rate of incarceration of any country in the world, with black, brown, and poor communities devastated by the numbers of young people behind bars for nonviolent offenses.

• International trade cabals that favor corporate demands over labor, human rights, and environmental protections and democratic sovereignty: NAFTA (signed by President Clinton after promising to oppose it during his 1992 campaign) is the most famous example. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), negotiated in secret and supported by both Romney and Obama, is the most recent.

• Overreaching intellectual property rights that privilege corporations: Think of the war between Monsanto and small farmers over genetically modified seeds and actions by the recording industry to exploit artists and censor the Internet by legal intimidation.

• Offshore accounts that allow wealthy corporations and individuals to escape paying US taxes, while Washington looks the other way.

Plutonomy versus Economic Democracy

There are some names for the ideology that says the chief purpose of government is to serve the demands of top corporations and help them consolidate power. Republicans call it promoting the free market and “ending big government.”

Democrats use equally obfuscating language (“win-win situation,” “public-private partnership”) and try to dress up their actions as compromise or even progressive reform. For phony progressivism, there’s no better example than the individual mandate imposed by the 2010 Affordable Care Act (ACA), an idea that was introduced by the rightwing Heritage Foundation, advocated by GOP leaders as a national plan in the 1990s, and enacted by Gov. Romney in Massachusetts.

The ACA (also known as Obamacare, more properly ObamaRomneycare) was crafted by Democrats with the participation of health insurance company reps. Despite the factional debate over health care reform, Obama and Romney and their fellow party leaders agree on the premise that the private insurance bureaucracy must maintain its control over our health care, without disturbing the skyrocketing medical costs that feed their bottom lines.

Occupy Wall Street protesters understand the radical, anti-democratic ideology of government-corporate convergence. Members of the movement who haven’t allowed the Occupy grievances to be shoehorned into “Reelect Obama” recognize that the solution lies outside the two-party election paradigm.

We should discard the “free market” claptrap and call it what it really is: corporatism, plutocracy, oligarchy, redistribution of wealth from bottom to top, rule by the One Percent, socialism for the rich, turbo-capitalism, Robber Baron Era redux, neo-feudalism. My favorite term is plutonomy, a word introduced in an infamous leaked Citibank memo on “global equity strategy” that fretted over “society demanding a more equitable share of wealth.”

We must develop a new and independent kind of politics to take America in a different direction. The Occupy Movement, joined by unions and community organizations, is doing so in the streets. The Green Party, with 2012 presidential nominee Jill Stein and running mate Cheri Honkala, has made inroads at the ballot box. Progressive Democrats are fighting the good fight in a party that may have drifted beyond rehabilitation.

There are plenty of alternatives to the current corporate-capitalism model: aid and redesign of municipal infrastructure to assist small businesses instead of Walmarts; support for family farms instead of Monsanto; worker-owned and community-owned companies and cooperatives; break-up of too-big-to-fail Wall Street behemoths into smaller regionally based firms (which the federal government had every right to undertake, since the 2008 bailout was in essence a government buyout); reversal of privatization of public properties and services like Social Security and public education; punishment for corporate criminals; renegotiation of trade pacts to ensure that local economies, the rights of working people, and the environment will be protected.

One of the best alternatives is Medicare For All. Politicians like to denounce Medicare For All as socialism. If fact, there’s more ‘free market’ with Medicare For All than under our current insurance system (or under ObamaRomneycare), since Medicare For All allows us to choose the physicians and hospitals that serve us, motivating them to compete for our visits — unlike private insurance and HMO policies, which tell us which physician or hospital to go to.

The first step towards winning real economic security for our country will take place when Americans figure out that “market-based solutions” are too often a bipartisan scam that masks a dangerous ideology. The constant repetition of the free-market ideal by politicians and talking heads in the media doesn’t make it any less fraudulent or extremist.

To vote or not to vote — that is the question for Occupy Wall Street protesters and for Americans sympathetic to the Occupy movement taking place in cities throughout the US.

For many of those who intend to vote, it means casting a ballot for Democratic candidates, including President Obama. For those who don’t plan to vote at all, the outcome of elections is irrelevant, because nothing will change under the current political system. Are these the only two choices?

The US is in a crisis, a political holding pattern in which Democratic presidents and party leaders keep adopting more and more Republican agenda while Republican politicians sink deeper into irrationality and borderline fascism.

The crisis won’t be solved by intoning “We must vote to reelect Obama and other Dems because Republicans will be worse” or by denial that voting can have any effect on the future.

Are we locked into a rightward-sliding two-party paradigm for the rest of history? What if millions of voters began to think outside of the two parties?

We’ll never interrupt the bipartisan assault on protections for working people and the environment until we change the political landscape. Wall Street banksters have nothing to worry about as long as Ds and Rs keep getting voted into office. The status quo will be validated in 2012, as it is in every election cycle, in three ways:

(1) Non-voting and anti-voting: Nonvoters have no effect on the political landscape. Occupy activists and others who have ruled out voting as a way to effect change ensure that they’ll have no collective influence on who gets elected or the policies of the candidates who get elected.

(2) Zombie voting: mindless votes for incumbents and party lines, regardless of a candidate’s platform, background, and qualifications. For such voters, Election Day is an empty but necessary ritual undeserving of critical thought.

(3) The mistaken belief among liberals, progressives, antiwar voters, and others that the Democratic Party offers change, that things will get better if we just keep voting to elect Democrats, or that we have to keep voting for Dems because they’re not as awful as the GOP.

By justifying votes for a party that long ago abandoned its “party of the people” principles, progressive, antiwar, environmentally-minded, and pro-labor voters have participated in their own political demise. We are long past the point at which lesser-of-two-evils voting has turned into self-defeat.

The position of progressives in the Democratic Party was clarified recently when President Obama scolded the Congressional Black Caucus for daring to complain about the White House’s numerous capitulations to the GOP. Rahm Emanuel, when he was White House Chief of Staff, called progressive critics “retards.”

The Democratic Party expects progressives to continue voting for a party hostile to their ideals on the assumption that they have no one else to vote for and that a Republican victory would be far worse. When genuine progressives, like Rep. Dennis Kucinich, run for the Democratic nomination, their loss is assured and their campaigns ultimately serve to herd supporters into voting for a nominee that rejects nearly everything they stand for.

As Les Leopold argues (“Don’t ‘Occupy the Democratic Party’ — Four Lessons From the Populist Movement,” AlterNet, Dec. 13), there is no hope for a rehabilitation of the Democratic Party. If anything, the Democratic Party is likely to jump even further to the right in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling, which struck down limits on corporate advertising for favored candidates, increasing the influence of business elites over both major parties.

Republicans are already trying to discredit the Occupy movement. We can predict that pro-GOP ads will slander the Occupy movement, and that, based on their usual tendency to retreat when challenged by the GOP, Obama and Dem leaders will dissociate themselves from the protesters and their demands. (See this.) If the 2012 presidential race is limited to D vs. R, the grievances and demands of the Occupiers will be banished to the margins by late spring 2012.

Beyond Protest

Electoral activism and street activism both have their limits and both are necessary. (Other strategies, like targeted boycotts, are effective too. Why rule out any nonviolent strategy?)

Street protest can be successful at capturing public attention, as demonstrations have proved throughout history. But it can be easy to mistake the vigor of protest movements, numbers of participants, and public sympathy with real success in changing the world.

The protests against the Iraq War during the last decade collapsed after Barack Obama’s inauguration, because so many Democrats, believing they had just elected a progressive antiwar president, decided that protest was no longer necessary — just when we needed it most.

What will happen in 2012 when pro-Dem unions and liberal groups and other Obama supporters are forced to decide whether to continue participating in Occupy protests against the Administration’s policies or help get President Obama reelected? Organizations like MoveOn.org and Van Jones’ American Dream are already trying to coopt the Occupy movement and spin it into “Reelect Obama.” These groups will be reluctant to join the angry demonstrations that many of us hope to see outside the 2012 Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina (as well as the Republican Convention, of course).

Participants in protest movements often espouse a variety of sometimes inconsistent ideals and tend to offer very general complaints and ideas for change. Demanding economic justice or an end to a war isn’t a program for systematic change. The Vietnam War protests focused public opposition to the war and may have hastened the pullout of US troops. In the end, however, the protests didn’t overturn the military-industrial complex or imperial culture of Washington, DC. Subsequent administrations, beginning with Jimmy Carter, maintained the pattern of US intervention in countries around the world.

In some cases, those in power simply ignore protest. The mass rallies throughout the US against President George W. Bush’s order to invade Iraq in 2003 had no effect at all.

The Occupy movement must continue. We should look forward to its survival through the winter and renewed vitality when spring 2012 rolls around. But we must also find ways to make systematic changes and rebuild the political culture of the US so that wars of aggression, capitalist depredation, ecological irresponsibility (exhibited by the Obama Administration in early December during the UN meeting in Durban, South Africa, on climate change), assaults on the US Constitution, and other evils don’t keep repeating every few years. In other words, we must replace people who are in power.

Vote For Yourself

The good news is that more and more Occupiers are showing interest in electoral action outside of the two Titanic parties. They’ve begun to embrace the vote as a strategy for challenging the corporate corruption and the erosion of democracy, in efforts like Occupy the Ballot.

Occupy Cincinnati demonstrators are already working to establish their own party. Carl Mayer, public defender and long-time supporter of Ralph Nader and the Green Party, recently spoke before Occupy Wall Street in Zuccotti Park and expressed “his hopes of the OWS movement’s becoming a viable third party in the future.”

On December 13, former Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson launched a presidential campaign, via his newly founded Justice Party.

Alternative parties have been responsible for introducing urgent changes, whether the parties themselves have succeeded (the anti-slavery Republican Party in the mid 1800s) or failed. The list of reforms introduced by third parties and initially rejected by the political establishment includes abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, the eight-hour day and other workers’ rights and protections, and civil rights for Blacks. If you’re worried that the US is drifting into a new Robber Baron Era, remember that the Populist and Progressive parties helped end the last one in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Who will represent the important ideas on the electoral stage in the 21st century?

The Green Party holds promise as an established national party, having laid a foundation for willing Occupy candidates to run for public office. In many states, Greens have accomplished the difficult task of achieving ballot status, overcoming prohibitive rules enacted by Democratic and Republican politicians to hinder alternative parties and candidates. Greens have spent more than two decades building party infrastructure and gaining campaign experience. The demands of Occupy protesters are clearly reflected in the Green Party’s platform and refusal to accept corporate checks.

In New York, the Green Party achieved major-party status through Howie Hawkins’ campaign for governor in 2010, fulfilling the state’s stringent requirements and earning Greens their place on the 2012 ballot. New York Greens have been active in Occupy Wall Street since the protests began in September. In the 2011 general election, Cheri Honkala, a long-time housing activist and founder of the Kensington Welfare Rights Union, ran for Sheriff of Philadelphia as a Green on an anti-eviction platform. Ms. Honkala spoke publicly at Occupy events about her pledge not to cooperate, if elected, with banks attempting to foreclose on Philadelphians’ homes.

Speaking on the party’s hope of emerging as a permanent independent political force in the 21st century, 2008 Green vice-presidential nominee Rosa Clemente said “The Green Party is no longer the alternative, the Green Party is the imperative.” Some Greens have challenged Rocky Anderson to run for the Green nomination, noting that the Green Party already has ballot lines. (Greens will choose their nominee during the party’s 2012 national convention in Baltimore, July 12 to 15.)

Whether Occupy activists decide to go Green or some other partisan route, they have the potential to lead a national voters’ rebellion against the Titanic parties and trigger a sorely need seismic shift in US politics.

The day a few non-corporate-money Occupy candidates are elected to Congress is the day Democratic and Republican politicians are no longer each others’ sole competition. The public debate on any given issue would open up to new ideas outside of the narrow D vs. R spectrum of policies and legislation approved by Wall Street, the oil companies, arms manufacturers, insurance companies, and other corporate interests.

There is no such thing as two-party democracy. Two-party elections are a single step removed from one-party states like the Soviet Union and China. At the heart of the voters’ rebellion is the right to choose whichever candidates best represent one’s own interests and ideals, without being told our choice is restricted to Big Mac vs. Whopper.

Refusing to vote and insisting on loyalty to Democrats will have the same effect — a future limited to the parties of war and Wall Street. Thanks to the momentum of the Occupy movement, 2012 gives us an opportunity to save the US from the demise of our republic, collapse of the middle class, and descent into terrain that would be familiar to Benito Mussolini in the 1920s.

Given the increasing entrenchment of corporate-money politics in the age of Citizens United and accelerated redistribution of wealth and power to the one percent, this opportunity might be our last.

The protests against Wall Street’s criminal theft of America’s future, to be followed on October 6 by the ‘October 2011′ occupation of Freedom Plaza in Washington, DC, are cause for optimism. Maybe ‘Arab Spring’ is finally coming to the US. (‘American Autumn’?) The protests, now spreading to other cities, are continuing despite the troops of police ready to club, pepperspray, and corral peaceful protesters into nets for mass arrest.

The biggest impediment to the democracy movement is not Fox News and pundits who believe that the Occupy Wall Street demos are a demand for ‘big government’, as if their entire understanding comes from a GOP talking points memo. It’s not the dismissive tone of journalists from the New York Times and other mainstream papers. It’s not the cable news stations who misreport the goals of the demonstrations or ignore them altogether.

The greatest danger is that many Americans sympathetic to the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ grievances, and maybe a small number of the protesters themselves, will soon fall into a familiar habit. In a few months we can expect to hear some of them declare “We must vote to reelect President Obama in 2012, to prevent a Republican victory.”

The Republicans have already won, regardless of who takes the oath of office in January 2013. Endless wars, Wall Street pillage, and the trashing of the US Constitution are no longer the exclusive intellectual property of the GOP.

Barack Obama’s progressive supporters acknowledge that he didn’t quite fulfill their expectations as an agent of change and a bulwark against war and the predatory power of corporations. But the GOP is so much worse, they say, that we have to keep voting Democrat. This is nonsense.

The liberals, progressives, leftists, editors and columnists for The Nation and Daily Kos and other publications who insist we vote Dem in every election cycle are preaching self-defeat.

Apologists for the Democrats will say, “But there are some real differences between the two parties!” That’s true. “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” would not have been repealed by a Republican administration.

Overall, however, the differences between D and R have grown more and more insubstantial during the past few decades. In many cases, Democratic presidents used their power to fulfill the GOP agenda, often accomplishing what Republican couldn’t by themselves, for example, President Clinton’s passage of NAFTA with help from a Democratic Congress and President Obama’s willingness to carve up Social Security and Medicare.

On nearly every big issue from the wars to Wall Street’s looting of the economy to offshore drilling and oil pipelines, President Obama has shown a smooth continuity from the Bush-Cheney Administration. When he clashed with Republicans in the health care reform debate, the argument was really over which side could best accommodate for-profit insurance companies and other special interests, with Democrats offering mandates that require everyone to purchase private coverage, an idea they pilfered from Republican Congressmembers who introduced it in the 1990s. (See “Whose side are they on? An unexhaustive recent history of bipartisan convergence” below.)

The major newspapers, network and cable news shows, and other media inflate the small differences because they like to make the news as simple-minded as possible, and that means limiting the public debate to D versus R on any big issue. Other points of view, such as the one expressed by the Wall Street protesters, aren’t fit for serious coverage, or sometimes any coverage at all.

Progressives who believe that President Obama “is really one of us” are as deluded as conservatives who believe Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, and other phony populists and corporate royalists when they call President Obama a socialist, by which they mean he’s a few degrees less rabid in his devotion to corporate rule than they are.

Instead of Democrat versus Republican, we should look at US politics as D and R versus the rest of us. Elections have become a contest between Democrats ready to fulfill GOP agenda and the GOP itself. Whether we elect a Democrat or a Republican to the White House, whether Democrats or Republicans win control of Congress, the center of political gravity remains on the side of the GOP. As George Lakoff has observed in several books and numerous essays, Democrats play according to Republican rules. Even when they’re telling outright lies, Republicans deal in gut-level messages that Democrats find themselves parroting: Support our troops! End big government!

Both of the Titanic parties accept enormous sums of money from corporate PACs to do the bidding of corporate special interest lobbies, but the GOP is far more shameless about its service to corporate elites and its ideology of privatization, deregulation, and concentration of economic power.

Democrats, on the other hand, want to be perceived as the party of the people, but won’t wean themselves off corporate campaign checks. They retreat from their stated principles and traditional constituencies and ignore progressive voices within their own party on the assumption that voters on the left have “nowhere else to turn.”

The retreat of the Democrats, their confused allegiances, and embrace of so much of the GOP agenda have meant a license for Republicans to move to ever greater extremes. Now we have a ‘liberal’ party that has moved to the right of Eisenhower and Nixon and a rightwing party that has descended into irrationality. Every decade, the political paradigm drifts further and further to the right.

If we want to interrupt this drift, we have to think outside of the two-party power bloc. The Occupy Wall Street protesters and their supporters have no voice in the two-party mainstream of electoral politics. It’s assumed that –if they vote at all — they will line up behind President Obama and a Democratic machine that regards them with contempt.

Time for a Voters’ Revolt

Dropping out of the elections and refusing to vote are not an option. Until we take steps now to break down the rule of the Titanic Parties and replace them in public office, we face decades of more endless wars, more erosion of basic human rights and protections for working people, and dwindling chances of a solution to global climate change.

Activism should not be limited to electoral politics. But the movement for a change in America’s political direction must include a voters’ revolt and the emergence of a strong and permanent alternative party that rejects corporate money and influence.

Without such an insurgence in 2012, the following topics will be missing from the election season debate after April or May: the plundering of the US economy by the financial industry; multi-trillion-dollar bailouts for Wall Street; the assault on public sector unions; universal health care (Medicare For All); ending the endless wars; the death penalty (Troy Davis will be forgotten); the dangers of the Tar Sands pipeline, offshore drilling, nuclear power, mountaintop removal mining, warrantless spying on US citizens, torture, and other gross abuses of power. Neither incumbent Obama nor the GOP nominee will mention these things.

Despite the best intentions of progressives like Dennis Kucinich, John Conyers, and others, the Democratic Party will not be rehabilitated.  A progressive challenge to President Obama in the primaries, as recently encouraged by Ralph Nader and others, will keep some of the complaints and ideals of the Wall Street protesters alive for a few months. By late spring, the challenger will be defeated by the Obama campaign juggernaut and the challenger’s supporters will find themselves muzzled, with the expectation that they’ll vote Dem anyway. That’s what happens in every presidential election.

The usual objection to voting third-party is that the candidate might ‘spoil’ by subtracting votes from a Democrat and enabling a Republican victory, with the role played by Green presidential nominee Ralph Nader in 2000 as the classical example. There are numerous problems with this accusation — it ignores manipulation and voter obstruction by GOP officials in Florida, a patently biased Supreme Court ruling that canceled vote recounts and delivered the White House to George W. Bush, and Al Gore’s own feeble campaign, which lost double-digit points in polls during the final months of the race (while Mr. Nader’s percentage never rose above a few percentage points) and failed to take even Tennessee, Mr. Gore’s home state. In Florida, the number of registered Dems who voted for Mr. Bush was four times the number who voted for Mr. Nader. Why don’t Democratic apologists ever apply the spoiler label to Republicans?

The assertion that Mr. Nader siphoned votes away from Mr. Gore assumes that Democratic candidates have some kind of prior claim to our votes. The subtext of the spoiler accusation, when leveled by pundits and politicians who’ve made no effort to promote reforms like Instant Runoff Voting that would eliminate the alleged spoiler effect, is that two-party rule must never face interference from alternative parties and independent candidates. It’s a notion of democracy only one step removed from single-party states like China and the Soviet Union.

The only fair and democratic elections are multi-party elections, in which every voter has the right to see more than a choice between Big Mac and Whopper on the ballot, the right to know which candidate best represents his or her own interests and ideals, and the right to vote for that candidate.

Imagine that multi-party democracy existed in the US. The election of a half-dozen noncorporate alternative-party candidates to Congress would alter the political landscape, with Ds and Rs no longer each others’ sole competition.

If such a candidate participated in the presidential debates, he or she would raise ideas that no Democratic or Republican nominee would ever touch, like Medicare For All and rapid withdrawal of all US forces from Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Commission on Presidential Debates is owned and run by the Democratic and Republican parties, who took control over it in order to bar other parties’ candidates. D and R politicians in many states have conspired to rig the ballot access rules of many states to block third-party and independent candidates from running for office. The two Titanic parties have been corrupted by their own exclusive power as much as by corporate money and clout.

These obstacles are all surmountable, but only through a concerted mass effort led by a broad alliance of those critical of the two-party status quo, the bureaucratic and political power of major corporations, and the expanding power of government. The Occupy Wall Street protests, which have drawn progressives, Greens, anarchists, libertarians, nonvoters, frustrated Democrats and Republicans, and many others, are a model for such an alliance.

Alternatives like the Green Party are waiting for their moment — the moment of mass epiphany when Americans recognize them as an imperative comparable to the anti-slavery Republican Party in the mid 19th century. The Occupy Wall Street protesters are the abolitionists of the 21st century, demanding an end to the predatory power of Wall Street and other corporate elites over our political system, our jobs, our homes, our savings, our health, nearly aspect of our lives.

Until we recognize that Democrats are as dangerous to America’s future as Republicans, until we spark a national voters’ revolt, we’ll continue to commit political suicide every Election Day.

The Occupy Wall Street participants want to push the country in a different direction, away from corporate oligarchy, military aggression, and environmental depredation. Protests and direct action must continue as the election season unfolds, especially during next year’s national Democratic and Republican conventions. We must find, build, and promote noncorporate ways to live our lives and expand participatory democracy (see Ben Manski’s essay “The Protest Wave: Why the Political Class Can’t Understand Our Demands”).

And if we want these things to have a lasting effect, the “99 percent” movement that inspired the current demonstrations must move to the next level, which must include independent electoral action in 2012 and beyond.

Sidebar: Whose side are they on? An unexhaustive recent history of bipartisan convergence

• Is President Obama a “warrior for the middle class”?

In 2008, Mr. Obama became the highest recipient of Wall Street campaign contributions in history. After he was elected, he followed in the footsteps of Republican presidents by stacking his staff with Wall Street insiders and operators — Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, economics advisor Larry Summers, Chief of Staff Bill Daley — whose deregulatory policies made the 2008 economic meltdown inevitable.

With bipartisan support in Congress, the Obama Administration bailed out the Wall Street firms that were responsible for the meltdown, while offering minimal aid to Americans facing unemployment and home foreclosures because of the Subprime Mortgage Crisis that these firms created. The White House and Congress have taken no steps to restore the Glass-Steagall Act or enact other reforms to curtail Wall Street power and prevent the next crisis.

The federal government plans to begin selling off the massive portfolio of foreclosed homes now owned by HUD, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac to private investment conglomerates (“vulture funds”), possibly the “largest transfer of wealth from the public to the private sector” in history.

Such actions were predictable by September 2008, before Mr. Obama’s election victory, when he undercut his pledge of “change we can believe in” with an endorsement of the first Wall Street bailout, in harmony with the Bush White House and his GOP competition, John McCain.

After promising to do so during his campaign, President Obama has refused to renegotiate NAFTA and other international trade pacts. These agreements, which tend to favor corporate power and profit over the rights and well-being of working people and the health of the environment, were authorized by President Clinton, who had initially opposed NAFTA while running for the White House in 1992.

Democrats have refused to repeal Taft-Hartley restrictions on union organizing. When Republican Gov. Walker want on the warpath against the organizing rights and benefits for public sector workers in Wisconsin in early 2011, Democratic Gov. Cuomo launched a similar assault against public sector workers in New York.

• Are Democrats the party of health care reform and Social Security?

The Democratic Party discarded its platform promise, since 1948, of a national health program while Bill Clinton was president. In 2009, Democratic leaders declared that universal health care (single-payer, also called Medicare For All) would be “off the table” — Senate Finance Committee chair Max Baucus’s words when he organized the health care reform round tables.

President Obama’s health care bill imposes mandates that function as a direct public subsidy to the health insurance cartel, an idea that Republicans proposed during the 1990s. Whether Democrats passed Obamacare in 2010 or the Republicans prevailed in blocking it, the insurance industry, Big Pharma, and other corporate lobbies would be the real winners.

Contrary to the current belief that the President recently compromised on Social Security and Medicare, he made his intention to slash them clear in 2010 when he appointed his National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (“Catfood Commission”) and stacked it with politicians, economists, and company heads hostile to both programs. Rather than alleviating the skyrocketing costs of health care, the highest cause of personal bankruptcies, Obama policies further threaten middle- and low-income Americans and burden retirees.

• Are Democrats the party of social justice?

President Obama has remained silent about record US incarceration rates — the world’s highest, surpassing repressive countries like China and Iran — and the fact that most of those behind bars are young, poor, and mostly black or brown. Since President Clinton, Democratic leaders have supported the growth of the private prison industry, which profits by filling up cells with more inmates.

Both Democrats and Republicans support the War on Drugs, which has ruined lives and caused endless devastation in poor neighborhoods, and the death penalty, despite racial disparities and a growing list of exonerations and errors. President Obama refused to comment on the fate of Troy Davis, who was executed by the state of Georgia despite significant doubts about his guilt (seven out of nine witnesses changed their testimony, some of them claiming police coercion).

• The environment and global warming?

President Obama has authorized more offshore oil drilling (despite the lessons of the disastrous BP spill in the Gulf); endorsed new nuclear power plants that will make money for energy companies while taxpayers assume the high cost and high liability (despite the example of Fukushima); allowed mountaintop removal mining to continue to obliterate and poison the West Virginia landscape; remained silent about the extremely dangerous technique called hydrofracking for natural gas in New York and Pennsylvania; endorsed the myth of clean coal; and is on the verge of approving the dangerous Keystone XL pipeline from the Canadian tar sands.

On September 2, 2011, President Obama killed proposed national air-quality standards for smog, overriding a plan by the Environmental Protection Agency to reduce air pollution. His administration, and Democrats in general, have supported greenhouse gas emissions trading schemes (“cap and trade”) that will allow polluting companies to trade and collect licenses to continue polluting. US obstruction remains the greatest impediment to the Kyoto Protocols.

• Peace?

Democrats pretended to be the antiwar party in recent elections, but in 2006 they boosted funding for the wars after gaining control of Congress. President Obama escalated the war on Afghanistan and expanded it into Pakistan, and launched a new invasion (Libya) without the consent of Congress. While ordering the withdrawal of some troops from Iraq, he is implementing Donald Rumsfeld’s plan to replace US armed forces, which are directly accountable to Congress, with private “mercenary” security firms, which aren’t.

In October 2002, the Democratic leadership voted for President Bush’s request for an extra-constitutional transfer of war power from Congress to the White House, effectively endorsing his plan to invade Iraq on fraudulent claims about Saddam Hussein’s WMDs, nuclear weapons acquisition, and collusion with al-Qaeda. Under the Obama Administration, Democrats have adopted the neocon doctrine of unilateral aggression and the use of military force against countries at peace with the US. There has been virtually no difference between the Bush and Obama policies on the Middle East. The Obama Administration, which continues to arm Israel, had no objection to the Israel’s invasion of Gaza and massacre of civilians and strenuously objected to Palestine’s bid for UN recognition.

• The US Constitution and international law?

The Obama Justice Department has refused to investigate Bush-Cheney officials for torture and other gross abuses of power, constitutional violations, and war crimes. The administration has continued many of the same policies: warrantless surveillance of US citizens, denial of habeas corpus, extraordinary rendition, maintenance of “black sites,” harassment and legal action against whistleblowers. President Obama has surpassed the last administration in his intention to assassinate US citizens suspected of terrorism without any semblance of due process, as in the recent case of Anwar al-Awlaki, the US-born cleric killed in Yemen, whose name was on a secret “hit list” of people the President has targeted for summary execution.