If you want other candidates to win besides Democrats or Republicans, why not work for election reform? I think publicly funded elections will make a big difference on who (people from different economic classes) gets to participate, and different forms of voting will make a difference on “third” party candidates getting elected.

I ran an election at my church once and it was fascinating to realize that with the same votes, different forms of voting would give us three different results. (We went with the form that we said we would go with before the election, of course.)

I’m not sure which form of voting I would choose. There is a lot of info about voting on the web, including this article from wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_system

It’s very clear to me that our current voting system favors candidates who are extreme (although apparently not extreme enough for you.) If we had ranked voting and 50% of people voted for the really right wing candidate, and 50% of people voted for the left wing candidate, but most of the people ranked some middle of the road candidate as their second choice, then we would all get a president/congress person that wasn’t our top candidate, but that we could live with. I’d like that. I’d like leadership in our country that isn’t as polarized/ing.

Actually, participatory economics is a technical term referring to a well-defined model.

Only organizing an independent political movement/Party

Bingo and that is what is missing on the Left. The meaning of the Sarah Palin selection is to galvanize the Christian Conservative base. No one can argue that Christian Conservatives are not independently organized. They are well organized and very supportive of Zionism as well as extremely reactionary.

The Left can only envy their organizational capacity and for 2008 there is no way the Left can organizationally even mount a challenge. As noted the Greens crippled Nader in 2004 thus both the Greens and Nader do not possess the organizational effectiveness for 2008.

The Left squandered their their best most recent opportunity leaving a void now filled by Obama. So while the Left takes snipes at Obama, they have left the electorate with a terrible option: don’t vote for Obama and perhaps allow for a McCain/Palin victory who reactionaryism will extremely retrograde their lives.

Obama, on the other hand, has tapped into the discontent that the Left abandoned four years ago. There is clearly a shift among the working class but unfortunately the Left cannot seem to come to terms that the Democratic Party by default is the ONLY place for them to turn since there is NO sufficient organizing on the Left for this discontent to coalesce.

I agree with Mr. Silver that the Left needs to get organized but IMO the Left needs to demonstrate that they can take on TOUGH issues that will demonstrate their adherence to principles which will increase trust levels that will yield greater solidarity.

If she is elected as the Vice President, this infant will be brought up by a nanny, or father, or sisters, but not by her mother. This is a woman who claims to be Conservative and concerned about children’s well being, but when it comes to her own newborn that will require extra attention, she jumps at the chance. Most women with children will choose their children first. And if she does not plan to take time away from her infant then she will have to take time away from her duties as Vice President and possibly President.

These are not part time jobs. These are not 9 to 5 jobs. The nation needs leader’s full time, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. A mother of a 4 month old child with special needs cannot possibly give that to both at the same time. This means either the country loses or the infant loses; neither of which is acceptable. In light of new developments in finding that Sarah Pailin’s unwed teenage daughter is pregnant, perhaps she really needs to spend more time with her children instead of chasing political ambitions.

John McCain had many other fine choices. If he wanted a woman he could have chosen Kay Baily Hutchinson. He had many other Republican woman choices that would have done very well. Instead, he chose a woman he had met twice without giving any consideration to her infant child. This is not a compliment to women, but an insult not only to mothers and the responsibility they have for their children, but to all Conservatives.

He obviously does not understand the importance of a mother being in an infant’s life full time. Obviously he doesn’t care. He did not care when he abandoned his wife and children many years ago. So why should he consider her children’s needs. His only care is for himself and winning the election.

Shame on you again John McCain.

What a brilliantly written essay. As a member of the far right, all I can say is thank the Gods that no one in the Democrat party will listen.

I must give kudos to you for both your insight and the arrangement of your thoughts.

Danny

A graphic example of differences that are magnified overseas was seen in November 1980, a few days after Ronald Reagan’s election. “Baby Doc” Duvalier, the dictator of Haiti who had chafed under Jimmy Carter’s nominally “Human Rights” based foreign policy, read into Reagan’s elections an augury that he could go back to thuggish ways of yore and let loose the dreaded Tonton Macoute on opponents of his regime. More than 50 prominent opposition figures, including the popular broadcaster Jean Dominique, were thrown out of the country. This is how Dominique, who was later assassinated, described the situation in Jonathan Demme’s documentary of his life:

Jean Dominique: But in 1980, Carter was losing ground. Mr. Ronald…
[smiles]
Jean Dominique: you know him?… was winning ground. And they…
[makes a couple long sniffing sounds]
Jean Dominique: … smelled it. They said: “The time has come, human rights no more. The Cowboy are back in the white house.” And you know the Macoute were fascinated by the cowboy. It was the end of the “Haitian Spring”.

Now there’s all sorts of people in ‘Progressives for Obama’, but a lot are like me. I supported Kucinich as my top choice for years, gave him money, went to his events, joked with him about how a vote for him was like voting for myself, etc.

True, I also helped Obama on his very first race for the statehouse and his Senate campaign, but he got on my bad side when he started waffling on the war after his first trip to Iraq. So I went with Dennis and when he dropped out, then with Richardson, who also had a harder line against the war than Obama.

But when Richardson dropped out, I had to reexamine Obama and the alternative, McCain. At that point Obama was tacking left on the war, and McCain was, well, McCain.

Here is where you and I seem to part company.

I think my ideas and actions have consequences that I ‘m accountable for, even if the choices before me are less than perfect–and they’re always less than perfect. I understand Jean-Paul Sartre’s play ‘Dirty Hands,’ and that living in history, even if you sit on your hands and do nothing, your hands get dirty. And as the Catholic boy that I once was, I’m also familiar with St Thomas’ moral teaching on when faced with two evils, choose the lesser, in lieu of viable options. I’ve heard all sorts of rhetorical quips against this moral principle, but I’ve yet to heard a sound moral argument refuting it. Which is why it’s still around after several centuries.

So to get our hands dirty, we launched ‘Progressives for Obama’ to build an independent left pole in a left-center coalition with a candidate speaking to the center and drifting right. Yes, we want Obama to defeat McCain. That’s a key point of the project, but far from the only point. Your caricature just shows you haven’t bothered to read or examine what we’re actually doing.

Parecon is not on the agenda of this election. And as someone who agrees with David Schweickart on socialism and markets, I doubt it will ever be. Nor is capitalism as a whole, although many of it abuses are.

The choice in November is between two factions of capital: McCain’s neoliberalism vs Obama’s high road industrial policy capitalism. That’s a difference that makes a difference to me, and it should to you as well.

But if you want to see the problems with a Parecon electoral platform and campaign, you might want to look at the history of DeLeonism and the SLP in America. DeLeon’s anti-market fundamentalism is a precursor of your own, as was his socialist industrial union model for organizing society, and didn’t do to well, however rational the package seemed to its devotees.

Economic democracy and many varieties of the solidarity economy, however, can be put on the ballot, starting at the base and working upward and outward. At least it can if if we begin working now, to build our own electoral base organizations, even if our national ticket in 2008 is Obama-Biden.

Let’s start working on getting more and more progressives (independents, greens, progressive party, etc.) elected; STOP voting for all Democrats; and build build build – and of course, stop worrying about outcomes.