Presidential 'Debates' Managed by Private Corporation run by both Repubs & Dems - Others Excluded!

[Peter Lemkin]

Preparations have begun for the first presidential debate. It'll be held September 26 at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York. While polls show Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are among the least popular major-party candidates to ever run for the White House, it appears no third-party candidates will be invited to take part in the debates. Debates are organized by the Commission on Presidential Debates, which is controlled by the Democratic and Republican parties. Under the commission's rules, candidates will only be invited if they're polling at 15 percent in five national surveys. Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson and the Greens' Dr. Jill Stein have both witnessed recent surges in support, but neither have crossed the 15 percent threshold. Johnson has polled as high as 12 percent nationwide, while Stein has peaked at 6 percent in recent national polls. But in some demographics, they're both beating Donald Trump. McClatchy recently polled voters under the age of 30 and found 41 percent back Hillary Clinton, 23 percent support Johnson, 16 percent back Jill Stein, while only 9 percent back Donald Trump. Among African Americans, polls also show Trump behind all three other candidates, polling at either zero, 1 or 2 percent. More than 12,000 people have signed a petition organized by RootsAction calling for a four-way presidential debate.
In a moment, we'll be joined by the Green Party's Jill Stein and her running mate, Ajamu Baraka, but first I want to turn to George Farah, the founder and executive director of Open Debates. He spoke on Democracy Now! a few years ago about how the Democrats and Republicans took control of the debate process.

GEORGE FARAH: The League of Women Voters ran the presidential debate process from 1976 until 1984, and they were a very courageous and genuinely independent, nonpartisan sponsor. And whenever the candidates attempted to manipulate the presidential debates behind closed doors, either to exclude a viable independent candidate or to sanitize the formats, the League had the courage to challenge the Republican and Democratic nominees and, if necessary, go public.

In 1980, independent candidate John B. Anderson was polling about 12 percent in the polls. The League insisted that Anderson be allowed to participate, because the vast majority of the American people wanted to see him, but Jimmy Carter, President Jimmy Carter, refused to debate him. The League went forward anyway and held a presidential debate with an empty chair, showing that Jimmy Carter wasn't going to show up.

Four years later, when the Republican and Democratic nominees tried to get rid of difficult questions by vetoing 80 of the moderators that they had proposed to host the debates, the League said, "This is unacceptable." They held a press conference and attacked the campaigns for trying to get rid of difficult questions.

And lastly, in 1988, was the first attempt by the Republican and Democratic campaigns to negotiate a detailed contract. It was tame by comparison, a mere 12 pages. It talked about who could be in the audience and how the format would be structured, but the League found that kind of lack of transparency and that kind of candidate control to be fundamentally outrageous and antithetical to our democratic process. They released the contract and stated they refuse to be an accessory to the hoodwinking of the American people and refuse to implement it.

And today, what do we have? We have a private corporation that was created by the Republican and Democratic parties called the Commission on Presidential Debates. It seized control of the presidential debates precisely because the League was independent, precisely because this women's organization had the guts to stand up to the candidates that the major-party candidates had nominated.

AMY GOODMAN: That was George Farah, founder and executive director of Open Debates, speaking on Democracy Now! in 2012. He's the author of No Debate: How the Republican and Democratic Parties Secretly Control the Presidential Debates.
Well, joining us now is Green Party presidential nominee Dr. Jill Stein, along with her running mate, Ajamu Baraka, a longtime human rights activist. Baraka is the founding executive director of the U.S. Human Rights Network and coordinator of the U.S.-based Black Left Unity Network's Committee on International Affairs.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! So, September 26, that's the first presidential debate. What are your plans, Dr. Jill Stein?
DR. JILL STEIN: Our plans are to be in that debate, because it's not just about whether our party will be included, it's whether the American people will have a voice, whether we will have a real discussion of the crisis of jobs, of the climate, of race, of war. Theseand the crisis of a generation, an entire generation that's basically been hung out to dry, that cannot get out of predatory student loan debt, that doesn't have the jobs they need, and doesn't have a climate future to look forward to. So, these are really the critical issues that people want to discuss.
We saw an incredible surge of a response last night, when we had our first prime-time TV. And I want to note that while we've come up to 6 and even 7 percent in the polls, this has happened without any media coverage, really, whatsoever onyou know, in the mainstream media. So, it's absolutely remarkable that we've not only doubled and tripled, even more than that, because we were invisible as of about two months ago in the polls, suddenly we're up there. So there's an enormous interest in what we're talking about.
AMY GOODMAN: So, let's go back to 2012. The debate then was at Hofstra, as it will be on September 26. You and your running mate then, Cheri Honkala, were arrested as you attempted to enter the site of the presidential debate at Hofstra. Democracy Now! was there at the time of your arrest.

DR. JILL STEIN: Well, we're here to stand our ground. We're here to stand ground for the American people, who have been systematically locked out of these debates for decades by the Commission on Presidential Debates. We think that this commission is entirely illegitimate; that ifif democracy truly prevailed, there would be no such commission, that the debates would still be run by the League of Women Voters, that the debates would be open with the criteria that the League of Women Voters had always used, which was that if you have done the work to get on the ballot, if you are on the ballot and could actually win the Electoral College by being on the ballot in enough states, that you deserve to be in the election and you deserve to be heard; and that the American people actually deserve to hear choices which are not bought and paid for by multinational corporations and Wall Street.

POLICE OFFICER 1: Ladies and gentlemen, you are obstructing the vehicle of pedestrians and traffic. If you refuse to move, you are subject to arrest.

Remove them. Bring them back to arrest them, please.

POLICE OFFICER 2: Come on, ma'am.

POLICE OFFICER 3: Would you step up, please? Stand up, please?

POLICE OFFICER 2: We'll help you. Come on. Thank you, ma'am.

POLICE OFFICER 3: Thank you, ladies.

POLICE OFFICER 2: Watch the flag.

POLICE OFFICER 1: Thank you, ladies.

POLICE OFFICER 2: Thank you.

POLICE OFFICER 3: Come with us.

POLICE OFFICER 2: Just come with us.

POLICE OFFICER 3: Thank you. You guys have to stay here. All right, everybody, we're going to ask you to please move back.

DR. JILL STEIN: Well, I'd say this is what democracy looks like in the 21st century. I'm afraid it's going to take somesome politics and courage here to get our democracy back. So, more to come.

AMY GOODMAN: "More to come," you said. So, you're taken away, Dr. Jill Stein, from the Hofstra campus. Where did you and Cheri Honkalawhere were you taken?
DR. JILL STEIN: We were taken to a dark site, where nobody knew where we were, an unmarked facility that was basically being run by, I think, Homeland Security and the Secret Service and local police. We were surrounded by, according to Cheri, who counted them, some 16 police and colleagues, and handcuffed tightly to these metal chairs for about seven hours.
AMY GOODMAN: Seven hours?
DR. JILL STEIN: Seven hours, until the debates were long over and everyone had gone home. It was, I think, an incredible testimony to how fearful the political establishment was, and is, that people should learn that they actually have another choice in that raceand all the more so in this race, because we know that the current candidates of the Democratic and Republican parties are the most unpopular, the most disliked and untrusted presidential candidates in history. So, people are clamoring for another choice. And weyou know, we're building a campaign to get into the debates, and we'll keep people posted as to what our actions will be, coming up. But we will not leave this just to the establishment to shut down political opposition, which is what this commission is doing.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you plan to head to Hofstra on September 26th?
DR. JILL STEIN: Absolutely. Whether we are in the debate or whether we are locked out of the debate, you can be sure that we're going to be there. And we're not going to be there alone. We're going to be there with the American people, who are demanding that we open up the debate and make it a real service to our democracy.
AMY GOODMAN: You have sued?
DR. JILL STEIN: We have two cases, one of which has been dismissed. The other one is still technically in effect. We are not holding our breath that this is going to be favorably decided in a court of law, but there's every reason for this to be decided in the court of public opinion, where public opinion is very clear that people have had it, not only with the rigged economy, but the rigged political system and with the dialogue, which is rigged by the Democratic and Republican parties. This commission is a private corporation run by the two political parties. The League of Women Voters called it a fraud being perpetrated on the American public. We're not going to settle for that.
AMY GOODMAN: Earlier this year, I spoke to Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson in his home state of New Mexico. He talked about the unfair nature of the presidential debate system, as well.

GARY JOHNSON: Right now, running for president of the United States as a Libertarian, there is no way that a third party wins. There's no way that I have a chance of winning, unless I'm in the presidential debates. There is the possibility of being at 15 percent in the polls, though, if I'm in the polls, that I could be in the presidential debates.

AMY GOODMAN: You're part of a lawsuit going after the Presidential Debate Commission?

GARY JOHNSON: Yes, on the basis thaton the basis of the Sherman Act, that politics is a business, that Democrats and Republicans collude with one another to exclude everybody else. We think that the discovery phase of this lawsuit is going to provide national insight into just how rigged the system is. I come back to the fact that 50 percent of Americans right now declare themselves as independent. Where is that representation?

[Drew Phipps]

Thanks Peter, for that link to the petition. Here it is again:

https://act.rootsaction.org/p/dia/action..._KEY=12433

[Peter Lemkin]

It is now official...ONLY Trump and Clinton will be allowed. Any other nominee from any other party who even tries to go will not only be denied entry, but will be arrested! [as in the past!].

Ralph Nader had some good insights into this dog and pony show yesterday....

Goodman: When the first presidential debate takes place next Monday, a week from today, it will exclude third-party candidates. The Commission on Presidential Debates announced Friday that both Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party and Libertarian Gary Johnson, the former governor of New Mexico, failed to qualify by polling at 15 percent or higher. Johnson is currently polling at 8 percent, has reached as high as 12 percent at some points. Dr. Stein is reportedly averaging about 3 percent and has peaked at 6 percent in some national polls. A recent poll by Morning Consult found more than half of registered voters believe Johnson should partake in the debate scheduled for September 26, and nearly half believe Stein should, as well. This comes as polls show Trump and Clinton are among the least popular major-party candidates to ever run for the White House. McClatchy recently polled voters under the age of 30 and found 41 percent backed Clinton, 23 percent supported Johnson, 16 percent backed Stein, and only 9 percent backed Trump.In 2012, Stein and her running mate, Cheri Honkala, were arrested as they attempted to enter the presidential debate site at Hofstra University, the same location where Monday's debate will take place. Democracy Now! was there at the time of their arrest, when the third-party candidates were blocked by a solid wall of police before sitting down on the ground. They were then arrested.

DR. JILL STEIN: Well, we're here to stand our ground. We're here to stand ground for the American people, who have been systematically locked out of these debates for decades by the Commission on Presidential Debates. We think that this commission is entirely illegitimate; that ifif democracy truly prevailed, there would be no such commission, that the debates would still be run by the League of Women Voters, that the debates would be open.

POLICE OFFICER 1: Ladies and gentlemen, you are obstructing the vehicle of pedestrians and traffic. If you refuse to move, you are subject to arrest.

Remove them. Bring them back to arrest them, please.

POLICE OFFICER 2: Come on, ma'am.

POLICE OFFICER 3: Would you step up, please? Stand up, please?

POLICE OFFICER 2: We'll help you. Come on. Thank you, ma'am.

POLICE OFFICER 3: Thank you, ladies.

POLICE OFFICER 2: Watch the flag.

POLICE OFFICER 1: Thank you, ladies.

AMY GOODMAN: That's the Green Party's presidential candidate in 2012, Jill Stein, seeking entrance to the presidential debate at the time at Hofstra. This year she's continued to demand four-way presidential debates and said in a statement she plans to show up with hundreds of supporters outside that first debate. The debates are organized by the Commission on Presidential Debates, which is controlled by the Democratic and Republican parties. It's said it will review the criteria for the second and third debates in the future.
In a minute, we'll be joined by former third-party presidential candidate Ralph Nader. But first, this is George Farah, the founder and executive director of Open Debates, speaking on Democracy Now! about how the Democrats and Republicans took control of the debate process.

GEORGE FARAH: GEORGE FARAH: The League of Women Voters ran the presidential debate process from 1976 until 1984, and they were a very courageous and genuinely independent, nonpartisan sponsor. And whenever the candidates attempted to manipulate the presidential debates behind closed doors, either to exclude a viable independent candidate or to sanitize the formats, the league had the courage to challenge the Republican and Democratic nominees and, if necessary, go public.

In 1980, independent candidate John B. Anderson was polling about 12 percent in the polls. The league insisted that Anderson be allowed to participate, because the vast majority of the American people wanted to see him, but Jimmy Carter, President Jimmy Carter, refused to debate him. The league went forward anyway and held a presidential debate with an empty chair, showing that Jimmy Carter wasn't going to show up.

Four years later, when the Republican and Democratic nominees tried to get rid of difficult questions by vetoing 80 of the moderators that they had proposed to host the debates, the league said, "This is unacceptable." They held a press conference and attacked the campaigns for trying to get rid of difficult questions.

And lastly, in 1988, was the first attempt by the Republican and Democratic campaigns to negotiate a detailed contract. It was tame by comparison, a mere 12 pages. It talked about who could be in the audience and how the format would be structured, but the league found that kind of lack of transparency and that kind of candidate control to be fundamentally outrageous and antithetical to our democratic process. They released the contract and stated they refuse to be an accessory to the hoodwinking of the American people and refuse to implement it.

And today, what do we have? We have a private corporation that was created by the Republican and Democratic parties called the Commission on Presidential Debates. It seized control of the presidential debates precisely because the league was independent, precisely because this women's organization had the guts to stand up to the candidates that the major-party candidates had nominated.

AMY GOODMAN: That's George Farah, the founder and executive director of Open Debates.
For more on the Commission on Presidential Debates, who is excluded from the first presidential debate of 2016, we're joined by someone who's been through this before: yes, four-time presidential candidate Ralph Nader, longtime consumer advocate and corporate critic, has a new book out, Breaking Through Power: It's Easier Than We Think. He is speaking today here in New York.
Ralph, talk about this decision that just came downno third-party candidates in the first debate. You know this well.
RALPH NADER: Well, corporations are deciding who debates, when they debate, who asks the questions. So, in the primaries, you had major corporations decide who gets on, who doesn't. They excluded, for example, the former head of the IRS, Mr. Everson, former deputy of immigration service, the only man who had any experience in the federal government, because he didn't have a super PAC sponsoring him. And you can see what they did with Dennis Kucinich in 2012.
Now we have the Super Bowl of debates, and we have another corporation, which is funded by other corporations, like Anheuser-Busch, Ford Motor Company, AT&T. They have these hospitality suites at the debate location. And this is controlled by the two-party tyranny that doesn't want any competition, doesn't want voices that represent majoritarian directions in this country, like living wage, full Medicare for all, crackdown on corporate crime, pulling back on empire, civil liberties advance instead of the PATRIOT Act. All of these are represented by our third parties, which cannot reach tens of millions of people. You see, it's basically a terminal exclusion, because you can go and speak to the biggest crowds of allI filled Madison Square Garden, the Boston Garden, the Target Center; I reached less than 2 percent of the people I could have reached had I been on one debate. And the polls, again and again, showed that a majority of the people want more people on that stage. They don't just want the Republican and Democratic Party going through basically parallel news conferences. They're not really debates.

[Dawn Meredith]

The debate last night sunk even lower than the last one...

We are all so screwed here.

Killary wants to go after Russia- World war three??? Or is it just rhetoric?

The Donald is a nutcase.

They both refuse to answer the questions in the debate.

The empire has fallen. (About time)

[David Guyatt]

The debate last night sunk even lower than the last one...

We are all so screwed here.

Killary wants to go after Russia- World war three??? Or is it just rhetoric?

The Donald is a nutcase.

They both refuse to answer the questions in the debate.

The empire has fallen. (About time)

Because the Empire is fragmenting and falling makes it the most dangerous time of all.

The British retreated from their empire in the 1950's politely. Because they knew they were over and because the US absolutely insisted they do so - and because they had already agreed to put all their efforts into the new American empire (hence the so called "special relationship" of those days.

They therefore had no other choice but to go quietly.

The US today remains the global military hegemon and I have real concerns it won't go quietly, but will chose a burnt earth policy:

...if we can't have it, then fuck you all, no one else is getting it either.

Seems to be the crazed attitude of mind in Washington.

This leaves the rest of us hoping and praying that the schizophrenic power-crazed men in Washington are quickly replaced by men of judgement and goodwill, or we'll all be sucking on radioactive water to slake the gunpowder thirst of our remaining days.

[Peter Lemkin]

This leaves the rest of us hoping and praying that the schizophrenic power-crazed men in Washington are quickly replaced by men of judgement and goodwill, or we'll all be sucking on radioactive water to slake the gunpowder thirst of our remaining days.

Good luck there with your hopes.........I don't see persons of judgement and goodwill anywhere to be found anywhere near the centers of power. Radioactive water and gunpowder...hmmm....likely to be a new fashionable mixed drink in bars very soon.

[David Guyatt]

This leaves the rest of us hoping and praying that the schizophrenic power-crazed men in Washington are quickly replaced by men of judgement and goodwill, or we'll all be sucking on radioactive water to slake the gunpowder thirst of our remaining days.

Good luck there with your hopes.........I don't see persons of judgement and goodwill anywhere to be found anywhere near the centers of power. Radioactive water and gunpowder...hmmm....likely to be a new fashionable mixed drink in bars very soon.

But look on the bright side. If Hilary wins, which she almost certainly will, at least she's a racist nor sexist.

She'll be an equal opportunities exterminator.

[Peter Lemkin]

We end today's show with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges and Eddie Glaude, chair of the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. Chris Hedges began by talking about his new piece, "Donald Trump: The Dress Rehearsal for Fascism."

CHRIS HEDGES: Well, that's what we're watching. Trump, for all his shallowness and narcissism and imbecility and self-destructiveness, nevertheless has been able to run a fairly close race with Hillary Clinton. We saw from the leaked Podesta emails that the Clinton machine promoted, consciously promoted, especially through the press, what they call these "Pied Piper" candidates, listing Trump, Cruz andI forget the thirdTrump and Carson. And the idea was that they wanted to give them legitimacy. They wanted to push the more mainstream candidates, like Jeb Bush, closer to the lunatic fringe. And that's because, fundamentally, there is no difference between Hillary Clinton and a figure like Mitt Romney. You know, what they're battling about is what Freud called the narcissism of minor difference.

And the danger with this election is that the longer the policies of neoliberalism, austerity, the security and surveillance statein essence, the paralysis on the part of our corporate state to deal with the suffering, grievances and mounting rage of now over half the country who live in povertythe more these lunatic fringe candidates like Trump, these figures of ridiculereminds me very much of what happened in Yugoslavia. The economic meltdown of Yugoslavia vomited up figures like Radovan Karadzic, Slobodan Milosevic, Franjo Tudman, who were buffoonish figures before they achieved political power, much like much of the Nazi Party in Weimar. And I think that's what we're watching. And if we don't reverse the structural mechanisms by which we are disenfranchising and refusing to deal with the most fundamental rights and issues affecting now a majority of the American population, then we will get a fascist or a kind of quasi-protofascist, Christianized fascism, embodied in a figure with a little more intelligence and political savvy than Trump. And that's why I find this election so frightening and so dangerous.

I think it's the fact that the power elites, embodied by figures like the Clintons and Barack Obama, have been utterly, utterly tone deaf to what's happening, and are playing a very, very dangerous game by, on the one hand, promoting a figure like Trump, because, of course, his outrageousness gives her a kind of credibility, without understanding that another four years of what's been happeningand it won't be an effective political strategy anymore, and it won't be funny.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Professor Eddie Glaude, let's get your perspective on this. Earlier in the summer, you wrote a piece called "My Democratic Problem with Voting for Hillary Clinton." Now, some say that Clinton's victory is now more or less a foregone conclusion. You also talked about the necessity of strategic voting. Can you talk about both the arguments that you've made in light of where we stand today in the campaign and with the election less than a month away?

EDDIE GLAUDE: Sure. You know, I think that it isit is reasonable to conclude that Hillary Clinton is going to win. I think the internal polling for the Republicanon the Republican side suggests that Donald Trump is going to go down pretty badly, that it's going to be a pretty decisive victory. Some, like Steve Schmidt, are predicting that she's going to win upward to 400get to 400 in the Electoral College, some at 380. People are declaring that this is going to be the destruction of the Republican Party.

And a lot of this has to do with, right, the fact that Donald Trump moves between being, as I've said before, a lunatic and an adolescent. And we can talk about him, but in kind of orienting us to this campaign, to this election cycle, by emphasizing the ridiculousness of and the bombasity of Donald Trump, we have turned our attention away from, I think, Hillary Clinton and the policies that have defined the Democratic Party up to this point. And I think Donald Trump is just an exaggerated indication of the rot that's at the heart of the country, and that Hillary Clinton is the poster child for, I think, a failed economic policy that has left so many fellow Americans behind, and particularly the most vulnerable.

So what I've said is that we needed to suggest to Hillary Clinton thatand suggest to the Democratic Party that business as usual was no longer acceptable and that I couldn't vote for and I couldn't do thatI can do that because I'm in a blue state, and that there are some who are in a red state who can vote their conscience, but if you're in a battleground state, it makes all the sense in the world, given who Trump is, to not vote for herto vote forto not to vote for Hillary ClintonI mean, to not vote for Trump and to vote for Hillary Clinton.

So, in this case, part of what I'm trying to suggest is that we need to be very mindful in this moment, even as we say she's going to win. We need to understand who she's appointing as her transition team. We need to understand that personnel is policy. We need to see what her position will really be in terms of how she will govern economically, who she's going to pick and choose for attorney general position, who's going to populate her government. And I think once we get a better sense or if we pay attention to what she's doing, we will be even better mobilized and organized to bring pressure to bear on her presidency, once November 8th happens.

AMY GOODMAN: So, what do you think about this, Chris Hedges, this idea of strategic voting?

CHRIS HEDGES: I think it's an utter failure. I mean, one of the things that the WikiLeaks Podesta emails showed is that they were putting in place this neoliberal policyFroman, who was then ahe's now a U.S. trade representative. He, at the time, was at Citibank. In October, before Obama even achieved power, he's sending out a list of Cabinet positions, all of whichmost all of which came to pass. That's certainly happening now.

I think that we have to step outside this corporate, two-party duopoly and begin to empower right now the third party, you know, that I think represents or challenges corporate power most effectively, is the Green. It has issues. You know, it functions well in cities like Richmond, California, doesn't function as well in other places. But if they can poll 15 percent, that gives them ballot access in 2020 in a few dozen states, and it gives them $10 million. And I think that now is the time to, as Syriza did a decade ago, to fight back, because we have very little time left.

One of the things we have to remember is that we have a large number of supporters of Donald Trump who celebrate American violence through the gun culture, open racism, neo-Confederist movements, nativist movements. And Trump, I think, has made clear now, on the campaign trail, that he will essentially attempt to discredit the system if he loses. And right now they are working within the system. But unleashing that rage, you know, or essentially legitimizing that rage and that kind of violence after the election will begin to really rend the fabric of American society.

We have no more time to play around. We haven't even spoken about the issue of climate change. We know, from the leaked emails, that Hillary Clinton is a fan of fracking. She brags about promoting fracking in Poland and other places as secretary of state. We justthe kind of weakness of the system itself cannot, I think, sustain much more of this assault without dramatic and frightening blowback and ramifications. And I think Trump is systematic of that.

So, as I've said many times, I think we have to do what manyPodemos and many parties in Europe have done. We have to walk into the political wilderness. We have to build movements, and we have to build alternative third parties that challenge this system, because the inevitable result is a kind of frightening police state. Well, legally, it's already in place, physically, in marginal communities. They've been turned virtually into mini police states. The system of mass incarceration will not be affected in any meaningful way. Of course, it was the Clintons that put much of it in place. We just saw this very courageous prisoner strike, where the prisoners did work stoppages because, they said, the only way to stop this system of neoslavery is to stop being a slave. And I think that is a level of political consciousness that the rest of us have to begin to attain.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Professor Glaude, your response to Chris Hedges' rejection of strategic voting?

EDDIE GLAUDE: Well, I think we agree on principle. And part of what I thinkwhere we agree is that we have to keep Trump out of office. And the question for me is that: How do we do that? And one of the ways I'm thinking we need to do it is to vote strategically. And that is, in those places where we can, for me, blank out or vote for Jill Stein, we should. And in those places wherethe battleground states, where it matters, where Trump has a chance to win, I think we need to turn out in massive numbers and make sure that he doesn't win those states. I think we have to do two things simultaneously.

And I think he's right in this regard: I think that what we've seen and what we've witnessed in this moment is the bankruptcy of a particular economic ideological philosophy that has left so manyso many people behind. And I think we need to dare to imagine a new world. But I think it's going to require strategic and tactical thinking. And I think, on its face, Chris and I aren't disagreeing. I just think there are ways to get to the sameto the same end.

N.B. I just voted by absentee ballot and voted for Jill Stein. I couldn't bring myself to vote for the 'lesser of evils' in my state, even though it is one of the 'contested' states. If we don't start to break up the 'two' party system [really only one party system], we have lost America forever. I think Trump has just about destroyed the Republican party and now we progressives need to destroy the Democratic one. We need a multi-party system with proportional representation and bottom up political structure. Now it is totally top down and heading toward a crypto-fascist state [if not already there].