Hedges on the sad Green Party

Just somethin i read. I post it because Hedges makes a statement about the Green Party that made me smile, and sigh.

(Btw Hedges noted on a radio show with Ralph Nader that Bernie made a ‘faustian bargain’ with the Dems. That bargain being that Bernie would be progressive on domestic issues but he prettymuch supports all the usual imperial war/ deep-state stuff.)

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Feb 2016
Bernie Sanders Phantom Movement

Bernie Sanders’ Phantom Movement

“…The two parties have created innumerable obstacles to third parties, from locking them out of the debates to challenging voter lists and keeping them off the ballot. The Green Party is internally crippled by endemic factionalism and dysfunction. It is dominated in many states by an older, white demographic that is trapped in the nostalgia of the 1960s and narcissistically self-referential.

I spoke three years ago to the sparsely attended state gathering of the Green Party in New Jersey. I felt as if I was a character in Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel “The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta.” In the novel, Mayta, a naive idealist, endures the indignities of the tiny and irrelevant warring sects of the Peruvian left. He is reduced to meeting in a garage with seven self-described revolutionaries who make up the RWP(T)—the Revolutionary Workers’ Party (Trotskyist)—a splinter group of the marginal Revolutionary Worker’s Party. “Stacked against the walls,” Llosa writes, “were piles of Workers Voice and handbills, manifestos and statements favoring strikes or denouncing them which they had never got around to handing out.”

I am all for a revolution, a word Sanders likes to throw around, but one that is truly socialist and destroys the corporate establishment, including the Democratic Party. I am for a revolution that demands the return of the rule of law, and not just for Wall Street, but those who wage pre-emptive war, order the assassination of U.S. citizens, allow the military to carry out domestic policing and then indefinitely hold citizens without due process, who empower the wholesale surveillance of the citizenry by the government. I am for a revolution that brings under strict civilian control the military, the security and surveillance apparatus including the CIA, the FBI, Homeland Security and police and drastically reduces their budgets and power. I am for a revolution that abandons imperial expansion, especially in the Middle East, and makes it impossible to profit from war. I am for a revolution that nationalizes banks, the arms industry, energy companies and utilities, breaks up monopolies, destroys the fossil fuel industry, funds the arts and public broadcasting, provides full employment and free education including university education, forgives all student debt, blocks bank repossessions and foreclosures of homes, guarantees universal and free health care and provides a living wage to those unable to work, especially single parents, the disabled and the elderly. Half the country, after all, now lives in poverty. None of us live in freedom.

This will be a long and desperate struggle. It will require open confrontation. The billionaire class and corporate oligarchs cannot be tamed. They must be overthrown. They will be overthrown in the streets, not in a convention hall. Convention halls are where the left goes to die.