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Third Party Rising?

By: Nancy Bordier Friday October 15, 2010 2:25 pm

Eleven-Page 1997-2003 Paginated Word Document of Entire Piece

Thomas Friedman wrote in a recent New York Times article, “Third Party Rising“, that he is “astounded” by the level of disgust with Washington D.C. and the two party system he has found among industry leaders in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. He says he knows of “at least two serious groups” on the East and West coasts “’developing third parties’ to challenge our stagnating two-party duopoly that has been presiding over our nation’s steady incremental decline.”

He predicts that “barring a transformation of the Democratic and Republican Parties, there is going to be a serious third party candidate in 2012, with a serious political movement behind him or her one definitely big enough to impact the election’s outcome”.

Friedman cites the harsh indictment of the two major parties by Stanford political scientist Larry Diamond: “We basically have two bankrupt parties bankrupting the country”. Diamond published similar views back in 2008 in a Huffington Post article, Can American Democracy Recover? He cited “a broad and deepening sense among Americans not only that the country is moving in the wrong direction, but that there is something seriously wrong and corrupt with our democracy”. He provides the following specifics:

MUST READ EVERY WORD….

Phi Beta Iota: We learned this when we went across America for the American Committee on Foreign Relations (ACFR) in the years following 9/11 delivering our lecture, “9/11, U.S. Intelligence, and the Real World.”  Americans are not stupid–mainstream media personalities like Friedman are not stupid either, just oblivious.  They live in their own world with the Kissingers and CNN faces so bent on being polite they cannot muster a tough question or get a grip on the whole.  As we said years ago, Washington may not be interested in reality but reality is assuredly interested in Washington.  It's game time.

See Also:

Votetocracy (vote on bills)

Reference: Diversity of Voices & Values

Reference: Citizenship Versus Transpartisanship

Reference: Cyber-Intelligence–Restore the Republic Of, By, and For…

Harnessing Collective Intelligence to Save Democracy

Tom Atlee Proposes distributed-intelligence, crowd-sourcing participatory think tank for popular common-sense policies, unhindered by party affiliations and ideology

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