John Nichols and Rbbert W. McChesney
4.0 out of 5 stars Sickening at Two Levels — Superb Indictment of Periphery, Completely Avoids Two Party Tyranny Issue, July 19, 2013
This book makes me sick at two levels.
Level 1: It is the best treatment available of what I and many others have been saying for years. My own treatment was provided in a Preface, “Paradigms of Failure,” in the book under my signature below, that also had a preface by Thom Hartmann, another by Tom Atlee, and a third, reprinted, from Senator Bernie Sanders. The entire book is free online, so I am not pimping it.
Level 2: The book is at best naive and at worst deliberately misleading in suggesting that Congress somehow needs to be “empowered” to resist. This is absolute and utter bull. I ran for President in 2012, accepted by the Reform Party, listed at Politics1, interviewed for On The Issues, and I ran for two reasons: to get all of the best ideas in one place (We the People Reform Coalition) and to test the boundaries of the two-party tyranny as immortalized in Theresa Amato's outrageously superb Grand Illusion: The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny. I specifically ran to be able to contact every single other Presidential candidate from the small parties, and to learn — as I did — that not a single one of them could overcome their ego (as Occupy could not overcome its mob) to come together in a demand for Electoral Reform from 2011 in time for 2012. That report to Hackers on Planet Earth and also published in Reality Sandwich is easily found online by searching for “How I Tested the Boundaries of the Two-Party Tyranny.”
Here is what this book does NOT tell you, and the reason it gets only four stars from me (it is superb in what it does tell you, but misses the key point): NINE TIMES the US Congress has been asked to pass legislation that would mandate — for federal elections only — that the six small parties blocked from ballot access (Constitution, Green, Libertarian, Natural Law, Reform, and Socialist) — and Independent candidates — be guaranteed both ballot access and debate access. NINE TIMES, the last four sponsored by Ron Paul, the two-party tyranny has refused. They have a deal: they borrow one trillion a year in our name, one third of a federal budget that is documented to be 50% waste, and in return they share the right to loot the public treasury and pay off their voting blocks — corporate welfare and the banks for the Republicans, individual welfare for the Democrats. Obama is an anomaly — Wall Street bought the white half, the Progressives got the black half, and we all know how this turned out.
