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PostPosted: Fri Jan 10, 2020 1:08 am
  

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ArloNetizen

Joined: Dec 28, 2019
Posts: 84
Location: San Diego, CA
Alternative Parties for US President for 2020:

in case anyone here is disillusioned, and/or, disgusted with the two party system the Republicans and the Democrats for years, my roommate and I have been voting in the Green Party. We've been registered with the Green Party for the past few years now. Jill Stein ran for President in 2012 and in 2016. This year I understand that Howie Hawkins and Dario Hunter are running.
The Green Party is non-corporate and ecosocialist. They're ecocialists and environmentalist. You will not be turned away though if you're not a socialist.
through of course other parties you can check out but the Green Party is the Party we like the most.

if anyone is interested you can read the following article by Howie Hawkins, one of the people that are running for US president in the green party:





Alternative Party 2020 US Pres:
​Howie Hawkins Green Party!

​Article by Howie Hawkins:
"Give Bernie Sanders props for popularizing the term “socialism.” It used to be a conversation stopper. Now it is a conversation starter.


But Sanders isn’t helping the socialist cause by confusing it with the old New Deal liberalism of FDR. As Norman Thomas, the Socialist Party’s 1936 presidential candidate, famously quipped in a radio address, “Roosevelt did not carry out the Socialist platform, unless he carried it out on a stretcher.”

Socialism has traditionally meant social ownership and democratic administration of the economy. That’s the dictionary definition. That’s the socialist tradition. One can see that from this old membership card of the UK Labour Party, a party nominally committed to democratic socialism from 1918 until the Tony Blair’s “Third Way” neoliberals got Clause IV deleted from the party constitution in 1995).
Now Bernie Sanders is deleting economic democracy based on social ownership of the major means of production from our understanding of socialism.


As he said in his November 2015 speech on democratic socialism, “So the next time you hear me attacked as a socialist, remember this: I don’t believe government should own the means of production….”


When he returned to the topic of democratic socialism again on June 12 this year, he never said a word about any kind of social ownership. Nothing about the worker cooperatives he touted in his 2016 book, Our Revolution. Nothing about the idea Sanders had floated just two weeks before the speech of socializing companies by requiring them to regularly put a portion of their shares in a fund controlled by workers.


Democratic socialism for Sanders in his speech is simply fulfilling an updated version of President Roosevelt’s 1944 call for an Economic Bill of Rights, which Sanders defined as:


\\The right to a decent job that pays a living wage



\\The right to quality health care



The right to a complete education


\\n
\\nThe right to affordable housing


\\n
\\nThe right to a clean environment


\\n
\\nThe right to a secure retirement


\\nThese are rights that socialists support. I have campaigned for this sort of Economic Bill of Rights in three campaigns for New York governor since 2010. It was our Green alternative to the public austerity that both Democrats and Republicans were proposing in the wake of the 2008 housing and financial meltdown. We called it the Green New Deal.
\\nSocialism is a different system of economic organization from capitalism. Sanders never addresses how capitalist property relations divide society into class hierarchies with the billionaire class on top.


\\nUnder capitalism, workers are exploited. The owners, not the workers—the takers, not the makers—grab for themselves the wealth that workers create with their labor. Workers get a fixed wage, while capitalists take all the profits. Under socialism, workers receive the full value of their labor. The net income after paying for production costs (equipment, materials, supplies, taxes, etc.) is distributed to the workers in proportion to their labor contribution. This socialist system of distribution yields an equitable distribution of income in the first place at the point of production. Sanders’ tax and transfer social programs only partially compensate after the fact for exploitation and its inequitable distribution.


\\nCapitalism is prone to economic crises due to overproduction during market booms, leading to excess inventories and layoffs during market busts. These recessions and depressions impoverish workers and further concentrate wealth as the bigger capitalists buy up assets at deflated prices. A socialist economic democracy can plan for stable production without boom and bust cycles, but Sanders gives no indication that this is part of the case for socialism.


\\nSocialist economic planning also enables an ecological socialism of sustainable production of enough to meet people’s material needs without exceeding ecological limits. Capitalism, on the other hand, is a system of blind, relentless growth driven by its competitive structure, which requires capitalist firms to grow or die in the competition for market shares and profits. Capitalist growth disregards ecological limits and is destroying the ecological foundations of the human economy.


\\nSanders’ call for “the right to a clean environment” requires ecosocialism. But Sanders’ says nothing about how “democratic socialism” is needed to realize this right, particularly with respect to the climate crisis. Exxon, Chevron, and the Koch Brothers will never reinvest their earnings from fossil fuels into clean renewables. Big Oil must be socialized along with power utilities, railroads, banking, and other key sectors in order to plan the rapid transition to 100% clean energy across all productive sectors, from electricity and transportation to agriculture and manufacturing. The federal government took over or built a quarter of US manufacturing capacity during World War II in order to turn industry on a dime into the “Arsenal of Democracy” that helped beat the fascists. We need nothing less to defeat climate change.


\\nCapitalist competition also generates war. Global corporations enlist their home-based nation-states and militaries in an international competition for resources, markets, cheap labor, and geopolitical military positioning. This capitalist international structure produces endless wars and the inevitability, sooner or later, of global nuclear annihilation by the nuclear-armed states if we don’t change the system. Socialism’s international cooperation would build peace based on mutual aid in place of capitalism’s competitive nationalistic militarism.
\\n
\\nThe jingoistic display of a dozen American flags as the total backdrop for Sanders’ 2019 socialism speech was the antithesis of socialist internationalism. The speech said nothing critical about the US global military empire or about socialism as the alternative to capitalist imperialism and the path to peace.


\\nSanders’ presentation of liberal social programs as “socialism” fails to address the power rooted in the private ownership and dictatorial control of the means of production. Dictatorial control extends well beyond the workplace where employees work as directed by supervisors without many of the constitutional protections of the Bill of Rights. Capitalist economic dictatorship encompasses the whole economy and the government. Without socialist economic democracy, programs to implement the Economic Bill of Rights will be resisted or, if passed, rolled back by the capitalists because power will remain in their hands.


\\nConcentrated economic power under capitalism yields concentrated political power for the capitalist class. This power is obviously exercised through campaign donations, advertising, and lobbying. But it is also expressed directly in the economy. Capitalists can strike, too. They can refuse to finance government borrowing. They can withhold or offshore investments, depress the economy, and blame the reformers. Usually, the threat of these measures is sufficient to bring progressive reformers to heel. The capitalists who exercise this private economic power are not up for election.


\\nSanders’ liberalism is vulnerable to the capitalist veto because it depends on taxing the capitalist economy to fund the social programs. Capitalists don’t want to pay taxes and are especially opposed to taxes that fund social programs that strengthen the economic security and therefore the bargaining power of the working class. A Sanders administration would have to pander to the capitalists or face economic sabotage. Bill Clinton found this out. He was instructed during the transition planning for his presidency by Goldman Sachs’ Robert Rubin, who became his top economic advisor and treasury secretary, that he would have to drop his modest reform program of education spending, public works, and middle-class tax cuts in order to show the investor class the fiscal austerity they demanded. Clinton exclaimed, “You mean to tell me that the success of the economic program and my re-election hinges on the Federal Reserve and a bunch of fucking bond traders?” Clinton found out that the US bond market—a few thousand traders working for a handful of investment banks—had veto power over his economic program.


\\nDemocracy needs socialism. Political democracy requires economic democracy. Socialist economic democracy based on social ownership and democratic administration of the economy is needed so people have the power to enact and maintain an Economic Bill of Rights.
\\nSanders’ Economic Bill of Rights will be popular with working class voters. Public opinion polling has consistently shown majority support for government action to realize these rights from the 1940s up to today. I am again campaigning for it as I have in past campaigns.


\\nBut in addition to calling for socialist economic democracy as necessary for securing these economic rights, I am also saying the Economic Bill of Rights must be implemented in a way that reverses the growing racial wealth gap and the increasing segregation in housing and segregation that we have experienced since the 1980s. It was disappointing that in Sanders’ unvarnished praise of FDR’s New Deal that he did not acknowledge and correct for the racial bias in its implementation. Social Security at first excluded sharecroppers, farmworkers, and domestic workers, which disproportionately excluded black people and poor people of every color. The administration of the Home Ownership Loan Corporation, the Federal Housing Administration, and the public housing program discriminated against black people and increased segregation, as did the education and housing programs of the GI Bill. New Deal policies increased the economic gap between black people and white people.


\\nIt was Martin Luther King Jr., whom Sanders cites favorably in his speech, and other civil rights leaders who picked up the torch for FDR’s Economic Bill of Rights in the 1960s. With their 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, 1966 Freedom Budget, and 1968 Poor People’s Campaign, they demanded an Economic Bill of Rights, but this time with the indispensable addition that the programs be administered equitably without racial discrimination. That is the anti-racist torch we must pick up today in campaigning for the Economic Bill of Rights. Anti-racism is one of the reasons we call for a Green New Deal in order to distinguish it from the racism of the old New Deal.


\\nThose 1960s civil rights leaders saw their demands for universal economic rights as a means of undermining the white racial backlash that was then mounting in reaction to the passage of federal civil rights laws. White workers were being mobilized against civil rights and desegregation by the Dixiecrat Democrats and the Goldwater Republicans. Black people were scapegoated as a threat to white workers’ jobs and economic well-being. Competition for limited opportunities and resources provided a material underpinning for white racism. In turning “from civil rights to human rights,” the civil rights movement believed they needed to secure economic rights for all in order to secure civil rights for black people. They intended to undercut racism by leading an interracial movement of poor and working people for economic rights for all. As A. Philip Randolph, the socialist labor leader who conceived of the March on Washington, put it, “We must liberate not only ourselves, but our white brothers and sisters.”


\\nThe failure of the Democrats to implement the Economic Bill of Rights during the Johnson administration when they held the presidency and both houses of Congress in the 1960s ultimately led to the white backlash taking power today in the form of Donald Trump. An important part of the way to beat back his negative program of racist scapegoating is still the same: a positive program of economic rights for all. Old-fashioned New Deal liberalism is not enough. It will take socialist economic democracy to secure economic rights for all.
\\n"

That article was written by Howie Hawkins I do not own the article but I wanted to share it.
I also have it on my own website.

Carol


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PostPosted: Fri Feb 21, 2020 2:42 am
  

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ArloNetizen

Joined: Dec 28, 2019
Posts: 84
Location: San Diego, CA
This is why I support an alternative, non-corporate, political Presidential candidate.
Some disturbing information I saw, about Bernie Sanders.
Article from World Socialist Website
wsws.org.
Look up "Bernie Sanders, New York Times, pre-emptive strikes".
Carol


"Sanders tells New York Times he would consider a preemptive strike against Iran or North Korea

By Jacob Crosse and Barry Grey
14 February 2020

Bernie Sanders has won the popular vote in both the New Hampshire and Iowa presidential primary contests in considerable part by presenting himself as an opponent of war. Following the criminal assassination of Iranian General Qassem Suleimani last month, Sanders was the most vocal of the Democratic presidential aspirants in criticizing Trump’s action. His poll numbers have risen in tandem with his stepped-up anti-war rhetoric.

He has repeatedly stressed his vote against the 2003 invasion of Iraq, reminding voters in the Iowa presidential debate last month, “I not only voted against that war, I helped lead the effort against that war.”

[https://ci4]Democratic presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders speaks to supporters in Des Moines, Iowa, February 3, 2020 [Credit: AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais]

However, when speaking to the foremost newspaper of the American ruling class, the New York Times, the Sanders campaign adopts a very different tone than that employed by the candidate when addressing the public in campaign stump speeches or TV interviews.

The answers provided by Sanders’ campaign to a foreign policy survey of the Democratic presidential candidates published this month by the Times provide a very different picture of the attitude of the self-styled “democratic socialist” to American imperialism and war. In the course of the survey, the Sanders campaign is at pains to reassure the military/intelligence establishment and the financial elite of the senator’s loyalty to US imperialism and his readiness to deploy its military machine.

Perhaps most significant and chilling is the response to the third question in the Times’ survey.

Question: Would you consider military force to pre-empt an Iranian or North Korean nuclear or missile test?

Answer: Yes.

A Sanders White House, according to his campaign, would be open to launching a military strike against Iran or nuclear-armed North Korea to prevent (not respond to) not even a threatened missile or nuclear strike against the United States, but a mere weapons test. This is a breathtakingly reckless position no less incendiary than those advanced by the Trump administration.

Sanders would risk a war that could easily involve the major powers and lead to a nuclear Armageddon in order to block a weapons test by countries that have been subjected to devastating US sanctions and diplomatic, economic and military provocations for decades.

Moreover, as Sanders’ response to the Times makes clear, the so-called progressive, anti-war candidate fully subscribes to the doctrine of “preemptive war” declared to be official US policy in 2002 by the administration of George W. Bush. An illegal assertion of aggressive war as an instrument of foreign policy, this doctrine violates the principles laid down at the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi officials after World War II, the United Nations charter and other international laws and conventions on war. Sanders’ embrace of the doctrine, following in the footsteps of the Obama administration, shows that his opposition to the Iraq war was purely a question of tactics, not a principled opposition to imperialist war.

The above question is preceded by another that evokes a response fully in line with the war policies of the Obama administration, the first two-term administration in US history to preside over uninterrupted war.

Question: Would you consider military force for a humanitarian intervention?

Answer: Yes.

Among the criminal wars carried out by the United States in the name of defending “human rights” are the war in Bosnia and the bombing of Serbia in the 1990s, the 2011 air war against Libya that ended with the lynching of deposed ruler Muammar Gaddafi, and the civil war in Syria that was fomented by Washington and conducted by its Al Qaeda-linked proxy militias.

The fraudulent humanitarian pretexts for US aggression were no more legitimate than the lie of “weapons of mass destruction” used in the neo-colonial invasion of Iraq. The result of these war crimes has been the destruction of entire societies, the death of millions and dislocation of tens of millions more, along with the transformation of the Middle East into a cauldron of great power intervention and intrigue that threatens to erupt into a new world war.

Sanders fully subscribes to this doctrine of “humanitarian war” that has been particularly associated with Democratic administrations.

In response to a question from the Times on the assassination of Suleimani, the Sanders campaign calls Trump’s action illegal, but refuses to take a principled stand against targeted assassinations in general and associates itself with the attacks on Suleimani as a terrorist.

The reply states:

Clearly there is evidence that Suleimani was involved in acts of terror. He also supported attacks on US troops in Iraq. But the right question isn’t ‘was this a bad guy,’ but rather ‘does assassinating him make Americans safer?’ The answer is clearly no.

In other words, the extra-judicial killing of people by the US government is justified if it makes Americans “safer.” This is a tacit endorsement of the policy of drone assassinations that was vastly expanded under the Obama administration—a policy that included the murder of US citizens.

At another point, the Times asks:

Would you agree to begin withdrawing American troops from the Korean peninsula?

The reply is:

No, not immediately. We would work closely with our South Korean partners to move toward peace on the Korean peninsula, which is the only way we will ultimately deal with the North Korean nuclear issue.

Sanders thus supports the continued presence of tens of thousands of US troops on the Korean peninsula, just as he supports the deployment of US forces more generally to assert the global interests of the American ruling class.

On Israel, Sanders calls for a continuation of the current level of US military and civilian aid and opposes the immediate return of the US embassy from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv.

On Russia, he entirely supports the Democratic Party’s McCarthyite anti-Russia campaign and lines up behind the right-wing basis of the Democrats’ failed impeachment drive against Trump:

Question: If Russia continues on its current course in Ukraine and other former Soviet states, should the United States regard it as an adversary, or even an enemy?

Answer: Yes.

Question: Should Russia be required to return Crimea to Ukraine before it is allowed back into the G-7?

Answer: Yes.

Finally, the Times asks the Sanders campaign its position on the National Security Strategy announced by the Trump administration at the beginning of 2018. The new doctrine declares that the focus of American foreign and military strategy has shifted from the “war on terror” to the preparation for war against its major rivals, naming in particular Russia and China.

In the following exchange, Sanders tacitly accepts the great power conflict framework of the National Security Strategy, attacking Trump from the right for failing to aggressively prosecute the conflict with Russia and China:

Question: President Trump’s national security strategy calls for shifting the focus of American foreign policy away from the Middle East and Afghanistan, and back to what it refers to as the ‘revisionist’ superpowers, Russia and China. Do you agree? Why or why not?

Answer: Despite its stated strategy, the Trump administration has never followed a coherent national security strategy. In fact, Trump has escalated tensions in the Middle East and put us on the brink of war with Iran, refused to hold Russia accountable for its interference in our elections and human rights abuses, has done nothing to address our unfair trade agreement with China that only benefits wealthy corporations, and has ignored China’s mass internment of Uighurs and its brutal repression of protesters in Hong Kong. Clearly, Trump is not a president we should be taking notes from. [Emphasis added].

In a recent interview Ro Khanna, a Democratic congressman and national co-chair of the Sanders campaign, assured Atlantic writer Uri Friedman that Sanders would continue provocative “freedom of the seas” navigation operations in the Persian Gulf and the South China Sea, while committing a Sanders administration to “maintain some [troop] presence” on the multitude of bases dotting “allied” countries from Japan to Germany.

Millions of workers, students and young people are presently attracted to Sanders because they have come to despise and oppose the vast social inequality, brutality and militarism of American society and correctly associate these evils with capitalism. However, they will soon learn through bitter experience that Sanders’s opposition to the “billionaire class” is no more real than his supposed opposition to war. His foreign policy is imperialist through and through, in line with the aggressive and militaristic policy of the Democratic Party and the Obama administration.

The Democrats’ differences with Trump on foreign policy, though bitter, are tactical. Both parties share the strategic orientation of asserting US global hegemony above all through force of arms.

No matter how much Sanders blusters about inequality, it is impossible to oppose the depredations of the ruling class at home while supporting its plunder and oppression abroad.

Sanders is no more an apostle of peace than he is a representative of the working class. Both in foreign and domestic policy, he is an instrument of the ruling class for channeling the growing movement of the working class and opposition to capitalism back behind the Democratic Party and the two-party system of capitalist rule in America."






Sent from my Z557BL using Tapatalk


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PostPosted: Sun Mar 08, 2020 6:13 pm
  

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Arlo Fanatic

Joined: Sep 15, 1999
Posts: 8253
I think this worth sharing here too:

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/an-op ... y-for-2020


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PostPosted: Sun Mar 08, 2020 6:45 pm
  

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Arlo Fanatic

Joined: Sep 15, 1999
Posts: 8253
Also:

Bernie has said outright, that I have heard, that he is not a pacifist, and has also said outright that war should not be a first resort but a LAST RESORT.

In other words, There are lots of choices between doing nothing, and dropping bombs. At least that is my take on it.


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PostPosted: Tue Mar 10, 2020 4:16 am
  

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ArloNetizen

Joined: Dec 28, 2019
Posts: 84
Location: San Diego, CA
Thank you but this is not going to sway my vote for the Green Party.


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PostPosted: Fri Mar 13, 2020 7:16 pm
  

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Arlo Fanatic

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We disagree on this. I wish you could see what is being said here. And I am sure you wish I could see it your way, but I don’t.

I guess we will have to leave it at that for now.


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PostPosted: Fri Mar 13, 2020 8:51 pm
  

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ArloNetizen

Joined: Dec 28, 2019
Posts: 84
Location: San Diego, CA
Agree to disagree


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PostPosted: Fri Mar 13, 2020 8:52 pm
  

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ArloNetizen

Joined: Dec 28, 2019
Posts: 84
Location: San Diego, CA
agnes wrote:
We disagree on this. I wish you could see what is being said here. And I am sure you wish I could see it your way, but I don’t.

I guess we will have to leave it at that for now.

I assume you are speaking for yourself


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PostPosted: Fri Mar 13, 2020 9:28 pm
  

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Arlo Fanatic

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Posts: 8253
CarolFolk7 wrote:
agnes wrote:
We disagree on this. I wish you could see what is being said here. And I am sure you wish I could see it your way, but I don’t.

I guess we will have to leave it at that for now.

I assume you are speaking for yourself


When I say "We" here, I am referring to you and I


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PostPosted: Mon Mar 16, 2020 1:52 am
  

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ArloNetizen

Joined: Dec 28, 2019
Posts: 84
Location: San Diego, CA
agnes wrote:
CarolFolk7 wrote:
agnes wrote:
We disagree on this. I wish you could see what is being said here. And I am sure you wish I could see it your way, but I don’t.

I guess we will have to leave it at that for now.

I assume you are speaking for yourself


When I say "We" here, I am referring to you and I

Okay. :D
That's cool. :D
Carol


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