OK, apparently I'm all alone in here! Well, if I'm going to talk to myself about the progressive debate on political strategies for the Greens/third party/indie candidates front, I better include the link I gave over in the letter to Kerry supporters thread, because it is the most important thing ANYONE who considers themselves progressives, should read:

"Monkeywrench Hope An Interview with Jeffrey St. Clair"

Jeffrey is an environmental activist and co-author with Alexander Cockburn of a new collection of essays on this subject titled "A Dime's Worth of Difference". Here is the blurb on the book:

Every four years as the presidential elections approach, a distress beacon goes out to progressive-minded people warning them about the imment take-over of the country by Republican ultras intent on yoking the nation under a fascist regime. Every four years, the Democratic Party offers itself as the only bulwork against the jackboots. Every four years, this argument becomes more and more labored; the differences between the two parties more and more difficult to detect.

"There ain't a dime's worth of difference between them." That's how the great Waylon Jennings described the two parties back in the early 1980s. There may be even less today. Across a range of issues, from civil rights and the drug war to job-slashing trade pacts and health care, the Democrats and Republicans have coalesced into an frightful harmony.

In this sharply written volume, the editors and writers of CounterPunch, the radical newsletter and hugely popular website, reveal how each party is fattened by the same roster of corporate contributors; each party connives to gerrymander congressional districts so that as few seats as possible are up for contention; each party bows to the desires of defense contractors and media conglomerates; each party endorses an economic scheme that shifts money from the poor to the super-rich; each party warehouses the poor by the millions in a vast prison system, one of the few booming sectors of the new economy.

Even the imperial wars of the last 20 years have been a joint venture with Republicans backing Clinton's laptop bombing campaigns and Democrats cheerleading Bush's bloody forays into Afghanistan and Iraq. These days the parties are divided mainly by pretense, phony policy debates on oil drilling in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge (as most of the rest of the continent is given away to the oil companies) or restrictions on late-term abortions (when abortion clinics have been extinguished from 85 percent of the counties in America). The Democratic Party is the graveyard of social change movements.

Yes, the rot is deep, but there is a resistance, a movement to break free from the shackles of this political duopoly, which has its roots in the civil rights uprising of Fanny Lou Hamer, the anti-war campaign of Eugene McCarthy, Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition and the independent campaigns of Ralph Nader. A Dime's Worth of Difference charts the history of these rebellions and the Democrat Party's attempts to coopt them or crush them out entirely.

Political redemption won't be found in the voting machine or at political conventions, but in peopless movements organizing together in the workplace or on the streets, in communities, at weapons plants or on the frontlines of the Pacific rainforests. There's work to be done. Let's do it.

Powerful essays by

Alexander Cockburn
Jeffrey St. Clair
Brandy Baker
Robin Blackburn
Sean Donahue
Michael Donnelly
Joshua Frank
Kevin Alexander Gray
Gabriel Kolko
Greg Moses
Steve Perry
Vijay Prashad
Jeff Taylor
JoAnn Wypijewski