If you've heard Ralph Nader refer to "the corporate parties," and wondered what an anti-corporate party might look like, here's a link:

http://freewebs.com/theconsumersparty

The concept is less than 3 weeks old, and has garnered quite a bit of interest. So far, while many people have objected to the name, nobody has disagreed with the proposed party platform.

I agree....the name is a little hard to get past, but they do have some good things in their platform. I always agreed with the idea that a corporation is not a person, never understood how that came to be.

If the democrats could get their hand out of the corporate cookie jar, this would be a great way to revive the party (but i don't see that happening).
Being a low end consumer myself, i think a lot of people are going to have a hard time with putting profits behind safety and quality, but it sure would make a great difference in this country.

I like their platforms, but Nader is nowhere close to the savior that this guy makes him out to be. I wouldn't throw any support in front of him at all, no matter what. The guy is a hypocrite.

I guess there are all sorts of progressives.

The progressives I know tend to suspect that the reason the Democratic Party spent so much money smearing Nader and trying to deny him ballot access, might be because the fix was in so that the pr-war frat brother candidate of one corporate party wouldn't seriously contest it when the pro-war frat brother candidate of the other corporate party "won."

If you haven't read Walter Karp's definitive book on corporate party politics, "Indispensable Enemies," I'm not really sure you're a progressive.

Nader hasn't been smeared. In fact, one has to wonder why the press gas given Nader such a free ride, and never talked about how he's raping the whole liberal/progressive movement. If you haven't read up about all the union-busting, hypocritical stock-trading, and profiteering Nader has done, you might fall into the trap of supporting Nader. And if you support Nader, you're certainly not supporting progressive causes. You're just supporting a dangerously neurotic, hypocritical ultra-wealthy egomaniac who tells people to "vote their conscience" but doesn't want them to stop and realize the consequences so they can really vote their conscience.

Ralph Nader lost my respect when he began running solely for his own hubris. With no party behind him, there can be no platform and no mandate. It doesn't matter where he points when he yells "Charge!"--whoever is in Congress will be racing off some other way.

And it's folly to suggest that just because Kerry and Bush were in the Skull and Bones together, there must be some kind of conspiratorial link between them to throw the election to Bush. If that were really the case, why would Kerry have wasted his own valuable time running for office in the first place? Or doing things like busting BCCI, a bank that financed both terrorists AND Dubya? When you start drawing tenuous links like that, you're squarely in tinfoil territory. There are plenty of other Bonesers who've never become nearly so prominent; are we to assume THEY are in on this, too? One might as well assume that ALL school clubs are somehow breeding grounds for conspiracies, if it comes down to that...

Sorry, amigo, but we've covered this ground before. Nader was better when he stuck to consumer advocacy, and got laws made or changed that way. As a president, he'd be the lamest duck ever to swim quacking off the pond.

'Bina.

Welcome to the POAC forums, where new members are immediately greeted with critiques from the admins. Our motto: If we disagree with anything you say, we'll make damn sure you know about it.

Gee, thanks. I guess, since you already KNOW what I'm thinking, there's no point in my telling it to you.

But then again, since it's clear that you don't know what I'm thinking, here--let me spell it out for you:

Until you figure out how to get money out of the ECONOMY, don't look to get it out of politics. Do you think political campaigns run on air alone? They do not. There are millions of expenses in politics--everything from campaign literature spelling out their position on the issues, to lawn signs ("Vote for Smith"), to TV, newspaper, Internet and radio advertising. A candidate who can't spend on advertising, won't get elected. Why? Because no one will know him from their neighbor's cat! (And if it comes down to it, the cat probably stands a better chance than some door-knocking stranger who can't even afford to put out campaign literature...)

And the bigger a party gets, the more it can spend, and the more is available to it. Because known names and platforms get the donors--it's that simple. So there's no way to make it run without money, unless, like I said, you figure out a non-monetary economy that everyone is willing to sign on to. (Good luck with that, by the way...)

Now, if you wanted to reform campaign FINANCING, to limit the influence of corporate donors, that might be a whole 'nother ballgame. There you'd find no shortage of listeners. Because campaign-finance reform is an old and unresolved issue. John McCain tried to tackle it a few years ago, along with Russ Feingold, and had only limited success. Or, if you wanted to discuss how political advertising and how the current paid-ad system is a mess and allows for all kinds of deception, you'd certainly have a ready-made audience. Personally, I'd like nothing better than to see ALL parties allotted only so much airtime and space, free of charge--enough to spell out their positions, and that's it. No other advertising allowed. It would still work well within the system as exists right now, and it would also eliminate the need to build vast campaign war chests, which only corporate money seems to fill.

But this naive talk of "new paradigms" completely ignores the existing reality--namely, that world politics works by increments and builds on what's already there, not by complete breaks and rebuildings from scratch. We don't need yet another paradigm. We need reform, plain and simple.

'Bina.

I've seen that book. On that site. I take it with a grain of salt.

I've heard all this before. I used to believe in it myself, but reality has shown me otherwise. Sorry.

'Bina.

"New paradigm" is just another term for "New World Order." There's not a paradigm's worth of difference. Both are really about throwing out everything we've work for over the last 225+ years: i.e., discarding America.