Corporate America Has Two Parties – We Need One of Our Own!

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The 2008 presidential election has broken every fundraising record imaginable. Big business is pouring in enormous piles of cash to both parties to ensure that whether Barack Obama or John McCain wins they’ll have a loyal servant in the White House.

Funding and backing both major political parties is very useful for the rich and powerful. When public anger swells at one party, given the absence of any viable alternative, the other head of the two-headed corporate political machine gets elected into office. This allows voters to blow off steam while big business can rest assured their power and profits will be left untouched.

Workers and young people need a party of our own – one that doesn’t accept a penny from corporations and fights for what the vast majority of ordinary people need: An immediate end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, universal healthcare, an end to discrimination, living-wage jobs, and a good quality of life.

Unlike the Democrats and Republicans, a genuine mass political party wouldn’t just be an electoral machine that asks for your vote with TV ads once every two years. We would organize campaigns in our communities in between elections, too.

We could prevent progressive movements like the labor, antiwar, and immigrant rights movements from being isolated into single issues by uniting them under the umbrella of our own political party in a common struggle against our common enemy – big business.

A party that aims to fight big business would need to base itself on the working class and the oppressed. It would need to be democratically controlled by its members, not unaccountable, detached politicians like the Democrats and Republicans. The membership would collectively decide who our candidates would be through democratic meetings and conferences, not by who can raise the most money or who big business and the corporate media like best. All elected representatives should be paid the wage of the average worker.

Given the stability and longevity of the two-party system in the U.S., many believe that we’ll always be stuck with two corporate parties. However, over the past 20 years there have been growing cracks in the two-party system. A record numbers of voters, 25%, are registering as independents. The New York Times commented on August 5 that the rise of independent voters in many states “essentially constitutes a third party.”

The rise of the Green Party, the candidacies of Ralph Nader and Ross Perot for President, and Jesse Ventura’s electoral victory as Minnesota Governor in 1998 are all examples of growing dissatisfaction with both major parties. A July 2007 USA Today/Gallup poll even showed that 58% of Americans want a new party!

A key task for building a new party is getting the labor, antiwar, environmental, and civil rights organizations to sever their ties with the Democrats. This would provide enormous resources for a new party to publish newspapers, create TV and radio programs, organize rallies, and go directly to workplaces, campuses, and communities to convince millions of people to break with both pro-war, corporate parties.

We need to build what the working class of practically every industrialized nation in the world has built – a workers’ party, a party for the millions, not the millionaires!

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BOX – Labor Showers Obama with Cash, Volunteers

In June, John Sweeney, head of the AFL-CIO, announced the labor federation’s backing of Barack Obama. He pledged that affiliated unions would donate a whopping $50 million and mobilize more than 250,000 volunteers.

If one adds to that all the money given by the Change to Win union federation (SEIU alone is also pledging $75 million to help Obama) and the donations made by each union individually, it would easily add up to hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands more volunteers for Obama. On top of this will also be the huge amounts of money and activists supplied by antiwar, environmental, women’s, and civil rights organizations.

The tragedy of the situation is that this mountain of cash and army of volunteers will be deployed behind a pro-corporate, anti-worker candidate. Imagine if the hundreds of millions of dollars the labor movement is wasting on the Democrats were put into supporting independent pro-worker, antiwar challenges like Ralph Nader’s campaign for President, or Cindy Sheehan’s campaign for Congress in California. Nader is currently polling 4-6% in polls despite having a budget of just over $1 million, and unlike Obama he supports a $10/hour living wage and a repeal of the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act as well as the repeal of NAFTA and other pro-corporate free trade agreements.

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