Apr 30, 2011

Time to Break the Mold

From the West Virginia Mountain Party's Jesse Johnson, in the Register Herald:
The other thing is overcoming business as usual with the two-party system. I think that every American and every West Virginian looks at the two-party system, looks at the Democrats and Republicans and says, “We have a problem.”

There’s corruption, and both parties have sold out to Wall Street. We’re having billion-dollar elections now, and this is absolutely insane.

If we have public financing of elections, which is one of the things that I would certainly do, and a restoration, somewhat, of the fairness within the media in regards to those elections. In ’87, I believe it was, the Fairness Doctrine was eradicated, so there is no equal time for anything other than the two-party system. So, if you control, it’s just like a ball team. If you own the stadium and you have two teams come in, whether they are shirts and skins, or whatever, if you are on those two teams, you are going to profit.

That’s what we get handed to us repeatedly. Here are two seemingly different choices, but they line up the same. You saw that with the U.S. Senate race. The New York Times showed that Joe Manchin and John Raese were the two closest as far as platforms of any two Democrats or Republicans in the nation. They acted in the media as if they were drastically different. They weren’t.

I’m giving West Virginia a true opportunity to define itself as a leader, truly define itself as a state that respects fairness, truly define itself as a state that is willing to break that broken mold of business as usual in politics and take the opportunity to find out if their vote really counts.

4 comments:

Donny Fix said...

Greens need to do three things:

1. Work in coalition with other third parties to
2. Make the presidential debates open to all presidential candidates that followed the rules and got nominated to a presidential ballot and
3. circulate a pledge to voters to only vote for candidates taking public funding to get rid of, once and for all, the influence of money on elections.

TiradeFaction said...

@Donny

That's seems a bit ambitious, doesn't it? While those are good goals, they're hardly accomplish able(?) with the current infrastructure third parties have. Perhaps we should build up our state (and county) chapters into well oiled machines first, before we tackle things like presidential televised debates. And/or create our own debates, and spread them via "word of mouth", hopefully planting seeds of support among voters for third parties.

Anonymous said...

So this Register Herald article about Jesse was the day before the Mountain Party's nominating convention... and how many votes did Jesse's own people cast for him for governor on May Day? Apparently ZERO as it was reported that Baber was unanimously nominated.

d.eris said...

interesting, anon. I'll look into that