From the Nation, calling on progressives and populists (socialists) to play a pivotal role in the next election.

The rant part on Bush is old news, but still entertaining.

Apparently this guy took it on himself to tell Nader to throw himself on his sword for the Glorious Revolution so the Democrats can win. Nader, who at least has the balls to be socialist right up front, told him to go jump in the lake.

If you cut Bowser open and dumped every last thing out, it still wouldn't match this amazing pile. You'd have to go on campus and add the rhetoric of at least two hard-core leftists to beat this.

Like many others, this guy calls for the Democrats to shed the last vestiges of moderation and become the full-bore socialists that they long to be. Call to mind the final scene in "The Fly," where Brumble sheds the last vestiges of his humanity in disgusting chunks to reveal the immense, carnivorous insect within.

...Therefore, I argued [to Nader], what is needed is an undertaking by the liberals, progressives and populists of the country to challenge the corporation-corrupted leaders of the Democratic Party and their Democratic Leadership Council, to make the party's sellout course since 1978 itself the issue of the Democratic primaries, and to converge behind the nomination of a progressive Democratic candidate for President--be it Congressional Progressive Caucus chair Dennis Kucinich, Russell Feingold, Jan Schakowsky or Jesse Jackson Jr. The point, I said, is to get a strong progressive candidate and to get our forces behind that candidate and a progressive platform. Among many other things, it should include a commitment to have the party fight for instant-runoff voting (IRV), which at one stroke would end the third-party "spoiler" threat to the major parties and would free citizens to vote for their favorite candidates without helping to elect candidates whose views are diametrically opposed to theirs.



...The months ahead should be devoted to building nonviolent resistance to Bush's policies and his election. We need to build at once an Internet-based communications network (not an umbrella organization) among progressive, populist, labor, youth, civil rights, women's and religious organizations and individuals. The resistance must take many forms: local protests, sit-ins, teach-ins and, yes, marches on Washington, perhaps even Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1968 idea of a people's encampment in the city, in 2004--all the tactics that we know matter in building an opposition force and making that opposition heard. And we may hope that in the midst of the pressures and dynamics of the next year and a half, we will focus a substantial portion of our energies on securing the Democratic nomination for a true progressive.

Even if the candidate backed by the progressive coalition does not ultimately take the nomination, this effort alone will contribute to restoring progressives as a permanent force to be reckoned with inside the party.

It will enable us to influence the platform so that it includes reformist planks that might, for openers, include IRV, national health insurance, public funding of elections, federal chartering of large interstate corporations, repeal of Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy and new laws to prevent media monopolies and diffuse the ownership of radio and TV licenses.

Other planks might include no attack-first wars, no first use of nuclear weapons, no Star Wars and no weapons in space, a Marshall Plan for the world's poor, a commitment to renewable energy sources and conservation, and a strengthened, not a sabotaged, UN.

A strong and coherent left working for such ends within the party should also enable us to influence what the candidate advocates, even if he or she is not our original choice. That is the way Democratic Party politics have usually worked. Even FDR was compelled to defer to his left wing.



"For openers." Can't wait to see the complete wish list.

Pretty much lays it all out for us, doesn't he?

Progressive Caucus member Nancy Pelosi is now leading her party in the House. Any questions?

The Democrats know, or should, that to go hard left would destroy them as a party. Despite what the media and other leftist pundits would have you think, most Americans are not socialists.