Re “A boon for History buffs“, a really interesting excerpt. History is no doubt filled with decisions that could have changed the direction of the country in significant ways.
The first campaign I worked on in high school was for the slate of Nelson Rockefeller for Governor, Jacob Javits for Senate and John Lindsay for Mayor. I think it was the latter who got me interested. Lindsay was a progressive Republican who was also nominated by the Progressive Party.
Javits was the first senator to introduce the decriminalization of marijuana (although that issue was not on my radar when I was in high school.) The country would be much better off today if those types of Republicans still existed. But, now we have Democrats who are more conservative than Nixon, including Obama.
But, the labels conservative and liberal really don’t work any longer. It now comes down to corporatists vs. anti-corporatists. The latter includes Republicans like Ron Paul and would probably have included many of the Tea Party Republicans before they were manipulated so expertly by the Republican Party into supporting candidates who oppose their beliefs.
Unfortunately, both parties are controlled by concentrated corporate power, especially Wall Street and the military-industrial-complex, who have the system rigged so that the candidates that come out of the primaries are consistent with their interests in corporatism and militarism.
And, it is not only the Tea Party folks who are manipulated into voting against their interests, most Americans are. Democracy has become mostly a mirage that gives people a false sense of choice.
Could not agree more. Same is true up here in Canada — Liberal / Conservative parties are the same thing really, just Conservative mph a little faster than Liberal — as Nader would say The current leader of Liberal was director of Carr institute at Harvard — he is on record as supporting torture in some situations (and of course, we know Harper supports torture as he handed over various prisoners to that fate).
I see many ‘conservatives’ not yet realizing that their party is mostly about ‘corporatism’ and that corporatism opposes principles of true conservatives big time. We can only hope that many of them ‘get it’ soon. And that they say no to ‘corporatism’ before we are completely impoverished (and, gulp, enslaved worse than we are) on this continent.
Same true of ‘liberals’ up here. They do not seem to understand that the Liberal party is really no different than the Conservative party.
People so need to dump both the Conservative Party and Liberal Party here in Canada or we will never see any progress, security, or prosperity again. The only viable option up here, seems to be the Green Party, with many former Conservative, Liberal, and NDP supporters coming over to the Greens looking for real solutions to real problems… (and this includes several very well known Canadian icons as well in recent years).