An Alleged "Two Party System"

[Echo In Light]

An Alleged "Two Party System"
By Ed Ciaccio

12/08/07 "ICH" -- The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

We must be clear about the following bitter realities:

1. "Every 10 minutes an Iraqi civilian is injured or killed in a war that George Bush says will not end until he leaves office. Every 10 hours an American soldier is killed in a war that George Bush says will not end until he leaves office. Every 10 days $2 billion is removed from the U.S. Treasury and placed in the accounts of Halliburton, Blackwater and all other war profiteers that are getting rich off the misery of Iraqis and Americans by a government that will continue to remove those amounts or more every ten days as long as George Bush is President of the United States" (from Sally B. Davidson at Veterans for Peace, NY).

While Bush and Cheney remain in office, the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan will continue. Bush's recent announcement of his (probably illegal) "agreement" with the increasingly unpopular, discredited, U.S.-puppet Maliki regime to continue Iraq deployment of U.S. troops indefinitely shows Cheney/Bush's absolute and total contempt for our Constitution and the wishes of 3/4 of U.S. citizens. As even Alan Greenspan admitted in his recently-published book: the Iraq War was largely about oil. The U.S. power elite, Democratic as well as Republican, wants those permanent U.S. bases in Iraq to protect access to, and control of, "our" oil, especially as China, India, and Europe become stronger economic and trade threats to U.S. global hegemony.

2. Why do BOTH major parties agree that the U.S. "needs" access to, and control of, this oil? Because, implicitly, most Americans believe that we "need" this oil to live the way we have become accustomed to living in 2007. The one, true religion of all Americans is Consumerism, and we all practice it daily via TV & radio, the Internet, and in our mega-cathedral of consumption, the shopping mall. We need to be honest with ourselves and face up to how much our consumptive (pun intended) U.S. lifestyle depends on maintaining our oil and other fossil fuels addictions, and how complacent, if not comfortable, we are about expecting that our political and military leaders will continue to secure these foreign fossil fuels to support our lavish "American Dream" lifestyle. Then we need to ask ourselves how much we are truly willing to cut back, and how we can make this a part of our activism.

3. Therefore, based on points 1 and 2 above, most Congressional Democrats implicitly support the continued occupations, regardless of their rhetoric, which is belied by their failure to stop funding the occupations, or to begin impeachment hearings of Cheney and Bush. Oil is also a major reason they support military threats of "regime change" in Iran, along with over-concern for Israel's security, regardless of Israel's hundreds of nuclear weapons (Israel, unlike Iran, is NOT a signatory to the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty), and general lack of real concern about Israel's inhumane treatment of Palestinians and its 40-year occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. The largely neocon-led "Israel Lobby" is a reality which we must, sooner or later, confront, especially since it has so much influence on most members of Congress.

4. The leading Democratic Presidential candidates, Clinton, Obama, & Edwards, all said they will keep some (50,000?) U.S. troops in Iraq through their first term (till 2013), so we can't count on them to stop this wasteful madness anytime soon. That relatively smaller number of troops, dispersed among the (4? 14?) permanent bases, will be enough to protect "our" oil, but small enough for Iraq to become as forgotten (except to the troops and their families) as our 50-year occupation of South Korea or Germany. Only Richardson, Kucinich, & Gravel have said they will begin to bring home the troops immediately, and they have next to no chance at being the nominee.

5. ALL the presidential candidates, and ALL members of Congress, get contributions from the "Defense" (War) Industry, to a greater or lesser extent. Right now, for example, Hillary Clinton leads ALL candidates, Democratic as well as Republican, in the amount of such contributions. See Defense Industry Embraces Democrats, Hillary By Far The Favorite
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2007/10/17/defense-industry-embraces_n_68927.html. (To find out what each industry contributes to which politicians, including candidates, go to http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.asp?Ind=B02)

More:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18856.htm

[ixion]

1. technically, we have a multi-party system...

it's just that the current status quo groups (dem/repub) do everything they can to keep other groups from representation.

[OHdem10]

2. We have been a one party system since the founding

of the DLC.