From the Green Party to the Constitution Party, to the [...]]]> Towards the end of 2010 radio shows and TV shows hosts asked: where is the next third party? When are we going to see another party go against the Republicans and Democrats? I do not understand these questions, because there are many third parties in our nation.

From the Green Party to the Constitution Party, to the Socialist Party and the Libertarian Party, plus everything in between. These organizations have been in existence for decades, if not centuries, however the major media outlets have failed to properly expose them. None of the media sources have brought in the rank-and-file of these organizations into their respective studios to talk about the issues. Day in and day out, you see nothing but the same two major party voices preaching on what is going on, and how to solve the issues at hand.

Why not bring in someone on-air like Rich Whitney of the Green Party, who in 2006 received 10.7% of the general election vote in the Illinois Gubernatorial race? It was the first time a third party has done so well in Illinois in over 40 years.

The Daily Cape Cod, a blog site for those living in Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard, mentioned the following:

“We need a third party. We already have a progressive party that is up and running, but something new is needed on the progressive side. We need a progressive party that will move forward at a pace both acceptable to conservatives and liberals.”

Hello, it is called the Green Party. The Greens are liberal on the social issues, and conservative on the fiscal issues. For example, the Green Party wants to repeal No Child Left Behind, and wants single-payer universal health care. On fiscal issues, the Greens want to cut line-by-line in order to eliminate wasteful spending.

Another example is the Libertarians back in 2004. When George W. Bush was seeking re-election for the presidency, there were rumors that the Libertarians could cost him his job. Don Devine, Vice-Chairmen of the American Conservative Union and GOP insider, said the following:

“I think [the Bush campaign] should be concerned. I don’t know how concerned…They need to work on it and I think they know they need to work on it.”

So why are third parties not prevailing like they should be?

Not only media, but several organizations in communities do not allow third parties to participate in events, including candidate forums, endorsement interviews, debates, and the like.

On the federal campaign level many third party candidates get left out from the Presidential and Vice-Presidential Debates. Most of the time, third party candidate have their own debate, which is not televised. At the state level, many third party campaign get left out of forums, endorsement interviews, and get left out from the press.

The simplistic response to all of this would be, “A third party can never succeed in a election”. How did we lose track of our American Political History?

I recall a man that was well known in his community, and was also a respected lawyer. He managed to get elected to office at the state level. He was then approach by a third party to ask him if he would run for president. The man had never thought about higher office, but after talking with his advisers and family, he took up the challenge and began campaign across the country. Where ever he went, the two major parties would criticize him and the party he was affiliated with. After much campaigning in 1860, Abraham Lincoln became the 16th President of the United States as a Republican.

Yes, the Republican Party was the third party, during the time period when Whigs and Democrats were the two major establishment parties.

Another example is the Socialist Party from 1920-1940. The Socialist Party held a strong base in Milwaukee, WI. Frank Zeidler was the longest serving Socialist Mayor Milwaukee had. Thanks to Mayor Zeidler he brought in mass transit, better sanitation, annexed the city of Milwaukee for tax purposes and offered services, and much more.

So for all of those in the media who asking where is the next third party, do some research. Google and learn about parties like the Green Party, Libertarian Party and the Constitution Party. Look further and find other parties that are out in the political fray trying to get heard. There are third parties out there, you just need to do more searching.

You can view my published articles at Independent Voter Network, Dissident Voices, and Whiteout Press

By BERNARD SCHOENBURG (bernard.schoenburg@sj-r.com) The State Journal-Register

The Occupy movement should take credit for chasing the G-8 Summit out of Chicago in May, a founder of the radical 1970s Weather Underground said in Springfield Tuesday.

“They realized the couldn’t actually put on their [...]]]> An article originally posted in the SJ-R

By BERNARD SCHOENBURG (bernard.schoenburg@sj-r.com) The State Journal-Register

Bill Ayers, a founder of the radical 1970s’ Weather Underground, will speak in Springfield Tuesday at the invitation of a group called Foundation for a United Front.

“He’s going to be just talking about activism — what it meant [...]]]>

An article originally posted in the SJ-R

By BERNARD SCHOENBURG (bernard.schoenburg@sj-r.com)

The State Journal-Register

Bill Ayers, a founder of the radical 1970s’ Weather Underground, will speak in Springfield Tuesday at the invitation of a group called Foundation for a United Front.

“He’s going to be just talking about activism — what it meant when he was an activist and what it means now,” said A.J. Segneri, who is executive director of the host group.

The event, which costs $15 to attend, is at 7 p.m. Tuesday at the Golden Frog Cafe, 3 N. Old Capitol Plaza.

Segneri said he and some friends started the nonprofit group to foster “community building.”

“Community is not a physical thing, like within Springfield proper,” he said. “It’s people coming together with common interests.” Such interests could involve such issues as homelessness, foreclosures and urban agriculture, he said.

Affiliated with Greens

Segneri, former women’s tennis coach at Concordia University in Mequon, Wis., moved to Springfield about six months ago to become head assistant tennis pro at Springfield Racquet & Fitness Center, He has also worked in political campaigns, including that of Green Party candidate Steve Alesch for Congress in Illinois’ current 13th District.

Segneri identifies his politics as “Green,” and said he is neither Democrat nor Republican. He also said Ayers’ visit is not related to the March 20 Illinois primary.

“We’re all about having conversation, not causing controversy,” Segneri said.

Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, were both leaders of the Weather Underground, a group that claimed responsibility for bombings in the early 1970s at the U.S. Capitol, a Pentagon restroom and a New York City police headquarters. No one was injured in those attacks, but a Greenwich Village townhouse the group was using to build a bomb blew up in 1970, killing three members. Ayers wrote in a 2001 memoir, “Fugitive Days,” that the bomb was packed with screws and nails.

“We did go off track … and that was wrong,” Ayers told The Associated Press when the book came out.

Dohrn and Ayers surrendered to authorities in 1980. Charges against Ayers were dropped because of government misconduct, including FBI break-ins and wiretaps. Dohrn served less than a year in prison.

Controversy continues

Recently, two Springfield residents who had been members of the board of the Illinois Humanities Council resigned from that group to protest the council’s sponsorship of a fundraising dinner with Ayers and Dohrn in Chicago.

Conservative commentator Tucker Carlson, co-founder and editor of The Daily Caller, had the winning bid on the dinner for $2,500. The dinner took place Feb. 5.

“Though guarded and seeking to avoid controversial topics, the two former terrorists revealed interesting tidbits about their lives, political philosophy and relationship with President Obama,” The Daily Caller reported.

Segneri said his foundation believes in nonviolence.

“They stood for something, and that’s what we appreciate,” Segneri said of Ayers and Dohrn.

Segneri said he’s been talking to other groups in Springfield, but the foundation so far involves only four or five people.

Bernard Schoenburg can be reached at 788-1540 or bernard.schoenburg@sj-r.com. Follow him on Twitter at @bschoenburg.

***

Want to go?

What: Speech by Bill Ayers, formerly of the Weather Underground.
Sponsor: Foundation for a United Front.
When: 7 p.m. Tuesday
Where: The Golden Frog Cafe, 3 N. Old Capitol Plaza.
Tickets: $15, at door or by reservation (tickets@buildingsolidarity.org or call 815-499-2765).

2.  We must radically reinvent contemporary democracy.  Current systems are deeply corrupt and not responsive to the needs of people.   Representatives chosen by money and [...]]]> 1.  Human rights must be taken absolutely seriously.  Every single person is entitled to dignity and human rights.  No application needed.  No exclusions at all.  This is our highest priority.

2.  We must radically reinvent contemporary democracy.  Current systems are deeply corrupt and not responsive to the needs of people.   Representatives chosen by money and influence govern by money and influence.  This is unacceptable.  Direct democracy by the people is now technologically possible and should be the rule.  Communities must be protected whenever they advocate for self-determination, self-development and human rights.  Dissent is essential to democracy; we pledge to help it flourish.

3.  Corporations are not people and are not entitled to human rights.   Amend the US Constitution so it is clear corporations do not have constitutional or human rights.   We the people must cut them down to size and so democracy can regulate their size, scope and actions.

4.  Leave the rest of the world alone.  Cut US military spending by 75 percent and bring all troops outside the US home now.  Defense of the US is a human right.  Global offense and global police force by US military are not.  Eliminate all nuclear and chemical and biological weapons.  Stop allowing scare tactics to build up the national security forces at home.  Stop the myth that the US is somehow special or exceptional and is entitled to act differently than all other nations.  The US must re-join the global family of nations as a respectful partner.  USA is one of many nations in the world.  We must start acting like it.

5.  Property rights, privilege, and money-making are not as important as human rights.  When current property and privilege arrangements are not just they must yield to the demands of human rights.  Money-making can only be allowed when human rights are respected.  Exploitation is unacceptable.  There are national and global poverty lines.  We must establish national and global excess lines so that people and businesses with extra houses, cars, luxuries, and incomes share much more to help everyone else be able to exercise their basic human rights to shelter, food, education and health care.  If that disrupts current property, privilege and money-making, so be it.

6.  Defend our earth.  Stop pollution, stop pipelines, stop new interstates, and stop destroying the land, sea, and air by extracting resources from them.  Rebuild what we have destroyed.  If corporations will not stop voluntarily, people must stop them.  The very existence of life is at stake.

7.  Dramatically expand public spaces and reverse the privatization of public services.  Quality public education, health and safety for all must be provided by transparent accountable public systems.  Starving the state is a recipe for destroying social and economic human rights for everyone but the rich.

8.  Pull the criminal legal prison system up and out by its roots and start over.  Cease the criminalization of drugs, immigrants, poor people and people of color.  We are all entitled to be safe but the current system makes us less so and ruins millions of lives.  Start over.

9.  The US was created based on two original crimes that must be confessed and made right.  Reparations are owed to Native Americans because their land was stolen and they were uprooted and slaughtered.   Reparations are owed to African Americans because they were kidnapped, enslaved and abused.  The US has profited widely from these injustices and must make amends.

10.  Everyone who wants to work should have the right to work and earn a living wage.  Any workers who want to organize and advocate for change in solidarity with others must be absolutely protected from recriminations from their employer and from their government.

Finally, if those in government and those in power do not help the people do what is right, people seeking change must together exercise our human rights and bring about these changes directly.  Dr. King and millions of others lived and worked for a radical revolution of values.  We will as well.  We respect the human rights and human dignity of others and work for a world where love and wisdom and solidarity and respect prevail.  We expect those for whom the current unjust system works just fine will object and oppose and accuse people seeking dramatic change of being divisive and worse.  That is to be expected because that is what happens to all groups which work for serious social change.  Despite that, people will continue to go forward with determination and purpose to bring about a radical revolution of values in the USA.

Those sentenced before me constituted the [...]]]> I spent Friday morning sitting on a wooden bench in a fourth-floor courtroom in the New York Criminal Court in Manhattan. I was waiting to be sentenced for “disturbing the peace” and “refusing to obey a lawful order” during an Occupy demonstration in front of Goldman Sachs in November.

Those sentenced before me constituted the usual fare of the court. They were poor people of color accused of mostly petty crimes—drug possession, thefts, shoplifting, trespassing because they were homeless and needed a place to sleep, inappropriate touching, grand larceny and violation of probation. They were escorted out of a backroom by a police officer, stood meekly before the judge with their hands cuffed behind them, were hastily defended by a lawyer clutching a few folders, and were sentenced. Ten days in jail. Sixty days in jail. Six months in jail. A steady stream of convictions.  My sentence, by comparison, was slight. I was given an ACD, or “adjournment in contemplation of dismissal,” which means that if I am not arrested in the next six months my case is dismissed. If I am arrested during this period of informal probation the old charge will be added to the new one before I am sentenced.

The country’s most egregious criminals, the ones who had stripped some of those being sentenced of their homes, their right to a decent education and health care, their jobs, their dignity and their hope, those wallowing in tens and hundreds of millions of dollars, those who had gamed the system to enrich themselves at our expense, were doing the dirty business of speculation in the tall office towers a few blocks away. They were making money. A few of these wealthy plutocrats were with the president, who was in New York that day to attend four fundraisers that took in an estimated $3 million. For $15,000 you could have joined Barack Obama at Daniel, an exclusive Upper East Side restaurant. For $35,000 you could have been at a gathering hosted by movie director Spike Lee. Most of those sentenced in that courtroom do not make that much in a year. It was a good day in New York for Barack Obama. It was a bad day for us.

Our electoral system, already hostage to corporate money and corporate lobbyists, gasped its last two years ago. It died on Jan. 21, 2010, when the Supreme Court in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission granted to corporations the right to spend unlimited amounts on independent political campaigns. The ruling turned politicians into corporate employees. If any politician steps out of line, dares to defy corporate demands, this ruling hands to our corporate overlords the ability to pump massive amounts of anonymous money into campaigns to make sure the wayward are defeated and silenced. Politicians like Obama are hostages. They jump when corporations say jump. They beg when corporations say beg. They hand corporations exemptions, subsidies, trillions in taxpayer money, no-bid contracts and massive loans with virtually no interest, and they abolish any regulations that impede profits and protect the citizen. Corporations like Goldman Sachs, because they own the system, are bailed out by federal dollars and given essentially free government loans to gamble. I am not sure what to call our economic system, but it is not capitalism. And if any elected official so much as murmurs anything that sounds like dissent, the Supreme Court ruling permits corporations to destroy him or her. And they do.

Turn off your televisions. Ignore the Newt-Mitt-Rick-Barack reality show. It is as relevant to your life as the gossip on “Jersey Shore.” The real debate, the debate raised by the Occupy movement about inequality, corporate malfeasance, the destruction of the ecosystem, and the security and surveillance state, is the only debate that matters. You won’t hear it on the corporate-owned airwaves and cable networks, including MSNBC, which has become to the Democratic Party what Fox News is to the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party. You won’t hear it on NPR or PBS. You won’t read about it in our major newspapers. The issues that matter are being debated, however, on “Democracy Now!,” Link TV, The Real News, Occupy websites and Revolution Truth. They are being raised by journalists such as Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi. You can find genuine ideas in corners of the Internet or in books by political philosophers such as Sheldon Wolin. But you have to go looking for them.

Voting will not alter the corporate systems of power. Voting is an act of political theater. Voting in the United States is as futile and sterile as in the elections I covered as a reporter in dictatorships like Syria, Iran and Iraq. There were always opposition candidates offered up by these dictatorships. Give the people the illusion of choice. Throw up the pretense of debate. Let the power elite hold public celebrations to exalt the triumph of popular will. We can vote for Romney or Obama, but Goldman Sachs and ExxonMobil and Bank of America and the defense contractors always win. There is little difference between our electoral charade and the ones endured by the Syrians and Iranians. Do we really believe that Obama has, or ever had, any intention to change the culture in Washington?

In this year’s presidential election I will vote for a third-party candidate, either the Green Party candidate or Rocky Anderson, assuming one of them makes it onto the ballot in New Jersey, but voting is nothing more than a brief chance to register our disgust with the corporate state. It will not alter the configurations of power. The campaign is not worth our emotional, physical or intellectual energy.

Our efforts must be directed toward acts of civil disobedience, to chipping away, through nonviolent protest, at the pillars of established, corporate power. The corporate state is so unfair, so corrupt and so rotten that the institutions tasked with holding it up—the police, the press, the banking system, the civil service and the judiciary—have become vulnerable. It is becoming harder and harder for the corporations to convince its foot soldiers to hold the system in place.

I sat a few days ago in a small Middle Eastern restaurant in Washington, D.C., with Kevin Zeese, one of the activists who first called for the Occupy movements. Zeese and others, including public health care advocate Dr. Margaret Flowers, set up the Occupy encampment on Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C. They got a four-day permit last fall and used the time to create an infrastructure—a medic tent, a kitchen, a legal station and a press center—that would be there if the permit was not extended. The National Park Service did grant them an extended permit, and Freedom Plaza is one of the encampments that has not been shut down.

“We do have a grand strategy,” he said. “Nonviolent movements shift power by attacking the columns that hold the power structure in place. Those columns are the military, police, media, business, workers, youth, faith groups, NGOs and civil servants. Every time we deal with the police, we have that in mind. The goal is not to hit them, hit them, hit them and weaken them. The goal is to pull people from those columns to our side. We want the police to know that we understand they’re not the 1 percent. The goal is not to get every police officer, but to get enough police so that you have a division.”

“We do this with civil servants,” he went on. “We do whistle-blower events. We go to different federal agencies with protesters blowing whistles and usually with an actual whistle-blower. We hand out literature to the civil servants about how to blow the whistle safely, where they can get help if they do, why they should do it. We also try to get civil servants by pulling them to our side.”

“One of the beautiful things about this security state is that they always know we’re coming,” he said. “It’s never a secret. We don’t do anything as a secret. The EPA, for example, sent out a security notice to all of its employees—advertising for us [by warning employees about a coming protest]. So you get the word out.”

“Individuals become the media,” he said. “An iPhone becomes a live-stream TV. The social network becomes a media outlet. If a hundred of us work together and use our social networks for the same message we can reach as many people as the second-largest newspapers in town, The Washington Examiner or The Washington Times. If a thousand of us do, we can meet the circulation of The Washington Post. We can certainly reach the circulation of most cable news TV shows. The key is to recognize this power and weaken the media structure.”

“We started an Occupy house in Mount Rainier in Maryland,” Zeese said. “Its focus is Occupy the Economy. This is the U.N.’s year of the co-op. We want to build on that. We want to start worker-owned co-ops and occupy our own co-ops. These co-ops will allow Occupiers to have resources so that they can continue occupying. It will allow them to get resources for the community. It will be an example to the public, a public where a high percentage of people are underemployed and unemployed although they have a lot of skills. People can band together in their community and solve a problem in the community. They can create a worker-owned collaborative of some kind. They can develop models of collective living.”

“We looked at polling on seven key issues and found supermajorities of Americans—60-plus percent—were with us on issues including health care, retirement, energy, money in politics,” he said. “We are more mainstream than Congress. We aren’t crazy radicals. We are trying to do what the people want. This is participatory democracy versus oligarchy. It’s the elites versus the people. We stand with the majority.”

The Washington encampment, like many Occupy encampments, has had to deal with those the wider society has discarded—the homeless, the mentally ill, the destitute and those whose lives have been devastated by substance abuse. This created a huge burden for the organizers, who decided that they were not equipped or able to deal with these wider, societal problems. The encampment in Washington’s Freedom Plaza enforces strict rules of behavior, including an insistence on sobriety, in order to endure through the winter and ensure its own survival. Other Occupy movements will have to do the same.

“We don’t want to become a soup kitchen or a homeless shelter,” Zeese said. “We’re a political movement. These are problems beyond our ability. How do we deal with this? Let’s feed the Occupiers first, and those who are just squatting here for free get food last, so if we have enough food, we feed them. If we don’t, we can’t. We always fed people, of course. We usually have enough peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for everyone. But as we debated this issue, we stated talking about things like ‘how about a Freedom Plaza badge, or a Freedom Plaza wristband, or a Freedom Plaza card.’ None of those ideas were passed. What we ended up developing was a set of principles. Those principles included in them participation. You can’t be there because you want a [tent] or free food. You have to be there to build the community and the movement. You have to participate in thegeneral assemblies.”

“The first principles, of course, were nonviolence and non-property destruction,” he said. “We don’t accept violent language. When you’re violent you undermine everything. If the protesters in [Manhattan’s] Union Square, who were pepper-sprayed, had been throwing something at the police, you would not have had the movement. It was because they were nonviolent and didn’t react when they were being pepper-sprayed that the movement grew. At UC Davis, when those cops just walked down the line and sprayed, the nonviolent reaction by those kids was fantastic.”

“We constantly kept hearing in the beginning what are our demands, what are our demands, is our demand to meet with Obama?” Zeese said. “We said: ‘Oh no, that would just be a waste. If we meet with Obama he’ll just get a picture opportunity out of that. We won’t get anything.’ You don’t make demands until you have power. If you make demands too soon, you don’t demand enough and you can’t enforce the demand that you get. So if you get promised an election, you can’t enforce that the ballots are counted right, for example. We realized late into our discussions—we had six months of planning, so four months into it—‘we don’t have the power to make a demand.’ That was very hard for a lot of our people to accept.”

“Instead of making demands, we put up what we stood for, what principles we wanted to see,” he said. “The overarching demand was end corporate rule, shift power to the people. Once you make that as your demand, as your pinnacle, you can pick any issue—energy, health care, elections—and the solution becomes evident. For health care it’s get the insurance companies out from between doctors and patients; on finance it’s break up the big banks so that six banks don’t control 60 percent of the economy and break them up into community banks so that the money stays at home rather than going to Wall Street; energy is to diversify energy sources so people can build and have their own energy on their roof and become energy producers. The overarching goal was: End corporate rule, shift power to the people. We developed a slogan: ‘Human needs before corporate greed.’ After that, everything fell into place for us.”

When the congressional super committee was meeting, the Occupy Washington movement formed its own super committee. The Occupy Super Committee, which managed get its hearing aired on CSPAN, included experts on the wealth divide, fair taxation, the military budget, job creation, health care and democratizing the economy as well as giving voice to the 99 percent. “The 99%’s Deficit Proposal: How to create jobs, reduce the wealth divide and control spending” resulted from the Occupy hearing. The report made evidence-based recommendations Zeese knew would not be considered by the Congress, but he saw it as foundational for the movement.

“History shows the demands made by those in revolt are never initially considered by government,” he said. “Our job is to make the politically impossible the politically inevitable.”

I do not know how long it will take to dethrone the corporate state, but I do know it is a dead and terminal system of power. As the global economy deteriorates and climate change causes greater disruptions, these corporations will be increasingly discredited. I know the iron grip of corporations over our lives will, eventually, be broken. The corporate state will, like all wounded animals, lash out with a blind fury, which is why I suspect we have been given the National Defense Authorization Act, which permits the military to arrest and hold U.S. citizens without due process. It will increase pressure to become crueler and more callous at the base of the columns it depends on for survival. And eventually it will break. No one knows how long this will take. It could be months, years, maybe even a decade, although the massive assault by the fossil fuel industry on the ecosystem will probably force a popular response sooner than we expect. The only question is how much damage these corporations will be permitted to inflict.

I attended a rally Friday night in Foley Square, a few blocks from the criminal court where I had spent the morning. It was part of the Occupy the Courts event held across the nation to protest America’s corporate coup and the Supreme Court ruling in the Citizens United case. It was cold and blustery. Snow was on the way. Many in the crowd of a couple of hundred were visibly chilled. I spoke about the movement. I spoke about the lawsuit I have brought against Barack Obama and the secretary of defense to challenge the National Defense Authorization Act. I spoke about the inevitability of the Occupy movement.

I realized, afterward, I had forgotten to say what was most important. I forgot to say thank you. Thank you for standing up to corporate power on a cold winter’s night. Thank you for making hope visible. You must never underestimate your power. I was sentenced in the day. I was exonerated in the night.