And you, by comparison, are so perfect.

You're right about this. Norman Solomon is much the same way.

Lindorff knows a lot, & often says excellent things. But he does have this weakness, which is particularly in evidence when he starts dishing out venom & disrespect for 3rd party supporters. Even in this thread, where the "good" Lindorff (Lindorff-G) is once again with us, there's this undercurrent of his bitterness & contempt for 3rd party supporters. He attacks them (ie, us) in the same way that Democrats always attack leftists, by calling us "purists," "holier-than-thou," & aiming only to make ourselves feel morally superior to Democratic voters.

When safely away from election times, both Lindorff & Solomon do very creditable impersonations of real leftists.

Oh! I would like to add that we can just stop subsidising polluting, energy intensive animal agrobusinesses and start directing funds to help small, local farmers who grow and sell organic produce. This is a must to be sure. This touches on so many levels.

Just small points: single-payer healthcare for all Americans...absolutely NON-negotiable!

An immediate 50% cut in defense spending while more money starts pouring into domestic needs so we can spend more on such necessities...i.e. mass transit, urban development, healthcare, education....to name a few. Let's stop funding more highways as this is destroying the landscape and wildlife habitats, not to mention American cities as they become one great massive suburb leading to no-man's land and contributes to the destruction of close-knit communities.

A national mass-transit program is definitely needed so we can completely ween ourselves off of polluting cars, trucks, and vans. We can let those industries collapse instead of bailing them out. After all, as someone pointed out, those CEOs will start decreasing wages eventually as workers' rights are continually trampled on. It has to stop at some point.

Isn't that the whole purpose of card check? To rig the game in the unions favor? Not for fairness which IS needed, but to take the place now held by business.

Its not fairness being sought, its control. Point by point it is evident.

That's the point--building a progressive third party is difficult but not impossible. Achieving progressive change through the Democratic Party is impossible. Lindorff has never grasped this distinction, and always chooses the impossible over the difficult. This is either a bad case of opacity or masochism or both.

Good and fair comment.

Your point about Europe is well taken. I have no interest in living in a European country though. You give up control of your own life in many areas for small guarantees. Plus weatch Europe over the next year or so. It may not be what you thought it was. I would also suggest that what can work in a small homogeneous country cannot and will not work here.

Our system has produced great outcomes and great problems, but we always seem to overcome them. These systems don't and never have. I'd say thats why they are not sucessful here.

I didn't say a third party is not viable, I simply don't believe you can manufacture one. I can assure you that the current Third parties can never win any election. They are narrowly focused without general appeal.

"Sticking with the status quo just because the roulette wheel is rigged is not a satisfactory conclusion, to my way of thinking. And how will you, or anyone else, see change through elections if you vote again and again for the status quo?"

And for that question I simply don't have an answer.

Sorry, it is late, but thank you Lindorff for taking the time to respond to what I see as some rather intelligent, constructive response to your article. I also notice you take the most umbrage with the most articulate and quick analysis. I find your claim of having studied thoroughly the period of the 30's entertaining as the qualification for your opinions for "...little parties." Why don't you talk about the beginnings when 'wobblies' were beaten and shot down by hired corporate security like the Pinkertons. Remember the WWI veterans and their families that camped out in front of the WH demanding what they had been promised? They got what the government always gives to its citizens, violence from the end of a gun, the equivalent to murder. And you know as well as I thats only two incidences.

And that is why this country needs a real coalition. The Dems no longer have it except for a few hanger ons and the political dropouts that only vote when they hear rumbling over the usual background noise. And that is why you are wrong.

Dave, if you want to go back to read vanmungo's post, he didn't refer to YOU as a mountebank, but Obama. I agree with that description of Obama (as it almost seems that you do as well) but I don't attribute that trait to you, who seems quite an honest fellow, even if I don't always (and I usually do) agree with you. Jerry

Mr. Lindorff--
I called Obama, not you, a "mountebank," as is clear from this sentence:
"I share the weariness of other posters on this list faced with yet another round of breast-beating from the very same Lindorff who urged people to vote for this mountebank." Evidently your reading comprehension is as bad as bad as your history comprehension, so it's no wonder that you keep lauding and voting for the Democrats that you later solemly denounce as sellouts.

I must inform Mr.Lindorff that he has been the victim of identity theft. This Lindorff--let's call him Lindorff D (for Democrat) haughtily declares that he has no patience with "this self-congratulatory third party nonsense." But there is another man, using name David Lindorff (let's call him Lindorff G, for Green) who wrote these words for CounterPunch barely eighteen months ago:

"The Democrats in Congress, and at the head of the party, need to receive a serious wake-up call. Since they're clearly too dumb or too out of touch to realize what's happening, we need to send them a message they can't ignore-the political equivalent of a car bomb. I'm talking about mass resignations from the Democratic Party, with every person who resigns and becomes an independent or who changes their registration to a third party sending a message to the DNC explaining why he or she is quitting. It starts small with a few people here and a few people there, but as Arlo Guthrie once put it, pretty soon we're talking about a movement, and you can join it right here!" (http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff09272007.html)

For the sake of argument and entertainment, though, let's assume that these two fierce adversaries are actually the same man, a political hysteric who frantically zigs this way, then that, and probably has no real idea what he really thinks about the Democrats from month to month and needs to check his last column to be sure what his latest position is.

So dizzy is Mr. Lindorff from his wild political oscillations that he probably can't comprehend how shabby and shallow is his assessment of left political history, how blatantly his outlook betrays the history of a person little or no experience of political organizing outside the ambit of his keyboard. He counterposes the building of (a) mass political movements and (b) independent political parties as though these two undertakings are mutually exclusive. In fact, they are complementary! All the great European social movements since the eighteenth century have combined these two strategies, each emboldening and strengthening the other. Where there is only independent activism without an accompanying political expression, the gains tend to be more uncertain and easier to turn back.

Yes, it was right for the anti-Vietnam War movement to concentrate on independent mass actions in the streets—demonstrations, civil disobedience. But the lack of a political outlet for antiwar sentiment in 1968 was a grave impediment to the movement that undermined the pressures exerted in the street.

The civil rights movement also arose and advanced mainly in the streets, but despite victories on the legal and civil front, vast disparities between the races persist on a mass scale because of the lack of an independent political organ through which African Americans can advance their agenda; their thralldom to the Democratic Party is precisely what has kept them from making further gains.

The same holds true for the labor movement; despite the spectacular gains of the thirties--which were achieved mostly under the leadership of Socialist, Communists, and Trotskyists (all POLITICAL PARTIES, ahem), labor's postwar subordination to the Democrats has resulted in a slow and steady erosion of all the gains of that era. Same with man of the other gains of the New Deal: Glass-Steagall, aid to dependent children, effective regulation of industry, all down the drain because of people's attachment to the Democratic Party. Lindorff, the recidivist Democratic voter, consistently underestimates the blight inflicted on social movements by continued tethering to the Democrats--and, by implication, by the lack of an independent political vehicle of their own to advance and propagate progressive ideas during election cycles, when the public's attention to poltiical ideas is at its height.

This is the same Democratic Party that Lindorff--or at least Lindorff D--STILL urges people to vote for. Now he's beating his breast again, AFTER the election in which he once again sowed illusions about the preferability of this band of crooks, which is now, under the leadership of Lindorff D's chosen candidate, Obama, perpetrating the most criminal looting of a national treasury in history while ramping up the criminal war in Afghanistan. For asking people to vote for Obama, Lindorff is complicit in these crimes, notwithstanding his post hoc lamentations.

But again--no single human can be this brazenly and chronically self-contradictory; voting for Democrats on Monday and reviling them on Friday, urging mass registration in a third party on Tuesday and sneering at third parties on Thursday. So we'll just conclude once again that David Lindorff has been the victim of identity theft and had better call his credit card company ASAP.

In the meantime, true progressives will persist in forging an independent alternative to the Democrats, however steep the climb; clearly this is more rational than the impossible task of extracting progressive policies from the corporate-owned Democrats. We’ll let Lindorff D and his ilk to bloody their skulls against that rock of futility, while we invite Lindorff G to join in the hard work of building the foundation of a real political alternative for tomorrow.

By the way, vanmungo referred to Obama, not you, as a mountebank.

"Democratic Party leaders and elected officials, from Obama on down, should get a message that they can not count on the votes of anyone."

I agree with that, but I believe that you and those who shared your views on the last election showed Obama and the Democratic Party leaders that they COULD count on your votes, despite clear signs that Obama would behave the way he is now behaving. And I think that they believe that they will be able to count on your votes in 2012, and 2016, etc.

It's not clear to me at what point, if any, you would be willing to vote for a presidential candidate who is neither a Democrat nor a Republican. Can you describe a hypothetical scenario in which you would vote for a third-party candidate, or are you saying that you would only vote for a Democrat, but you would like to see a progressive movement take hold that can move the Democratic party in a progressive direction, so that your vote for a Democrat would not be merely a "lesser-of-two-evils" vote?

"

"Meanwhile, French workers have locked up Caterpillar management until they agree to negotiate. I read they are providing food. They sure make us look gutless."

I'm sorry, but kidnapping, assault and battery is gutless to me. I have no respect for terroists.

"

I was confused by what you meant on that reply.

Wholly support the definition of Ms. J's statement as pompous. Hard to think the American Revolution or Civil War would have been won by simple, arrogant statements to the English or the Confederates, then standing by to see what would happen. I received the following in a newsletter put out by American expatriates living in France. I really admire the spunkiness and creativity of the French. No self-righteous crap from them; they just do what they must:

CLASS WARFARE
In what can only be described as class warfare there has been a rash of CEO hostage taking. On March 12th the CEO of Sony France was held overnight by workers who were not happy with their severance pay packages. This was then followed by a similar event at a 3M plant.
Adding flames to the fire was the announcement by car parts manufacture, Valeo, who is receiving state aid and scheduled to layoff workers that the outgoing CEO was to receive 3.2 million as part of his severance pay.
Mixed in around this was the national strike that took place on March 19th. Depending on whom you asked between 1.2 and 3 million people took to the streets. This was more than the number that demonstrated in the last national strike on January 29th. It’s unclear what the next development will be, the government announced it won’t be changing its economic policies. Economic policies viewed by many as favoring the banks over workers. The unions have set the next show of force on May 1st, Labor Day in France, a traditional day to demonstrate and a day when most of France closes down.

Third parties are a "diversion" because liberal pontificators like David Lindorff--who claim to know better--keep denigrating them in theory and practice instead of helping to build them. If half the verbal energy expended by this group of DNC recidivists--Lindorff, Van den Heuvel, Hayden, Sarandon, Moore, etc. (the usual suspects)--were spent in building an independent candidacy rather than attacking it while flacking for the Democrats, such a movement WOULD get off the ground.

The sophistry of Lindorff's argument is this--he extrapolates from a transient slice of history--i.e., third parties have had no impact for the past two or three decades--and divines from that purely conjunctural circumstance a divine law: Third Parties Shall Not Ever Work. This is the same kind of logic deployed by ideologists of the status quo, who constantly eternalize the present and/or recent past: America is a center-right country, socialism can never work, etc., etc.

Third parties have had a huge impact at various junctures of U.S. history: the Republican Party (all they ended up doing was vanquishing slavery!), the Populists, the Socialist and Communist Parties in the period between the World Wars (Roosevelt's New Deal would not have been possible without pressure from those growing, militant left-wing movements), and so on. Moreover, every major progressive reform in the United States has issued not from the beneficence of an established party but from independent organization and agitation: the abolitionist movement, the suffragist movement, the union movement, the anti-Vietnam war movement, etc., etc.--all marching, striking, demonstrating rather than passively pulling levers for this or that corporate shill.

Lindorff's argument against building a third party is therefore a piece of sophistry, based on selective examination of the evidence of history. But its flaws are logical as well as empirical. Even if Lindorff feels that it is unlikely that a third party could succeed, it is clearly IMPOSSIBLE that a progressive agenda can be realized in a Democratic Party dominated by corporate cash. Yet by urging votes for Democrats time after time, Lindorff chooses the impossibility over the improbability (an improbability that is merely the self-fulfilling prophecy of the faint-hearted and defeatist).

If Lindorff and his fellow DP addicts would stop whining and start building, we could have our independent progressive third party. Every vote that Lindorff and his ilk garner for the likes of Obama tightens the hold of these two-faced kleptocrats over the public, rendering Lindorff an accomplice in the very crimes he now piously denounces.

As Paul Goodman once wrote, "One has the persistent thought that if ten thousand people from all walks of life will stand up on their two feet and insist, we shall get back our country." As a Nader voter, I proudly count myself among that "ten thousand" and growing. The sooner people like Lindorff start standing up rather than lying down--time after time---for the treacherous corporate Democrats, the sooner that day will come.

"You see, the problem with Jennifer Bedingfield's pompous comment, typical of Third Party backers who see themselves as smarter and better than those who voted for a Democrat, is that voting for Nader or Cynthia McKinney, both of whom would make far better presidents, I agree, is a pointless exercise in self-congratulation."

Pompous comment ? Oh good GAWD ! LOL ! Those of us who voted for them were trying to bail you suckers out but sadly once again the suckers who voted McSame or Barry bit our hands yet again. Your agreeing that they would have made better presidents but calling it a pointless exercise is completely ludicrous. Never mind though, I've had to put up with even my family, friends, and coworkers who foolishly fall for such silly shortcuts like that. I'm sorry to see that you're tickled by Barry's "hope and change" pixy dust !

"They fail to address a fundamental dilemma, which is how do we move beyond the problem caused by the current two-party/one power structure domination of our political system?"

Actually, they're trying but you keep supporting the Ds and Rs hell bent on stifling their showing up on the ballots and the Democrats forcing Kerry off the ballot in 2004 made my heart boil in anger.

"They are divorced from the labor movement, which is a must."

What nonsense? The labor leaders are the ones soiling the labor movement by trying to out-CEO the CEOs. Remember how John Sweeney screwed up the AFL-CIO by allowing the principles of labor unions to be tossed out the window? If you even had a heart, you would have realized that organized labor does not mean overcharging union dues and pandering to the greedy CEOs and even being like them. Even within the Democratic Party, labor unions completely ignored Kucinich who I strongly supported in the Democratic Primary and don't give me crap talk that Kucinich was unelectable. Besides, if labor unions had actually been themselves, folks like Thomas More wouldn't be so outraged at them. People don't oppose labor unions but most of them would just appreciate it if they were less money obsessing and a bit more nurturant to their members for a change !!

"It was my hope that such a movement would grow out of the masses of people who invested so much "hope" in the Obama presidency. Who knows, perhaps out of the frustration and disappointment and sense of betrayal that will inevitably grow from his unwillingness to tackle the issues from a progressive direction, there still may grow such a movement."

You're on a false hope illusion sir. Obama, Pelosi, Reid, etc ... are already CRUSHING that kind of hope. Can't you see that?

Dave, talk about "sure loser": what is a better way for Americans to "lose" than to vote for a Democratic or a Republican candidate, neither of whom will reflect their views, since these entities have other Masters to which to attend? Your comment insults "losers" like me who believed, foolish us, that it is the very duty of a citizen to vote for that candidate whom he or she thinks would be best as President...such self-congratulatory pomposity!. (You apparently don't take that view of citizenship because you admit that Nader or McKinney would a "better" President than Obama even as you blast those of us who voted for them).

I can, however, see the force of the comment you made toward the end of your article, a point that I was developing in another recent comments string on this website in talking about the most likely conditions for mass revolution. You say, as a last resort in justification for electing a defective candidate like Obama, that the very disillusionment of supporters (like yourself apparently) might generate enough outrage to mobilize the masses to the grassroots uprising that you postulate as the only true source of change in a mandated 2-party system.

At this last resort, you may well be right: that the hope for real change may reside in the very frustration with the very false prophet of "hope and change" whom we have elected. Well, that's a sociological way of looking at things in terms of their "unintended consequences" (disclosure: I'm a sociologist) but it's going to be a hard sell at the polls in 2012 if all you "lesser evilists" tell the electorate that the huge dose of disappointment they have experienced in Obama's first term should be extended into a second one, that his very failures are the basis of the success of the masses. A Marxist could think that way...that the reduction under capitalism of people to a state that they have "nothing to lose but their chains" would benefit the socialist revolution. Like I say, I don't think that "theory" will sell electorally and all you "Progressives for Obama" will have to tell us again how much "worse" things would have been for the preceding four years if McCain and Palin had been at the helm. It will probably work, and we Americans will all be "losers" once again.

" movement that will take to the streets"

The problem with this is that, as I've noticed, mass demonstrations in America go largely unreported. unnamed Cheney staffers can get front page coverage whenever they want but a million people on the streets of a city in the US, well the American networks can't bear to encourage malcontents who are clearly trying to influence the politics of the country.

isn't this mass movement vs third party a distinction without a difference?

"...voting for Nader or Cynthia McKinney, both of whom would make far better presidents, I agree, is a pointless exercise in self-congratulation."
--------------------

I supported Nader for many reasons. The most basic being that I didn't want the deaths of innocent Arabs, Indians and Persians on my conscience.

It was crystal clear to me that voting for Obama would put me in that unacceptable position.

I'm afraid the election of pseudo-progressive Obama is going to set the movement back at least twenty years.

Every vote for a Democrat who promises change and fails to deliver is another nail in the coffin of progressivism.

Throw into the mix a media that's expert at mis, dis and underinforming the masses and we probably won't see a true progressive leader until the country hits absolute rock bottom.

This is a misrepresentation of my position. I never told people to "buy into" the Democratic Party. I have consistently said what we need is a mass movement.

This writer is setting up a straw-person to make a false argument that is all too easy.

Visit Dave Lindorff's website at www.thiscantbehappening.net

"there will not be [a viable option] until we get the pot boiling, the anger among the common people rising to the level that they will join together and risk everything for change."

Many of us who refused to vote for a Democratic or Republican presidential candidate did, in some sense, risk everything for change. And we wonder what the hell the rest of you are waiting for. Just do it. The next time the corporate media holds a gun to the electorate's head, tell them to go screw themselves.

If the millions of people who vote for Democrats as the lesser of two evils stopped doing so, it would send a shock wave through this country's political system, and the people might then reclaim some of the power that they were meant to have. But fear of the consequences keeps them from doing so.

Everything you say is true, especially this: "It is my guess that Obama would be much more reluctant to take such measures." Yes . . . but he'd do it if necessary and probably with less provocation than we think.

The far right is fulminating, frothing at the mouth like a pack of drunken mustered out German army officers in the Weimar Republic. I think they'll be back as early as '012 because One-Eyed Jack Obama is proving to be such a lilly livered chicken- shit.

Actually, McCain might have nailed it if the economy perceived to be under Republican control, hadn't tanked. And I wonder--if McCain-Palin had pulled it off and the policies were identical, want to bet that the anger would consolidate much faster than this lingering clinging to the hope and change mantra?

This post from kivals is the usual composte of counterfactual conjectures. People who are desperate to find reasons to support corporate Democrats like Obama seldom have recourse to FACTS, because FACTS show mainstream Dems and Repubs on the same page on nearly every key issue of the economy and national security. So these Obamaphiles revert to their rich imaginations--if the Republicans were elected, all blacks and Jews would be rounded up and sent to underground shelters, three simultaneous nuclear wars would start--some with other planets and galaxies, right-wing agents would start peeing in the water supply of San Francisco, etc., etc. Out this swirl we end up with somebody's "guess" that Obama would be a part of this rich effulgence from their fantasy life.

Some people, unable to deal with the reality of the Democratic Party, revert to fantasy. Whatever it takes.