To Hell with the Democrats!: Time to for Any Real Progressives in Congress to Bolt the Party and Start a New One

By Dave Lindorff

Jeff Greenwald has just written that President Obama, by playing a leading role in pushing for cuts in Social Security benefits as part of the whole kabuki-theater drama over the debt ceiling, and the alleged crisis of America’s national debt, has cut out the “soul” of the Democratic Party.

Let’s start by saying that if the Democratic Party ever had a soul, it was sold long ago to the Evil Ones who run corporate America, and especially the horned legions on Wall Street. But the point Greenwald makes is a good one:  Obama and his backers in the Democratic Party in Congress -- the power brokers like Sen. Harry Reid and Rep. Nancy Pelosi, and the sell-outs like Sens. Dick Durbin (D-IL), Kent Conrad (D-ND) and Mark Warner (D-VA), who are the Democratic half of the so-called Gang of Six currently putting forward a proposal to raise working class taxes while cutting taxes for the rich, and to slash $3 trillion from programs that are critically important for the poor and the sick -- have abandoned any commitment they and the party might once have had to working class America and to the poor and have gone over completely to a strategy of trying to compete with Republicans in currying the favor of the rich and the powerful.

There is at this point only one thing to do, and it’s not to encourage some liberal figure to run a quixotic primary campaign against Obama for the 2012 Democratic Presidential campaign. 

It is to move forward with a strategy to develop a fully-competitive progressive Third Party to run races in every Congressional district and  for every Senate seat up for grabs in 2012, and to run a candidate for President.

There is only one way this could be done, I believe, and that would be for the Labor movement, or at least those unions that realize that it’s over, in terms of getting any substantive support from the Democratic Party anymore, to make a bold offer to members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus to  bolt the Democratic Party, en masse, and together, with the help of existing progressive organizations and citizens, to form a new American Progressive Party...

For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the new independent online alternative newspaper now beginning its second year of daily publication, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/708