Are you tired of voting for the lesser of two evils when it comes time to vote during a Presidential election? Do you hold your nose when you pull down the lever in the voting booth? Do you even bother to vote any more?
There are third party candidates who actually do represent middle class interests instead of those of their political donors, who typically are the rich, the 1%, and Corporate America. Rocky Anderson and Jill Stein are two such candidates.
Recently I had the opportunity to interview Rocky Anderson in depth about his political positions: The Barefoot Accountant’s Interview of Rocky Anderson. It was an in depth, hour long interview, conducted on May 29th of this year.
Perhaps you have never heard of Rocky Anderson since the major media only cover candidates of our two political parties. Rocky Anderson was a Constitutional lawyer and civil rights attorney before serving as the Mayor of Salt Lake City from 2000 to 2008 as a Democrat; however, in 2011, he became disenchanted with the Democratic Party’s sell-out to Corporate interests and left the party to form the Justice Party in order to advocate economic, environmental, social and civic justice.
In Rocky’s own words,
The Constitution has been eviscerated while Democrats have stood by with nary a whimper. It is a gutless, unprincipled party, bought and paid for by the same interests that buy and pay for the Republican Party.
Below please compare Rocky’s positions on many issues to those held by President Obama and Mitt Romney. Note how Rocky differs from Barack Obama and Mitt Romney on the following issues:
Unlike President Obama and Mitt Romney, Rocky is for:
1. A WPA program to create jobs
2. Replacing our free trade agreements with fair trade agreements
3. Prosecuting Wall Street banksters and fraudsters
4. Ending government’s felonious spying on US citizens
5. Prosecuting war crimes
6. Restricting the use of the state secrets doctrine
7. Overthrowing NDAA, which allows indefinite detention without habeous corpus
8. Restoring civil liberties removed under the Patriot Act
9. Closing Guantanamo Bay
10. Federally protected marriage equality
11. Prohibiting new coal-burning plants
12. Stopping the Keystone Pipeline
13. Implementing dramatic measures in response to climate change
14. Stopping deportation of law-abiding immigrants
15. Ending the Bush tax cuts
16. Decreasing spending of the Military Industrial Complex
17. Ending the war on drugs
18. Restoring Glass-Steagall
19. Ending anti-trust exemptions of many industries
20. Breaking up “too large to fail and jail” banks
21. Moving the Federal Reserve to the Treasury Department
22. A single-payer Medicare-for-all healthcare system
23. Ending our dependence on for-profit insurance companies for healthcare needs
Did you vote for “change”, “hope and change”, “change you can believe in”, and “change the way Washington works” in 2008, only to see extensions of the tax cuts for the rich; an egregious estate tax reduction saving the Walton family billions of dollars in taxes; a healthcare system that will not control medical nor prescription medicine costs; increases in military spending; the enactment of the National Defense Authorization Act; “grand bargains” to lower the corporate tax rates while cutting social security, Medicare, medicaid; and a short-lived economic recovery in 2010 where 93% of the benefits went to the top 1%?
Maybe it’s time for our country to have other candidates come forward to speak for the 99% and Main Street instead of just for the 1% and Wall Street, that is, those who provide the hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign contributions to the candidates. If you feel that these campaign contributions and lobbyists moneys are, in essence, legalized bribery, and that our political system has become corrupt from all of the money involved in politics, perhaps you might want to consider other candidates besides those of the two major political parties.
And anyway, isn’t voting for the lesser of two evils still voting for evil?
Connecticut Politics 