Ross Levin Writes of OWS and Third Party Figures
Resident blogger Ross Levin has penned an article over at Polizeros. His article, which is about the Occupy Wall Street Protests generally, nevertheless manages to touch on a few personalities and parties that are of interest to IPR readers.
Barack Obama’s rhetoric certainly has a populist tone to it these days, but words are cheap. At the same time that he invoked Teddy Roosevelt, Obama sought to undermine Social Security, one of the fundamental social safety net programs in this country. Ron Paul and the newly Libertarian Gary Johnson, on the other hand, provide adequate solutions to some of the symptoms of this greater problem. Both are opposed to the race-driven drug war and the military-industrial complex and the empire which sustains it. They are even opposed to our modern “crony capitalism,” and in my eyes they are certainly better choices than any of the offerings of the major parties, yet their libertarian ideologies encourage corporate greed and power in some nasty ways. Actual solutions, or at least the first steps toward actual solutions, to our systematic socioeconomic inequality are present in the campaigns of the Green Party’s Jill Stein and the Justice Party’s Rocky Anderson. Stein’s campaign is centered on the idea of a “Green New Deal,” providing employment and a fair, democratic redistribution of wealth while jump-starting American environmental efforts. Anderson, the former mayor of Salt Lake City, recently formed the Justice Party and the central theme of his candidacy is, in his words, “to change the system and get the corrupting influence of corporate and other concentrated wealth out of our electoral system and out of our system of governance.”
Teddy Roosevelt, Ron Paul, Gary Johnson, Jill Stein, and Rocky Anderson either are now, or once were, third party Presidential candidates.
