What do -we- do in 2008? What are our goals, what are our options, what can we accomplish?

[jpgray]

Please post your plans for '08 below, along with the reasons behind those plans, the likely effect of those plans, and the evidence to show the plan can work. For this, it is best to assume that any of the major primary candidates can be nominated.

Here's what I think:

To my mind we have one ultimate goal--to create a -major- party which fully embraces progressive values. Yet no truly progressive candidacy in recent memory has been treated seriously, and almost no one votes for those candidacies. Nader, aside from his idiotic political strategizing, had great progressive stances on the issues. From a major party, someone like Kucinich is about as progressive as one can expect. Why then, do their candidacies founder and fail? Why is it that majorities in this country support progressive policies, yet they don't support progressive candidates?

Because we have a hideous teaming of corporate and state power. We see it in -both- parties, but the most extreme and complete representative of that is the GOP. The GOP benefits most from our ugly union of money and politics. They are corporate friendly to the point of fascism, so they receive enormous sums of money from big business. They support the most radical deregulation and are trust-lovers to the end, so the media willingly promote their candidates based on "image" and "character" while denigrating their opponents on the same terms, doing their best of course to obscure, muddle, and avoid popular progressive issues. If those issues -were- covered, the unpopular GOP stances on those issues would result in many progressive victories and Republican defeats.

So long as GOP holds even a significant minority of our three branches hostage, they will receive the most benefits from the system, and any politician wishing to defeat the GOP must sell out to a greater or lesser extent for even a slim hope of being competitive. Without money or fair coverage, no major candidate can survive. We need public financing, we need a regulated media--we need policy change, and every GOP politician that gets voted out of office makes it that much more possible.

You may argue that the Democrats are selling out on a similar level. They are. The DLC Democrats so many have a problem with are trying to find a balance between kowtowing to corporate influence while still paying lip service to progressive issues. It isn't working. It's frustrating and driving off the progressive electorate, and yet it still can't compete with the GOP for influence, since the GOP has sold out as completely as is possible. But recognize the source of this--the GOP, Scaife, Coors, etc. created this system in order to elect conservatives who enact devastatingly unpopular but very profitable economic policies. Their success ensured that their methods would be emulated by ambitious, unethical pols from the Democratic Party.

Thus the source of the trouble is the GOP. And they are the most visible symbol for the union of corporate and state power. A vote that helps unseat a Republican not only creates a more sympathetic environment for policy change, but it also delivers a clear message about how much bullshit the electorate is willing to take. If you want to vote for something in '08, bring the GOP to total defeat next year. As long as that corporate-state symbiosis persists, no progressive candidate will have a shot. A perfect candidate with the most perfect stances could be destroyed on a whim in this environment, and the only way to change that environment is to change policy. The only way to change policy is to make sure the people most opposed to those changes, the most visible symbols of united corporate and state power, are never elected.