The Push to Make Sanders the Green Party's Candidate

by Dave Lindorff Wednesday, May. 04, 2016 at 5:49 AM
marc1seed@yahoo.com

Sanders and his ardent supporters, in other words, have a unique historic opportunity to shatter the asphyxiating two-party duopoly of two pro-corporate parties that has been the Bermuda Triangle of progressive politics for over a century.

to read Dave Lindorff's article published on Counterpunch April 29, 2016, click on
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/04/29/the-push-to-make-sanders-the-green-partys-candidate/

Will Sanders seize this opportunity to continue the fight? If he is serious about inspiring a political revolution, he must. He has said he does not want to be a spoiler “like Ralph Nader” and help elect Donald Trump or some other Republican. But would that be the result of a three-way race with Sanders running as a Green? Not necessarily. In the first place, the claim that votes for Nader led to George W. Bush’s 2000 victory over Al Gore is bogus. Gore lost because he embarrassingly failed to win his own state of Tennessee. As well, it is clear that it was a corrupt Republican Supreme Court that by a 5-4 vote halted the count in Florida that handed that state’s electoral votes to Bush. It has been shown that continued counting and challenges to improperly rejected ballots would clearly have given Florida to Gore.

More importantly, 2016 is not 2000. The public this year is clearly sick of the two major parties, and disgusted by the undemocratic nature of the primaries. Incredibly, both Trump and Clinton, the likely winners of those primaries, represent the two most unpopular and disliked candidates in memory, with some 65 percent of Americans saying they dislike Trump and another 56 percent saying they dislike Clinton.