Green presidential candidates debate today

Ongoing as this posts.  And more revolution news below.

Watching the Hawks co-hosts Tyrel Ventura, Tabetha Wallace and Sean Stone will host two live third-party presidential debates: the Green Party on May 9 and Libertarian Party on May 12.

“In 2016 it’s time the illusion of choice offered by the Democrats, Republicans, and the Washington, DC power brokers must be challenged,” Ventura said. “Thankfully, there is a cable news channel in RT that has the courage to show US citizens and the rest of the world that there are more than just two brands of politics within the United States.”

Green Party candidates Jill Stein, Kent Mesplay and Sedinam Kinamo Christin Moyowasifza Curry will face off on Monday, while Libertarian Party candidates Darryl W. Perry, Austin Petersen and Marc Allan Feldman will debate next Thursday. Both debates will cover foreign policy, domestic issues, and electoral reform.

The debates will air on RT America from 4 pm to 6 pm Eastern time. You can also watch them on the RT America YouTube page.

“It is all but illegal to participate in US politics outside the twin titanic business parties. A majority of US citizens are disgusted with the status quo and want something new,” Mesplay said. “By nurturing real discussion and debate, RT America reveals an insistent international movement of polite dissent: the Green Party. Such visibility emboldens would-be voters who want a viable ‘third party’ in the United States.”

RT is “breaking the two-party stranglehold on debates and beginning the open discussion the American people are clamoring for,” Stein said in a statement.

She added that she’s excited for the Green Party debate, which she sees as “a step towards real democracy and an inspiration for the millions of Americans who are ready for a new politics that puts people, planet and peace over profit.”

America does indeed need four parties, particularly in 2016 with record-breaking distaste for Clinton and Trump.  Here's more thinking outside the two-party box.

YOU DECIDED to run a campaign independent of the two mainstream parties. Given all the excitement that Sanders has generated, many people who are very critical of Clinton are hoping it might be possible to reform the Democrats and turn them into a truly left-wing party. Even those who don't hold out much hope to reforming the Democrats will be pressured to vote for Clinton as the lesser evil in order to stop Trump. And you will, no doubt, be called a "spoiler." How do you respond to these arguments?

THERE HAS been a long and valiant effort for many decades to reform the Democratic Party. But the party has a built-in kill switch that it created in 1972 after George McGovern won the primaries as a peace candidate.

They changed the internal party system to insure that grassroots candidates would never be elected again. This included creating the superdelegates in order to empower the party insiders to call the shots. The superdelegates are about 30 percent of the total needed to win the nomination, so it's a very powerful firewall. Likewise with the the Super Tuesday primaries. So it's a doomed struggle, right from the outset, to try to reform the party.

You only have to look back to the era of the civil rights movement to learn this lesson. That movement was as powerful a movement as we have seen in modern history and, together with the labor movement, which was much more powerful than it is today, there was an attempt to organize what was called "realignment" inside the Democratic Party.

It did succeed in getting the conservative Southern Dixiecrats out of the Democratic Party, but that's as far as it got. It completely floundered on the effort to create a social-democratic party out of the Democrats. Why was that?

Specifically, it was the war in Vietnam that made it essential to be an imperialist or pro-war if you wanted to have the "credibility" to critique the Democratic Party. This basically shot that reform movement -- in the foot, you could say! Because at the end of the day, the Democratic Party is funded by war profiteers, predatory banks and fossil-fuel giants. So this is not where we are going to create that party of revolution. It is fundamentally a counterrevolutionary party.

About the spoiler effect, I'll say a few things. First of all, just to put it to rest. It's a myth that Ralph Nader cost Al Gore the presidential election in Florida in 2000. It was the U.S. Supreme Court that stopped the vote re-count, which Gore would have won had it continued.

But beyond that, the problem is that millions of Florida Democrats didn't come out to vote for Gore. Nader's votes in Florida were a tiny fraction of the Democrats who either voted for Bush or stayed home. Blaming Nader is a self-serving fear campaign that the Democrats use to silence their opposition.

Blaming Nader or other third-party candidates is a strategy to intimidate people into a politics of fear that tells you to vote against what you fear instead of voting for what you believe. But in fact, the politics of fear has delivered everything we were afraid of.

We can list all the reasons people are told to silence themselves and vote for a lesser evil candidate: we were afraid of jobs going overseas, the climate meltdown, expanding wars, the attack on our civil liberties and on immigrant rights, expansion of the prison state, etc. Look around. This is exactly what we've gotten -- much of it under a Democratic White House with two Democratic houses of Congress.

Take the Wall Street bailout. Obama did that with a majority of Democrats in both houses of Congress in 2009. That's when that all occurred. So the politics of fear delivers what we're afraid of. The lesser evil is not the solution. It merely paves the way to the greater evil. It ensures that the Democratic Party base gets demoralized and doesn't come out to vote. So the greater evil wins. We've seen this time and again.

-- All of this news about Stein has attracted the attention of David Brock's troll brigade, and they have swarmed.  As Clinton tacks harder right, picking up disaffected Republicans and their fat checks, we'll see more of this.

Fun.