You won’t hear the mass media talking about Rocky Anderson. You won’t hear Anderson speaking at any of the Presidential Debates, because the corporations that run our elections will make sure that Anderson is not invited to any of these debates.
Anderson, a two-term mayor of Salt Lake City, is running as the nominee of the Justice Party. He is sorely disappointed in Barack Obama’s decision to support passage of NDAA. He is a strong believer in the need to take definite steps to reduce production of
[1]greenhouse gasses (he took serious steps as Mayor). He very much supports the aims of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement. He challenges Americans to reject the “fear-driven argument” that they must vote for one of the two dominant political parties. Based on a well-written profile at Truthout, [2] here’s how Anderson describes the huge hurdle Americans face this election cycle:
Our nation has been transformed in extraordinarily tragic ways in the past dozen years. The rule of law has been utterly eviscerated during the Bush and Obama administrations. We’ve engaged in wars of aggression, wars for which there has been no coherent explanation. Our debt is completely out of control. We have a military-industrial complex with a stranglehold on our government. And at the core of almost every public policy failure, all we have to do to find an explanation is follow the money, because our Congress and the White House have been purchased lock, stock and barrel by wealthy corporate interests. The Republican and Democratic Parties have colluded in creating the corrupt, perverse system that has led our nation to this point today. And there is now no question in my mind that we need a major new alternative.
Here are some of the things that need to be done to turn this country around:
Compliance with the war powers clause would keep us out of the disastrous wars we’ve been fighting ever since at least Vietnam. Imagine if Congress lived up to its constitutional responsibility to determine whether the facts justify going to war. We would have never gone into Vietnam. We never would have been in Iraq. And it’s very likely we would not have been in Afghanistan.
We need significant campaign finance reform, with a public financing system. We need to reverse the Citizens United case. If that took a constitutional amendment, it would be very worthwhile, because the role of money in our campaign system is in large part responsible for the transformation of our democracy into a plutocracy – the control of our government by the very wealthy. We need to restore the rule of law, and live up to the promise that our nation has made, ever since its founding, that we would honor and recognize individual civil rights and liberties instead of indefinite detention without charges, trial or habeas corpus. We would get back to the basics in terms of due process for everyone.
And we need to join with the rest of the industrialized world and finally recognize the fundamental moral obligation that we, as a people, should have: to provide essential health care for everyone. People are dying simply because they cannot afford decent medical care in this country. . . . . it’s all happened because of the corrupting influence of money from the for-profit insurance and pharmaceutical industries.
A major transformation in these areas is required, and . . . I encourage everyone to no longer be satisfied with the Republican and Democratic Parties and their candidates, who have brought us to this point where we are today.
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