This is the editorial I presented on Shared Sacrifice Internet Radio on Saturday, August 23. You can listen to the show at www.blogtalkradio.com/Shared_Sacrifice.

With this summer’s oil price spike, the thought that there might be market manipulation by speculators in the oil market was on many people’s minds. Corporate free market apologists immediately tried to stamp out that thought by saying there was no evidence of such manipulation. They were right about one fact: At the time, there was no readily available evidence of market manipulation—because it had been hidden from regulators. The Washington Post reported this past Thursday, August 21, that there is in fact evidence of extensive manipulation by speculators in the oil markets, on the level of the market manipulation of electricity supply by Enron before their criminal operation failed. If regulators had just accepted the argument to “move along, there’s nothing to see here” that the corporate free market fundamentalists were trying to feed them, today we would not know of this oil market failure.

Free-market theory is based upon a simple assumption: It’s called perfect competition. This assumption states that all players in the market have all of the same information and that goods in the market cannot be differentiated (a raw commodities market is usually assumed to be as close as we can get to perfect competition). True free market adherents would not try to cover up market manipulation, but instead would want strong controls to ensure that vital information is freely available to all interested parties.

Futures markets grew out of the need for raw material suppliers and people who need the raw materials to guarantee a given quantity at a given price to be delivered at a predetermined date in the future. For example, if you’re a baker, you want to be able to predict the costs of wheat so you can budget for the expense and if you’re a farmer you want to be able to guarantee a price for your wheat. So farmer and baker get together to make a contract in the spring for the delivery of the wheat at an agreed-upon price when the wheat is harvested in the fall.

But it’s not like that anymore. Now we have speculators, who enter the market not to be able to compete to take possession of the commodity for processing, but just to wager on the price. Some of these speculators are so large—or there are so many of them—that their very presence creates artificial pressures on commodity prices. This in effect takes the commodity itself out of the equation and the bets are just on which way the price will go. Winner take all. And those that need the commodity, the baker in my example, will have to pay a large premium in order actually get it the needed resource. The baker will, of course, have no choice but to pass the higher cost onto his customers.

If this were just happening in the oil market, it would be bad enough. But it’s not limited to oil. Virtually every commodity that trades on an exchange is subject to this type of manipulation. When you aggregate this over the commodity needs of an entire economy it can be devastating to the poor—because food costs will rise and the poor have very low and often fixed incomes. It can also lead to inflationary pressures for everyone. All of this because of the greed of market manipulators who, in the words of the Washington Post article, exploit “their political influence and gaps in oversight to gain exemptions from regulatory limits and permission to set up new, unregulated markets”. The Washington Post article goes on to note that, “commodities have been good business for big Wall Street brokerages. Its commodity trades helped keep Goldman Sachs profitable during the credit crisis…”

But the so-called market fundamentalists in America aren’t actual, true market fundamentalists, they are elitists who find the WORD competition convenient, but they have no respect for the concept. They constantly strive to have the government protect them from the ravages of the marketplace, but insist vehemently that the government should not tax their profits. After all, profits are their RIGHT. They expect government to protect their private operations at the expense of economy-wide economic efficiency. And the government dutifully obliges. To American corporatists, government is a great private investment—it can be bought for a relatively low price and then ordered to create barriers to entry or artificial obstructions to information, which result in larger profits or even direct payments of taxpayer dollars into their pockets.

As I said before there is very little daylight between the two major parties, Democratic and Republican. What light that can be seen can be described in a manner of degree rather than in substance. Both parties are rabid corporatists. Whereas the Republican Party actively seeks to entrench corporate control over American private and public life, the Democrats seek to defend corporate encroachment in order to protect the corporate money flowing into their coffers.

Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul are considered fringe elements within their respective parties. But the irony is that they are fringe only when viewed through the corporatist prism through which the parties see. These two patriots will not cow-tow to corporate interests at the expense of America’s greater good. They were considered unviable presidential candidates because they would not adopt corporate interests ahead of the interests of the country.

Along with Mr. Kucinich and Mr. Paul, several former party insiders have sought and received third-party nominations to run for President of the United States in 2008. I believe it speaks to the weakness of the two dominant political parties when former party insiders abandon the parties in favor of their own principles. Congressman Barr and Congresswoman McKinney both served their constituents and their parties from elected federal office, but then saw the betrayal of their principles by those parties. They saw another approach and embraced a third-party way of thinking.

When two such influential people leave their parties in order to accept the challenge of confronting a broken system from a new perspective, it proves the time has come for third parties to be given serious consideration in this country. That’s what this debate is about: Offering the American people a new way of thinking; to move beyond the irrational fear of “throwing their votes away” on someone from other than the two major parties.

On this show, I have previously endorsed and then retracted an endorsement for a presidential candidate. At this time, none of the Shared Sacrifice producers have formal endorsements in place for any campaign. Speaking only for myself, I can say that I will not endorse, nor will I cast a vote for, either of the major party candidates. The parties are now corrupt and beyond redemption. They must be replaced, or at least relegated to irrelevancy by democratic forces—and those forces already exist if We The People would merely use the tools available to us. Namely, those tools are the existing third parties.

The one overarching goal we need to adopt this year and in coming political seasons is to break the duopoly. The greatest threat to our safety is not from some outside skulking terrorists, it is to allow these two corrupt parties to retain control within our own system. I think it matters little who actually wins the presidency as long as the Democrats and Republicans lose—their continued oligarchical stranglehold on our political system is the greatest single threat to national security this country has faced since the founding of our Republic.

Believe it or not, the thought that people should no longer succumb to politics at the point of a gun, as my co-host Matt Stannard is fond of saying, has finally reached the mainstream. On the Glenn Beck show this week (Wednesday, August 20), Penn Jillette of Penn & Teller made the point that people do have choices. You WILL NOT throw your vote away if you choose someone other than Obama or McCain this year.
We must recognize that the power rests with us and that we can only be held hostage by these two dying political parties if we accept their contention that they are the only game in town. As Penn said on the Beck show, “nowhere in the rules does it say it has to be one of those two.”

There Is No Coin

The following is the editorial I read on the Shared Sacrifice Internet Radio program (www.blogtalkradio.com/Shared_Sacrifice) on August 2, 2008:

Since the Reagan Revolution, the GOP has sought to remove choice from America. There are the obvious examples of abortion and gay marriage, but it goes much deeper than that. They have proven to be so radically ideological that the paramount concern for them is to remove choices not only from those currently living, but also from generations yet to come. To that end, they have run up a record national debt with the simple minded goal of making sure that future generations have only the ability to pay for military budgets and interest on the debt they have incurred in our name.

Newt Gingrich revealed this goal when, after the GOP took majority control of the House of Representatives in 1994, he stated that they would let the Department of Education and other government programs for average Americans “wither on the vine”.

They have so poisoned the well in American political discourse that the prospect of raising—or even paying—taxes to fund wars of choice have become a third rail of politics. Any politician who would dare to say that we need to pay as we go without running up debt would be vilified as someone who wants to raise taxes—and it is used against people who do not want to make so-called temporary tax cuts permanent. Even though the temporary nature of these tax cuts was required to get them passed in the first place.

Of course increasing taxes on corporate profits or on passive income like capital gains is out of the question—the rich should not have to pay to sustain the system that allowed them create their wealth in the first place. Workers should naturally have to pay for everything, after all they wouldn’t have jobs if it weren’t for the rich, right? Corporations and private investors have so unbalanced the system that we have no choice but to work for them. And as this imbalance continues to wreck the economy, our opportunities are increasingly, and deliberately limited. In the mind of the corporatist, only the poor and working-class should have to pay for the system. Rich people are above that indignity. They have transformed the American economy, creating an entire nation of corporate serfs.

The GOP has always reveled in the public perception of their fiscal management skills. They are supposed to be the businessmen of America. But when they take the reins of government, they are unable to act like managers. Once they have the power, they instantly turn that power to their own personal ideological interests—and the financial benefit of their cronies.

Before you accuse me of being lopsided with my polemics, allow me to turn an equally scathing eye to the other side of the corporate/congressional coin.

I used the example that GOP candidates often use the prospect of failing to make temporary tax cuts permanent as an easy and quick way to call their Democratic opponents tax-raisers. And the Democrats have proven that they are not up to the challenge of answering this. They run from it as if they were being called “weak on terror”. But the real reason that they run from that issue, and so many others, is that they implicitly agree with virtually everything the GOP stands for. There is very little light between these two parties, except at the margins, especially when it comes to deficit spending.

While the GOP loves to fight wars with other peoples’ blood and borrowed money, the Democrats are happy to sustain these wars, all the while squawking with faux outrage at the misuse of our national resources. But they won’t do anything to actually stop it.

It would be too generous to simply say that the Democrats don’t know how to frame the argument to persuade the American people to change course—that would be a simple failure of communication. No, it goes far beyond that. The Democrats are no longer an opposition party. The Democrats, while maintaining a different name, have adopted the GOP’s fiscal lack of discipline as their own. Even when we hear that Barack Obama is an agent of change the American people see is so desperately needed, he backtracks and votes to undermine the Constitution to protect GOP corporate cronies and now he says that he is willing to vote for a “compromise” which will allow off-shore oil drilling, which will protect oil company profits.

The Democratic Party has joined the Republican Party lock, stock and barrel in their subservience to narrow corporate interests at the expense of the greater good. For decades the American people have recognized that the GOP is owned by corporate interests. It is now time to accept this reality as it relates to the Democrats as well.

Many people have lamented that their only choice is to vote for a Democrat because a candidate using that label will be better than a Republican, if only marginally. That is a fallacy. The Democrats, have joined the Republicans in having no real concern for the welfare of the American people, and have adopted only one paramount item for their agenda: To attain power and maintain power once they get it, all so they can advance the agenda that every resource available to America should be channeled to the benefit of their corporate masters. Which makes voting for a Democrat no better than voting for a Republican.

Elections in this country are more important than a coin toss. Our duty as citizens requires that we do more than toss a coin in the air and hope that a D or R lands on top. These two parties are the two sides of the same corporate coin. The important thing to remember is, when the chips are down and the hard choices have to be made, a Democrat will respond in the exact way a Republican will—to use the resources of our national government to protect corporate interests first—and only—and leave every other issue to us to solve for ourselves.

We need to recognize that we live in a time of great peril, and risks must be taken if we are going to survive. One risk we can no longer afford to take is to rely on these two morally exhausted and intellectually bankrupt parties. One risk we should pledge to take is to listen to and take and honest look at third-party candidates. The D’s and R’s want to make you fear that you will throw your vote away if you vote for someone other than either of them. But the only risk we run by giving someone else a chance is that nothing will change—which is the outcome we’re sure to get regardless if we vote for a politician sporting a D or R after his name. We have been flipping this same corporate D & R coin for so long we have missed one important truth: There is no coin.