Just read the latest post from Cenk Uyger.  He recommends:

So, in financial reform Obama shouldn’t ask Republicans to vote with him, he should dare them not to. He should say:
“You want to vote with the bankers. Go ahead. I dare you. Every day I’m going to talk about how these bankers took hard-earned taxpayer money and turned it into record bonuses for themselves. I’m going to show pictures of their yachts and mansions. And then I’m going to say you want to protect them so you can hang out with them on their private jets and play with them in their vacation hideaways. I’m going to take a cut out of you and put it on a picture of their yacht. I’m going to name names. I’m going to make you famous. You still want to vote with the bankers. Make my fucking day.”

Does anyone really believe President Obama will do anything even closely resembling this?  Of course not.

We know Democrats are facing major defeats going forward. We know that corporate monies are going to flood into campaign coffers like never before thanks to a corrupt and misguided Supreme Court. Given these two facts, a third major political party could actually become viable if it is able to capture the very real angst out there over the corporate takeover of our government.

Dave Lindorff has penned an article about how to go about forming a viable third party:

Progressives in the Democratic Party are both joke and oxymoron.

It is time for any real progressives in House or Senate to admit the truth–that they are boxed in and effectively neutered by the Party leadership–and that if they really want to be defenders of the public interest and the progressive cause, they must give up their sinecures, cut themselves loose from the shackles of the Democratic Party, and form a new and independent national progressive party. They have a model: Bernie Sanders, the independent self-described socialist senator from Vermont. Of course, even Sanders is boxed in, given that he is alone in the Senate as an independent progressive , so that if he wants a committee assignment he has to agree to vote with the Democrats on the key issues of party control. But that is because there is nobody standing with him in the Senate.

This could change if the progressive caucus members of both houses were to quit the sell-out Democrats and form the nucleus of a new party, instead of just a caucus within the sclerotic and rancidly corrupt Democratic Party.

In the new political environment of “throw the bums out”, it makes sense for progressive Democrats to form a new party rather than resign their seats or wait to be defeated electorally:

We on the left know that nothing much is going to change in America until there is a genuine people’s party on the ballot, but for years we have watched in despair as well-meaning third parties like Peace & Freedom, the Green Party, the Socialist Party-USA and others (including parties not on the left like the Libertarians) have tried and failed to become national political forces. These efforts have been stymied because American voters, sensibly, have not wanted to “waste their votes” by casting ballots for Third Party candidates who stand no chance of being elected. They have been stymied because Americans have either been forced to accept a “lesser of two evils” approach to voting, or to simply not vote.

But true progressives in Congress who have the advantage of incumbency–people like Kucinich, Conyers, Feingold and others–could run as independents, or better, as third party candidates and win. And if they were to choose to run as a new third party, they would open the door for many other new candidates to run with them. They would give legitimacy to the idea of voting for something other than a corrupt Republican or a corrupt Democrat.

Americans are not stupid. They recognize that the two big parties are both acting in collusion in selling them all out to monolithic corporate interests, and that Washington is thoroughly owned by the rich and the powerful. That’s why only half of Americans even bother to vote (actually far fewer than that in off-year elections like the one coming up this November). And those who do vote, vote for major party candidates, for the most part not out of enthusiasm, but out of desperation.

Third parties have never in the past been able to garnish enough support to do anything more than alter who wins from the two major parties.  For that reason many voters, myself included, have just ignored these attempts to change our political system.  But in today’s environment, it does not seem to matter much at all if you vote Democratic or Republican.  We still get the same result, that being big corporate and moneyed interests running the show.  Since voting at all is now throwing away your vote, it would seem time is ripe to provide voters a real alternative.  And as Lindorff points out, getting the few already in Congress who do try but are unable to represent the interests of “the people” to jump ship to a new party will make it much more likely the new party will succeed.

No one wants to just give up and let the same old corrupt politicians continue to drag us all down with them.  We need a new party to restore to the electorate a reason to participate in the political process.