The US Has A One Party System

When I was a young boy living in San Jose, I discovered  shortwave radio.  I learned that I could tune into stations all over the world  and listen to them right in my bedroom.  I became an amateur radio operator when I was fifteen.  But long before I earned my ham radio license and for years afterward, I listened by the hour to international shortwave radio stations.  Some of my favorites included Radio Canada, the BBC, London, Radio Austrailia, Radio Japan and countless others.  One international broadcaster I listened to frequently was Radio Moscow.  It was the voice of the Soviet Union.  There was a North American Service in American English.  I wrote to Radio Moscow and tried to understand as much as I could about the USSR.  I also knew that there was a vast difference between the USA and the USSR.  I could not understand how people could put up with living in a country that had a one-party system of government.  I always assumed that the United States had at least two parties that always privided a choice.

I remember too, coming home from school one afternoon to a speech on TV by President John Kennedy on June 26, 1963  It was his "Let them come to Berlin" speech.  The President painted a vivid and stark picture of the differences between a system that needed to build walls to keep its people in and the US where people were longing to get in.  I was young and impressionable.  Vietnam was ahead of us.  I came from a very conservative republican family.  I was very patriotic.  However, I was also quite afraid of the prospect of being drafted and being sent to Vietnam.  I wound up joining the Air Force and I served state-side as an electronics instructor.   All the while I followed politics and tuned in to short wave broadcasts where ever I was stationed.   I continued to listen to Radio Moscow.  I may have been open to the possibility that another way of organizing society was possible.  I harbored a inner faith that as good or as bad as life was in the United States, we always had options. We had choices between the two parties. 

While serving in the Air Force I received an education that I had not anticipated.  I read Thoreau's essay, Civil Disobedience.  I experienced an awakening of sorts that called into question my conservative political upbringing.  By the time I had served my stint in the service and returned home I was becoming radicalized.  Another world was possible although I never really thought of it in those terms until recently.  A major shaping inflence stemed from what happened  outside the major party conventions in 1968.  As a result, for me 1968 has always had a revolutionary aura surrounding it.  What is happening now with the Occupy Movement is something I have discovered I had been waiting for ever since 1968.  It has to do directly with the rebirth of class consciousness and the phenomenon of oppression.  The advent of Occupy came for me on top the US Social Forum in Detroit.  My partner and I attended the US Social Forum in Detroit during the summer of 2010.  There were 18,000 other activists there who also thought another world was possible.

During the last several years and especially after the 2008 Presidential elections I have realized that essentially, those of us living in the good old USA have just one-party.  It is the party of the ruling elites.  It is the capitalist party.  It has two right wings.  That's why it keeps spinning to the right no matter how we vote.  And our media are occupied by the ruling elites who continually, twenty-four hours a day, pelt us with the predominate ideology.  Free markets are essential for our freedom we told in an uncritical manner.  Capitalism is necessary for democracy.  If you are unemployed, then that is our fault.