The Democratic and Republican parties are bankrupt, or let’s just come out and say it—they’re corrupt. Banks, corporations and the influence of billionaires have stolen our government from us and are using it to further enrich themselves. Tom Friedman, a naïve cheerleader for globalization and a serial apologist for the Iraq War, is not someone I usually follow, or whose opinions I value. For example, he still thinks we need corporate tax cuts to stimulate jobs. Really? The Financial Times debunked that idea in a recent article, as did  Ian Welsh in an excellent blog post on that topic. Tax cuts for corporations do not create jobs; they create jobs overseas.

But, I digress.

On October 2, Friedman wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times that made me sit up and take note. He admitted the United States is in serious decline, comparing it to the fall of Roman Empire, and declared that our two-party system is bankrupt and no longer viable. He also strongly suggested that a serious third party challenge could manifest in 2012.

Barring a transformation of the Democratic and Republican Parties, there is going to be a serious third party candidate in 2012, with a serious political movement behind him or her — one definitely big enough to impact the election’s outcome.

There is a revolution brewing in the country, and it is not just on the right wing, but in the radical center. I know of at least two serious groups, one on the East Coast and one on the West Coast, developing “third parties” to challenge our stagnating two-party duopoly that has been presiding over our nation’s steady incremental decline.

His op-ed is titled “Third Party Rising” and it includes statements from political scientist Larry Diamond, whom he interviewed for the piece:

“We basically have two bankrupt parties bankrupting the country,” said the Stanford University political scientist Larry Diamond. Indeed, our two-party system is ossified; it lacks integrity and creativity and any sense of courage or high-aspiration in confronting our problems. We simply will not be able to do the things we need to do as a country to move forward “with all the vested interests that have accrued around these two parties,” added Diamond. “They cannot think about the overall public good and the longer term anymore because both parties are trapped in short-term, zero-sum calculations,” where each one’s gains are seen as the other’s losses.

We have to rip open this two-party duopoly and have it challenged by a serious third party that will talk about education reform, without worrying about offending unions; financial reform, without worrying about losing donations from Wall Street; corporate tax reductions to stimulate jobs, without worrying about offending the far left; energy and climate reform, without worrying about offending the far right and coal-state Democrats; and proper health care reform, without worrying about offending insurers and drug companies.

“If competition is good for our economy,” asks Diamond, “why isn’t it good for our politics?”

We need a third party on the stage of the next presidential debate to look Americans in the eye and say: “These two parties are lying to you. They can’t tell you the truth because they are each trapped in decades of special interests. I am not going to tell you what you want to hear. I am going to tell you what you need to hear if we want to be the world’s leaders, not the new Romans.”

Other political blogs I follow have been embroiled in heated debate about the Democratic Party. That the Democratic Party is entirely bankrupt is a given. Opinions vary on how to deal with this reality, but they fall into three camps:

• Those who want to purge the party of corporate Democrats (which is just about everyone in the party) by challenging them at the primaries with true progressive candidates, in other words working within the existing Party over time to reclaim its Progressive roots.

• Those who want to abstain from funding or voting for Democratic Party candidates for the upcoming elections allowing the Party to crash and burn, so that a new Democratic party can emerge from the ashes.  This is the camp that feels we have to go through losing Congress in order to gain it back with real progressives.

• Those who want to build a viable third party to challenge what is perceived as a bankrupt and corrupt Democratic Party.

I expect to read about the idea of a third party challenge on the progressive blogs, but not from Thomas Friedman.  The fact that someone with his mainstream perspective is admitting this country is in very serious decline, and that both parties are bankrupt is significant. The fact that he knows of groups on both coasts that are mounting a serious third party challenge is noteworthy.

So, stay tuned, we may have a very interesting 2012 election.

The post Friedman: There could be a third party challenge in 2012 appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Recent news:  The space shuttle Atlantis docked at the international space station on May 16, 2010,  after officials decided there would be no need to perform a maneuver to avoid a piece of debris.

This may well have been the last flight of Atlantis. Following this mission it will be kept in working order, to be used as a possible rescue vehicle for one of the few remaining manned space flights.  While risk is still a crucial factor in the manned space program, in some ways, the program appears to be “yesterday’s news.”

Columnist Thomas Friedman has challenged us to launch a green energy technology program to match the intensity of the information technology program that has evolved over the past seventy years.  And he gives us a sound barometer to measure how we’ll know when the energy technology movement is beginning to make a real difference.  It will be when we have failures.  He’s talking about the kind of failures that occurred in the information revolution.  Failure is a reflection of the healthy competition that evolves from Darwin’s theory of survival of the fittest.

The ashes and rubble of failed programs and companies in the information revolution litter recent history.  But in many cases, each failure represented someone else’s success.

In the 1950s, the Navy’s Vanguard missile program to launch an unmanned satellite suffered one mishap after another, while the Army’s Redstone program succeeded in launching Explorer 1, an eighteen lb. satellite, into space on January 31, 1958, where it remained for twenty-two years.  The Army’s work was the precursor to NASA’s manned-space program.

On the commercial level, we see today’s winners: Apple, Intel, Sun Microsystems, Sony, Canon, Nikon, Microsoft, and many others.  Friedman asserts that they stand tall and in many cases continue to battle one another because they won the battles with previous competitors.  Some may remember the Commodore 64, which in the early 1980s was considered the class of the personal computing field.  But its operating system could not keep up with the Macintosh OS and Microsoft’s DOS and then Windows.  Prior to the Commodore, we had  the first personal computer, the Radio Shack TRS-80.  Unfortunately for the company, the computer lived up to its nickname, the TRASH-80.

If you were an investor in the 1980s, you were constantly getting tips on this company or that, one of which was going to revolutionize the computer industry.  The low-price stock might be making memory chips, fiber optics, new welding techniques, or the “brains” to the newest device to swipe credit cards.

While we remember tech stocks as being good investments in the 1980s and 1990s, we forget that most of the losers had investors, and they often lost all of their equity in a failed company.

Friedman’s point is surprisingly simple and logical.  Look at the table below and, while you can’t write on your computer screen, think of  how many information technology companies you could list in the left column and how few green energy technology companies your could list in the right column.

The green energy companies are there, they are just hard to find because they’re not that large (you’re not allowed to count a company called ‘BP’ that wants you to think that its initials stand for ‘Beyond Petroleum’).

Friedman takes the analogy between information and clean energy one step further.   I.T. essentially got its start from government.  During World War II,  the U.S., U.K., Germany, Soviet Union, France, and Italy were all working on hi-tech devices, mainly to become weapons of mass destruction or to be used for espionage.  Following the war, the American and Soviet governments put hundreds of billions of dollars into programs that could only succeed if based on information technology.  First the U.S. worked through the military, then NASA, and by giving tax incentives for research and development as well as building an infrastructure for the internet.

Friedman contends that green energy will become successful when it advances so far that we don’t even use the adjective ‘green’ in front of it, because all energy will be assumed to be green.  This phenomenon will happen when the government makes large financial commitments to partner with private entrepreneurs as it did with the information revolution.  Some of the private companies will succeed and make investors wealthy, and others will go by the wayside and leave some investors holding the bag.  But this is how it worked in our last major revolution and how it has to be if we are going to be successful in going green.

If and when a green revolution succeeds, the corporate corpses may include large fossil-fuel energy companies that currently thrive, as well as start-ups that by design or misfortune just didn’t find a niche in the program.  So if you want to see the clean energy program really take off, look for the failures as well as the successes.

The post In going green, failure leads to success appeared first on Occasional Planet.