Last week, Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) abruptly announced his intention to retire from the Senate in 2014, on the heels of Harry Reid’s failure to get the two parties to agree to reform the Senate’s notorious filibuster after the 2012 election. According to Harkin, the failure of filibuster reform will

Many interacting factors caused the Giffords assassination attempt. No single factor suffices to explain it. However, the acts and omissions of the U.S. Congress and the nation’s two major political parties are among the most significant of these interacting causes. They include the following: 1. Congressional refusal to pass campaign

Despite all of Michael Bloomberg’s protestations, the purpose of the new political organization, No Labels, appears to be that of laying the groundwork for a Bloomberg presidential electoral campaign — and the creation of a campaign vehicle that can pull the rug out from under the deeply unpopular Democratic and

A key factor for Michael Bloomberg and his advisers with respect to a presidential bid is his ability to get onto the ballot nationwide.

A major new third party is set to launch in New York in early December, according to a Wall Street Journal article of 11/24/10, “New grassroots group targets centrist voters“. The irony of the label “grassroots” attached to this new party, named “No Labels”, is worth noting. According to WSJ

Tom Atlee recently described the game changing potential of the Interactive Voter Choice System in the following terms:

“The participatory social-networking capacity of the Interactive Voter Choice System shifts voters’ allegiance and attention from parties, ideologies, and political categories to the actual policies they want to see implemented. The system then helps them ally with others who want to see those policies implemented, regardless of their diverse political beliefs or reasons for favoring those policies. In the process, IVCS gives rise to an empowering, collectively intelligent, evolving, self-organizing political ecosystem which can enable citizens to do the following:

1. clarify and push for policies they want, creating their own personal “platforms”
   
2. network with others to form coalitions or ad hoc lobbying groups to push preferred policies
   
3. field candidates outside of the party system to promote the policies they want
   
4. create new political parties
   
5. work within existing parties to shape their platforms and performance
   
6. hold elected representatives accountable for their performance on favored policies
   
7. create parallel “shadow government” structures and policies
   
8. take over political parties and dissolve them and, through all of the above, to
   
9. ultimately move our politics beyond party politics and ideologies altogether.

Voters did not get what they said they wanted from the 2010 elections. In fact, they got the opposite because the two major parties rigged the elections. The parties have been rigging elections for decades by gerrymandering election districts and passing campaign financing and election laws that prevent third party

Although the winners of the 2010 elections and the two major parties backing them claim voters gave them a mandate, the overall results are widely interpreted to be devoid of mandates. That’s because the two parties and their financial backers have rigged U.S. electoral processes to prevent voters from issuing

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has recently predicted that 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”. Is this what the U.S. electorate needs to wrest control of government from special interests? How can voters be more broadly empowered to get control of electoral and legislative processes as a whole?