We need to abolish poverty, not the Bill of Rights. The U.S. could cut military spending 75 percent and still spend more than twice as much as the next biggest military powers. We could cut 90 percent and be among the biggest military powers. We need a left that will bring these perspectives into the public arena, including the electoral arena. If the modest advances of the Greens next to the beating the Democrats took in the last election tell us anything, it is that the left should start running against the Democratic Party instead of trying to work through it.
Liberalism is dead.
The globalization of the capitalist economy, due to its heightened competition, is undermining all the ameliorative reforms that softened the harshness of capitalism in the industrialized countries. Capitalists can't afford decent wages and benefits and compete in the global economy. The center is collapsing along with the polarization of economic outcomes and the demise of the middle-income working class. Either the left strikes out on its own with a relevant program for a radical redistribution of wealth, income, and power, or it condemns itself to irrelevancy defending a corporate liberalism that has no political-economic basis anymore. Fusion foments confusion.