Pros And Cons Of The Green Party

The Democratic Party has a history of spurning truly progressive candidates. As Gore Vidal asserted in an interview with The Progressive, there is only one major political party in this country. “It’s the party of big corporations, the party of money. It has two right wings; one is Democrat and the other is Republican,” said Vidal. Ralph Nader, an icon of the far left who ran for president with the Green Party in 2000, has literally been banned from entering the Democratic National Convention. A lesser known progressive, Larry Agran, who ran for the Democratic nomination in 1992, had a similar reception. Agran wanted to slash the military’s budget in half and reinvest those funds in America. He even held the polling requirements to enter the Democratic debates, but he wasn’t allowed to debate. Naturally, Agran protested from the crowd during one of the debates and yelled, “I request respectfully to be included in tonight’s debate.” In turn, he was quickly arrested for disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, and trespassing. This is a recurring theme and in 2012 the Green Party candidate, Jill Stein, was arrested after she tried to enter the …show more content…
The candidate that has raised the most money wins 93% of the time in the House of Representatives and it’s 94% for Senate races. As a result, the costs for running a campaign have exploded over recent history. The average cost of a winning congressional campaign was $56,000 in 1974. That figure rose to $1.1 million by 2008. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) once described the amount of time politicians spend fundraising as “nothing short of amazing” which is understandable as on average, thousands of dollars need to be raised every day. “I was a pretty bad fundraiser. (I spent) maybe two to three hours (per day fundraising) and that was on the low side (compared to other Congressmen),” said former Rep Joe Walsh