Government Covid Policies Are Doing A Great Job of Dividing The “Progressive” Left, Making It The “Anti-vaxers” vs. The “Faithful Pfizerite Fauci Followers.”

Maybe you’ve been noticing this too?: How vaccination mandates and government Covid policy, accompanied by barbs all over the place about “misinformation,” is doing a great job of dividing what we’ve considered the progressive left.  Now what we get is the so-called “Anti-vaxers” vs. the “Faithful Pfizerite Fauci Followers,” even though most who are “anti-mandate” or even who have questions about these particular (EUA- “Emergency Use Authorization”) vaccines aren’t exactly always 100% “anti-vax,” and even though the “Fauci Followers” of the left, however faithful they are at the moment, usually distrust Big Pharma and official government information.  Whew!

Why is the left always so good at getting divided and conquered?  Or maybe it’s just that there are people out there who are more intent on seeing that kind of division get done to the left than to any other group!  Basically, if you’re paying attention, dividing and conquering the public is a long-standing tradition in this country.  Those who have an interest in doing so can best be described as the power elite.  Oh yes, and if you want to know where the power is, money is pretty measure of where it resides.

The potent presence of this new fracturing force (is there no end to Covid’s ills?) really hit home for me when I heard about how government policy over mandates is probably going to break up New York State’s Green Party this year, perhaps pretty much wipe it out of existence- We’ll see. Will that “third” party fade so entirely in New York so as to become just a ghostly relic of an alternative to the corporate duopoly that people once held significant hope for?  

But then, after thinking about the Green Party, I realized that we are seeing this fracturing in various ways all over what has been traditionally been considered the progressive left.  Did you think that the way that people were holing up and sequestering during Covid was anti-social enough?; well now people are walking away from age-old relationships over this.  In some cases, it’s like they don’t even recognize the very basic principles that once steadfastly connected them.

What, no possibility for a united middle ground here if the two sides were dialoguing?

Maybe not.  If not, the issues of government handling of Covid and the corporate media blasting those polices non-stop into the culture are doing a truly superb job of weakening and annihilating coalitions that were already comparatively weak, poorly populated, and ineffective in trying to deal with the pervasive corporatism dominating society.

I could observe that between these two sides, one side might be a little more open minded and have a better, more tolerant understanding of the other’s point of view and its origins, while saying, conversely, that other side may be more prone to shutting down dialogue and information exchange, and it may be a side much more prone to argue for or to demand censorship and to advocate for a totalitarian treatment of others.  One side in this debate is anti-authoritarian, the other is not. . .  With the split, both sides are going to try to claim the mantel of “true left,” “true progressive” thinking.–

– One of the sides in this split will claim that mantel by saying that it is anti-social for those on the other side to “downplay” the menace of Covid by questioning whether the public’s fear is proportional to the illness's actual threat, and anti-social if those on the other side “gullibly” wonder if, in fact, there might be measures and treatments going unadvertised and unpromoted that could ward off illness, fortify healthy resistance and that could treat Covid in ways that diminish the terribleness of what we've been worrying about 24/7 non-stop– (Shouldn't we rest assured that the health industry has always acted in the best interests of the public?)  That side will think that those who make arguments for personal freedoms or who venture to explore ideas that might diminish the perceived peril of Covid and the prescribed vigilance it certainly requires are selfish violators of the Star Trek principle of needed self-sacrifice we heard enunciated in that once climactic exchange between Kirk and Spock: “It is logical. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, . . . or the one.”

While the left further fractures into the splintered shards of increasingly small, self-contained, self- referential bubbles (as is the problem with the country in general). . .  (Sorry that’s not an internally consistent metaphor) . . . . Something else interesting is happening. . .

Anti-authoritarian sentiment and a belief in personal freedoms is uniting one side of this split left with people on the right, with libertarians, with independents, definitely with lots of varieties of anti-corporatists, even with people across the spectrum who may consider themselves to have no basic political philosophy, only perhaps to have pragmatic instincts about things they feel are askew.  Maybe, like Occupy Wall Street and The Tea Party, who concurred on this, they are against what they view as the corruption and crony capitalism that occurs when corporations capture the government.

Is the broad spectrum uniting of all these elements in what may be termed the “Medical Freedom Movement” frightening to those in power?  It’s suggested that it is and that an example of the growth of these new alliances that could be troubling to them was the recent anti-mandate rally in January in Washington D.C..  The anti-mandate event in D.C. was just days after another rally by the D.C. mall’s monuments.  The earlier event was a “March for Life” anti-abortion rally, greatly diminished in attendance from prior years.  That rally from several days before, made the front page of the New York Times above the fold.  The anti-mandate event at the Lincoln Memorial did not get such conspicuous coverage by the Times.

Time Magazine, not downplaying or disparaging the anti-mandate rally the same way the Times did, choose to admonish and forebodingly scold that this coming together of folk of different political stripes under an anti-mandate banner represented something in the nature of Svengali-like hypnotism.  Their January 26 headline was: “How the Anti-Vax Movement Is Taking Over the Right.”  I don’t know what the photo they used to underscore their headline was actually intended to illustrate: Right-wingers being taken over, or the “anti-vaxxers” who are taking over the right. . .

.. .  I feel that it is usually destructive to pigeonhole people, but, for the sake of de-pigeonholing those featured in the photo Time chose, I can assure you that the group depicted, including the woman putting her hands together in a prayer clasp, were a group of non-corporatist, left-of-democratic-party-mainstream Democrats (or at least recent Democrats), including, if you look, one who wore a big “Black Lives Matters” button.  If you know what I look like, you’ll know why I can speak with authority on that subject.

This coming together of people from different walks of political life could have long-range significance; not just on this single issue, but only multiple issues of utmost concern.  As I have written about before, there is a long list issues of foremost concern to Americans that supermajorities merging both left and right agree on, more than a score.  While those are things the vast majority of Americans want and that we, as a country, could easily have, the political establishment is not willing to provide them. Collusively, the corporate media downplays them all and does its best to instead divide us with Red Team/Blue Team squabbles about things that are generally far less important.

I’ve also written about how we have to get away from the “Red Team/Blue Team” divisions, since both the Republican and the Democrat parties are controlled by corporatist money and interests; viewed with the slightest bit of perspective, the two parties can be seen to work more like a tag team pursuing the same goals than anything else. 

I wrote about how we need a new political “color.”  Unfortunately, “purple” has already been grabbed by the “Purple Project,” which while purporting to be a populist styled erasure of Red/Blue differences, is actually just more top-down corporatism for those realizing that the “Red Team/Blue Team” stuff is total mishegoss.  I wrote then that “green” with its connotations of environmentalism wasn’t the best choice because it was already taken by the Green Party. Now if the Green Party is one more of those groups going to further fracture its pursuit of principles in the face of the Covid policies coming from government and Big Pharma, that just confirms the need for a new color for new emerging alliances.

PS: Here is the Monday, December 13, 2021 statement of the National Black Caucus of the Green Party, “We Say No To Mandates,” that explains the political stance and direction they are taking.  I am unaware that the Greens in New York State on the other side of this split have articulated their position or the ways in which they disagree and can’t go along with what the Black Caucus expressed here.

The Clinton And The Trump Investigations And Impeachments: Both Following The Same Formula For Division And Subtraction By Distraction?

I don’t know about you, but I had a striking revelation: The Clinton and the Trump presidential impeachments and the theatrically dramatic investigations accompanying them were remarkably the same.  In each case, the news media and our congress obsessed and transfixed for months on an investigation that seemed giant, sensational, and exhaustive, yet in each case was focused on something largely irrelevant to what was actually there to be investigated.  Also, in each case, the relatively trivial offenses selected to be focused on were perfect to foment and stoke distracting Red Team/Blue Team division.

I first realized the strange kinship of the two impeachments/investigations when I was reading a Whitney Webb article.  It was the fourth article in Ms. Webb's MintPress News series on pedophile sex ring operator and apparent blackmailer Jeffrey Epstein.  This is the in depth, connect-the-dots series that has attracted Ms. Webb so much attention.  The series was extra-remarkable when it got started getting real attention because Ms. Webb started it before Epstein’s provocatively mysterious death.–   The fourth article in the series, the first written after Jeffrey Epstein’s death, had me thinking, “reeling” is a better word, about how there was so much about the Clintons, Bill and Hillary, that Whitney Webb was writing about that was never investigated, never surfaced as part of any formal investigation, stuff that obviously should have been investigated. . .  But I remembered the Ken Starr’s Whitewater investigation that turned into the Monica Lewinsky scandal based impeachment and trial of Clinton.  Hmm.
                                           
That’s when I first thought about the commonality of the Clinton and Trump impeachments/investigations.  I don’t know if it vexed you, but for me it was excruciating that there is so much to investigate about Trump, so much that he could be impeached for (violations of the emoluments clause in the running of his hotels and resorts, diverting money appropriated for other things into his “wall,” willful violations of international treaties, assassination of Soleimani, putting a fox in charge of the hen house of every government regulatory agency chartered to protect the public), and yet the Democrats ignored all the potentially strong bipartisan issues challenging Trump and they impeached him for something totally different. 

Ignoring strong potentially bipartisan grounds for impeaching Trump while going after Trump on weak ones, the Democrats weaken anyone’s future ability to impeach and convict Trump on the much stronger, valid grounds available; “What doesn’t kill him, makes him stronger.”  They probably weaken the ability of anyone to impeach and convict any president in the future.  Beforehand, the Democrats notably put their energy into a rather bogus “Russiagate” investigation.  That’s now morphed, somewhat seamlessly, into a Ukraingate investigation. Of all possible things, the Democrats decided to impeach Trump for steps Trump took to surface corrupt activities of Joe Biden and his son in the Ukraine.

Are you wondering about the probable depths of the Bidens’ Ukranian corruption?  If you're doubting that it’s a significant issue, I suspect that, unserved by corporate mass media, or at least the Blue media, there’s much you haven't yet paid attention to.  To catch up, I recommend to you some documentary segments “UkraineGate – Inconvenient Facts” (the first is “A Not So ‘Solid’ Prosecutor”) produced out of France.  It’s available through partnering work done with Consortium News, for anyone who wants to get extra educated as they indulge their wondering about whether the Bidens, father and son, behaved in a manner worthy of a corruption investigation that would look into how, when Joe Bidden was in charge of Ukrainian affairs for the Obama administration following the United States’ participation in the overthrow of the Ukrainian government, Hunter Bidden, his son, got a very hard-to-explain, almost insanely lucrative five-year appointment to Burisma Holdings, a huge Ukrainian natural gas company.  Joe Biden was thereafter, still theoretically working of the U.S. taxpayers, when he was involved in removing and replacing the Ukrainian prosecutor in charge of investigations of that gas company’s business.

It’s possible you’re a Blue-team loyal Democrat who is in line with the feeling that Trump should absolutely not have tried to surface matters for investigation about the Bidens– If so, I suggest you try turning these things around and imagine how a Red-team loyal Republican might scoff hearing about the refusal of Democrats to allow the Bidens to be called as witnesses concerning the corruption Trump says he wanted to surface.  If impeachment witnesses are, indeed, important, why not welcome these witnesses? . .   Or just imagine that it was a yet-to-take-office Democratic president trying to surface, for better investigation, matters involving corruption during a prior Republican administration, perhaps Trump’s family reaping spoils in a country where we helped depose the government.  That country could be Bolivia, which is another country with natural gas resources likely to now be privatized.  Or possibly it could be Venezuela, an oil rich country the Trump administration is making concerted attempts to overthrow.

The point is this: Was Trump’s interest in seeing the Biden’s Ukranian activities investigated strong grounds for impeachment, or just an issue guaranteed to cause people to divisively side more strongly with contradictory outrage being expressed, respectively, in turn by either the Blue Team or the Red Team?

Now let’s go back in time to the Clintons.

Reading the Whitney Webb article with so many unsavory facts and allegations about the Clintons in one place, made me think about how I felt when Ken Starr, having supposedly started with Whitewater, was relentless pursuing President Bill Clinton for not telling the frank truth about his philandering sex life.  I remember, at that time, honing in on the principle that you should investigate the crime, not investigate the man.  That’s because in this complicated world if you selectively devote enormous resources to investigate just about any single individual there is probably something you can find that that individual did wrong if that is your intent.  And it seemed that was exactly what Ken Starr was doing.

I remember how back at the time in the 1990s, I felt increasingly aligned with, and defensive of Bill Clinton, because I felt he was being persecuted not prosecuted.  At that time, it forced me to ask whether we needed to know about and judge peoples’ personal sex lives as a predicate for determining their suitability to hold a governing office.  My answer on this subject was basically, no, with some exceptions.  In particular, I felt those exceptions pertained to those individuals in politics who were hypocritically trying to dictate and moralize about the sex lives of others by holding up rules they didn’t follow themselves: I was keenly aware that top Republicans prosecuting the Clinton impeachment, including three Republican House Speakers at the time, Dennis Hastert, Newt Gingrich, Bob Livingston, were all involved in their own sex scandals.

I wasn’t the only one reacting to the Clinton impeachment this way.  Democrats picked up seats in Congress as the probable result of the impeachment.  The impeachment of Clinton launched MoveOn as an organization to raise money for candidates opposing Republicans.  Bill Clinton’s sex life and the potentially hypocrisy of some Democrats seeming to defend even its predatory aspects, helped build up both sides.  MSNBC, only a few year old at the time was able, as pointed out by Matt Taibbi, to build up a Blue-Team type audience reporting on the Clinton impeachment hearings– It was an alternative to Fox, which was relishing a semen-stained dress.  Matt Taibbi points out that, “Fox struck gold with the Lewinsky story and the Clinton impeachment.”  Both “sides” were inflamed to more Red Team/Blue Team rooting by the issue.

Similarly, today, even as Blue Team-rooting Democrats were cheering the Trump impeachment or coaxed to do so, indications are that the Democrat’s flailing impeachment of Trump is driving Trump’s ratings up.
    
Flash back to the Clintons: After the Ken Starr investigation of Bill and Hillary Clinton culminating in the targeting of Clinton for impeachment for quibbling about what “is” meant when he was uncomfortably being questioned about his sex life, I felt as if the Clintons had been thoroughly investigated.  They must have thoroughly investigated, or so it seemed.  Ken Starr spent massively on his investigation of the Clintons.  Starr is estimated to have spent between $70 million and $80 million on his investigation (with all Clinton investigations combined, it may have been $92 million), and didn’t it seem that Starr was obviously stretching to hit the Clintons with whatever he could dig up, even it was something flimsy about Clinton not honestly answering questions concerning his sex life?  To appreciate whether that was a lot of resources devoted to an investigation, consider that the entire 9/11 investigation, the investigation of the event that launched multiple wars and trillions in spending, was initially budgeted just $3 million. $11 to $15 million was what was finally spent on that investigation; it was obvious it was to keep it on a short leash.
                               
Fast forward to find we have Trump in office.  We have another investigation that involves headlines awesomely plastered everywhere, Mueller’s “Russiagate” investigation.  Again we sense that enormous resources are being devoted to the delving.  This time though the investigation actually costs the taxpayers a little less.  Although Trump tweets and Giuliani as his lawyer asserts that the Mueller’s “Russiagate” investigation is costing $40 or more, the actual cost of it, coming out gradually, over time is probably in the mid-30s.  But then, of course, the “Russiagate” investigation is followed up with Ukraingate from which its is financially distinct, although they get thematically linked ('election help for Trump from foreign governments that use Cyrillic alphabets').  While we had the spectacle of what was referred to as the Trump-accusing “whistleblower” in Ukraingate (probably not an individual, but a CIA team effort), which must have involved some inevitable investigative followup, there are no figures yet offered for the cost of the impeachment investigation to add to the perhaps $35 million Mueller spent on Russiagate.

Certainly, from all the headlines and the leaks reported by Rachel Maddow, the New York Times, et al, there again had to be a feeling engendered that the investigation of Trump was thorough. Furthermore, the mainstream press assured us ahead of time that Robert Mueller could be relied upon for a credible investigation. As just a sample, the New York Times said Mueller was “a former federal prosecutor with an unblemished reputation” whose appointment would “alleviate uncertainty about the government’s ability to investigate the questions surrounding the Trump campaign and the Russians,” that he was “hailed by Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill, who view him as one of the most credible law enforcement officials in the country.”  We were told Mr. Mueller’s “record, character, and trustworthiness have been lauded for decades by Republicans and Democrats alike.”

Accepting any assurance of the expected validity of any of Mueller’s investigations is ill advised . . .  While the Times was writing about about Mueller’s “unblemished reputation” and sterling qualifications to be the Russiagate Special Prosecutor on May 17, 2017, just four years prior, May 9, 2013, you would have been reading in the Times the prediction that Mueller’s legacy would be unforgettably besmirched by Mueller’s botched investigation of tips the FBI was given ahead of time concerning the Boston Marathon Bombing.

If you review the entirety of Mueller’s career, you will find that Mueller’s forte is, in fact, craftily botching investigations to reach incorrect and misleading results.  The investigations he is involved in regularly focus on, pursue, and indict the wrong people for the wrong things.  Researching and writing about his record, I discovered over a dozen extraordinarily high profile cases and investigations (BCCI, Iragate, Iran-Contra, Anthrax, Enron, Pan Am Flight 103 Lockerbie, Whitey Bulger, Khobar Towers Bombing, Timothy J. McVeigh, 9/11, etc.) running from the 1990s consistently to the present where his results were conspicuously suspect.  At one time or another the inadequacy of various investigations were all covered by the mainstream corporate media, but the media usually has a conveniently short memory when they want to report about Mueller’s record.  The actual facts are that Mueller doesn’t seem to have very much in his record to boast of where the results of his investigations, when examined, did not seem to involve misdirection.

There was, of course, at the end, the publicly conducted jousting of Mueller William Barr that grabbed extra attention.  That jousting made Mueller’s Russiagate investigation efforts to `nail’ Trump seem sincere, but it helps to set aside that distraction if you know that Mueller and Barr are actually good friends who have worked together, often closely, on many of Mueller’s misdirecting investigations in the past.

As for Ken Starr, the Clinton Special Prosecutor, Starr just showed up as part of Trump’s legal impeachment defense team to make news by not-so-adroitly reversing himself on the subject of whether the country should pursue “divisive” impeachments. Should we consider Starr’s investigation of Clinton any more credible in terms of it's being on target in terms of what really needed to be investigated?   Starr is also very good at ignoring things and not investigating what needs to be investigated.  In 2016 Starr was fired from his job as president of Baylor University, accused of ignoring a fairly massive scandal about sexual assaults on his campus.  How ironic, after going after Clinton for sexual conduct issues.  Ironic too that the president Starr would choose to defend is the pussy-grabbing Trump . . .

 . . Starr was also part of the legal defense team for pedophile sex ring operator and apparent blackmailer Jeffrey Epstein, which brings up back around to uninvestigated cover-ups.  It also bring us back around to that fourth article in Whitney Webb’s Jeffrey Epstein series that laid out so much damaging information about the Clintons in relation thereto.
   
That then is what I believe deserves noticing: The Trump and the Clinton presidential impeachments and related investigations resemble each other so closely, that it is almost as if the Clinton impeachment and investigation was used as the playbook for what we just witnessed with Trump.  It’s the same subtraction, division, distraction formula with the same results:

    •    Start with important serious complex matters worth investigating, that would need to be investigated in order to hold the powerful to account.
    •    Subtract out for investigation only some things that are trivial and not worthy grounds for impeaching a president.
    •    Have those things that you investigate be sensational and controversial to ensure escalating division of the populace from differing Red Team/Blue Team perspectives.
    •    Have a big showy investigation where it looks like all the stops have being pulled out and the investigators are really anxious to “get” the president any way they can.

And what you get is:

    •    A more divided populace, pushed more into the deepest corners of the Red Team/Blue Team factionalism that helps ensure, fuel, finance and perpetuate the duopoly that traps and controls the electorate.  In this regard it is important to note that factionalism pushing people into rooting emotionally for the Red Team or the Blue Team, respectively, turns off critical thinking and analysis.  Additionally, it causes people not to think in terms of the many common interests they share would otherwise naturally prevail.
    •    A public misguided by its strong impression that everything that needed to be investigated has been delved into deeply and relentlessly, that no stone has been left unturned.  The public thinks that, like in a court of law, there has been a contest that ensures this, not that it amounts to a certain form of collusion.
    •    A government that is even less subject to being held to account than it was before.

On The Political Spectrum, We Are Told That We Are All “Red” or “Blue,” Or Maybe That We should be “Purple”– If All Those Colors Are Taken, And They All Mean “Corporatist” Plus Spending More On War, Maybe We Need A New Color!

Relentlessly "Red" or "Blue"? Aren't there other colors in the political spectrum that don't mean "corporatism"?

If anything should convince us faster of how completely we are coaxed to relentlessly play the “Red Team/Blue Team” game of politics, it probably should be the way that we don’t talk in terms of any other colors to describe the political spectrum.  Matt Taibbi is one of our political observers who notes the that the “Red Team/Blue Team” divisions are designed to encourage the kind of knee-jerk rooting for your chosen “team” that turns off critical thinking and escalates the kind of passions that obscure and interfere with the ability to discern and build upon common interests.  In fact, the cover of Taibbi’s new book, “Hate Inc.,” about how the corporate mass media routinely fuels anger and division in this country confirms the importance of the Red/Blue color meme representing division in half red and half blue.

More honestly, as I have been writing about here in National Notice, the bigger truth is that the public is largely united on most of the most important issues, with huge supermajorities of the public agreeing on what they want for country on a score of those most important issues even while elected officials refuse to provide those things and the corporate press backs those electeds up by relentlessly messaging that these are things that the public can’t expect to have.

Notwithstanding these commonalities, we are being sold the notion that we are divided.  Right after the 2016 election, on the eve of the presidential inauguration, PBS’s seemingly sober and authoritative Frontline rushed in to explain to us that we were in turmoil was because we are a divided nation, broadcasting its “Divided States of America” on January 17, 2017.  More recently, Frontline is back again with more of the same, broadcasting a few weeks ago, “America’s Great Divide: From Obama to Trump,” January 14, 2020.  Not only are we being sold on the idea of these false divides, we are being sold on the idea that the divide is between, and must be thought about in terms of, “red” and “blue,” or “Republican” versus “Democrat.”

Meanwhile, some observers whom I consider more astute because they are thinking the way I do (how is that for my own personal confirmation bias?) are not seeing the poles of the political spectrum in those terms at all.  They see the ranging of opinions in terms of populism versus corporatism, or populism/Democratic Socialism versus corporatist/Neoliberalism. On this spectrum, Trump was elected delivering faux populist promises and, with a switcheroo that he vaguely still tries to deflect attention from, has delivered corporatist crony capitalism, kleptocracy, and more neoliberalism.  Bernie Sanders can, in this light, be seen as a candidate that has more in common with Trump for what Trump initially promised, which explains the attraction of Sanders for so many who once voted for Trump.

Seeing the spectrum this way, both the Republicans and the Nancy Pelosi/Hillary Clinton Democrats represent the corporations and the wealthy global cooperate elite, and both “red” and “blue” are colors that stand for the pursuit of cooperate interests adverse to the general public.  In the case of climate change catastrophe chaos and militarism, these interest are very likely even completely adverse to the continuing survival of mankind and life on this planet.

If we can only now be politically defined in terms of those two pre-selected colors, I think we need some new colors.  Occasionally, when we are not being told how hopelessly divided we are as a country when we are actually not, we are paternalistically told that, rather than being so extreme, we should migrate to somewhere in the political spectrum that’s between, to the color “purple,” viewed as somehow moderate, or maybe even “independent” thinking.  That’s what’s going on with the Purple Project for Democracy.  It has a catchy slogan, “We The Purple,” conveying that it somehow reflects populism, and it bills itself as a “strictly non-partisan, apolitical effort,” but it is a top-down oriented plan for a corporate media coalition to start dictating what should be considered reliable theoretically middle of the road media.  In other words, it is an effort by entities such as The Washington Post, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Hearst newspapers, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute, NPR to speak with a more unified and authoritative voice to marginalize the noncorporate reporting and viewpoints that compete with their own.

If “red” represents corporatism and “blue” represents corporatism, then “purple” is just more corporatism that is theoretically peacefully without the “Red Team/Blue Team” squabbling and hate that the media typically conjures up.  A sort of spiritual “corporatism”?  Purple has long been a color identified with spiritualism.  The “purple” they want to sell us instead represents more efforts to separate us from any genuine populism-building narratives.

We obviously need a new color, or new colors.  I should note that one color, green, has already been taken by an alternative party, the Green Party, with a strong identification with, and platform built on, environmentalism.  Rather than just suggest that this is the answer, although the green party has important answers, I’d rather suggest that we go with something not quite so predefined and perhaps not so automatically associated with the environment. "Yellow" might have negative connotations when the path needs to be courageous.  Perhaps, the hard to define color of "teal"?

One other thing we need to change, along with the introduction of new colors, is the way that we hold our elections.  The way that we hold our elections is part of the reason that we only hear about “red” and “blue.”  The way that we currently hold our elections locks us into the rigid constriction of the  duopoly and ensures that it is easy for the corporations to buy off the only two parties who are only theoretically competing. Along with a new political color or colors, we need to be instituting changes that give third parties, parties like the Green Party, a change to rise, strengthen, and become truly competitive when they have valid and important ideas. . .  very likely the ideas that reflect the reasonably longings of huge supermajorities of the population-- That means changes like instant runoff elections, and proportional representation.