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The US electoral system is experiencing a crisis of legitimacy in the 2016 Presidential election cycle. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are the least popular candidates in US history. Clinton's record of service to Wall Street and the war machine has placed her at odds with a significant section of Democratic Party voters. Trump's candidacy has shattered the Republican Party into pieces. There is no better time than now for independent candidates to organize a real alternative to corporate power.

This is exactly what the Green Party has been doing in its 2016 presidential campaign. In 2008, the Green Party ran Cynthia McKinney for President. Her campaign was drowned out by the corporate symbolism of Barack Obama. In 2012, Jill Stein ran for President in a lame-duck election that was plagued by low voter turnout. The 2016 elections have presented a different challenge. Millions of people have been set into motion through the Sanders and Trump campaigns based on material issues. The Green party is hoping to expand its base by appealing to the discontent of Sanders supporters.

For the 2016 election, the Green Party has chosen Presidential candidate Jill Stein and her VP running mate Ajamu Baraka to organize a progressive movement independent of the Democratic Party. Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka's program is clearly distinct from program of the two-party corporate duopoly. The needs of the majority of people in the US and around the world are prioritized over the profit of the few. Universal healthcare, education, and the cessation of US wars represent a few of the Green Party's major policy proposals. The attractiveness of the Green Party to disaffected Democrats in the Bernie camp has emboldened the corporate media to run a smear campaign against Jill Stein.

The smear campaign against the Green Party is an inevitable response to the crisis of the two-party corporate duopoly. Neither the Democratic or Republican Parties have anything to offer their respective bases. For the Democratic Party, this has taken on increased significance ever since Hillary Clinton stole the primaries. Clinton's policy record of war, austerity, and racist state repression is the highest expression of what the Democratic Party has become. From the World War II period until the mid 1970's, the Democratic Party framed itself as the truest representative of labor and civil rights by granting concessions to the two largest movements in US history: the labor movement and the Black Freedom movement.

Today, the Democratic Party is the truest expression of US war, corporate plunder, and imperial power. Since the mid-1970s, Democratic Party Presidents have worked primarily for the super rich. Income and wealth inequality has widened dramatically as union density rates declined. The Black condition in the US has also deteriorated. Black wealth is less than it was in the 1960s. In 2015, the police killed more Black people than lynched in any one-year period during the Jim Crow era.

However, there have been far fewer calls to dump the Democratic Party as there have been to "dump Trump." The capitalist class that controls the two-party duopoly has (for now) been victorious in the battle of ideas. Many of the emerging movements of the last five years have been unable to articulate a coherent direction or ideology. The 2016 elections have opened up increased room to intensify the battle of ideas toward revolutionary ends. There is no better time to strengthen the fight against the two-party corporate duopoly by uniting the efforts of the left's "third party" candidates.

Every effort should be taken to unite people around the agenda of the Green Party and socialist tickets. Workers World Party's Monica Moorehead and Party of Socialism and Liberation's (PSL) Gloria La Riva possess similar a similar platform with the Green party. The difference is that Workers World and PSL are unapologetically communist in their political orientation. For the last several decades, communism and socialism struck fear into the eyes of the masses in the US. However, new polls reveal that socialism is becoming more palatable to US-born young people. The conditions have arrived for movement activists to drop anti-communist dogma and help build a social democratic bloc with socialist and communist forces.

Of course, such a project will endure great challenges if taken seriously. The Green Party's strength resides in its ability to mobilize around Presidential elections. Workers World and PSL consist of committed revolutionaries who are often overextended in their ability to both participate in the mass movement and run an election campaign that can win. Election campaigns are more seen as a venue to build the political consciousness of the working class than a method of transforming the system itself. The Green Party's convention included multiple calls to organize a mass party capable of building a social democratic movement that can break the two-party corporate duopoly's grip on the politics of the masses once and for all. This is a point of unity the Green Party, Workers World, and PSL can agree upon.

Furthermore, the conditions of US empire and global capitalism require the left to act urgently toward the end of working class unity. Russia and China are being provoked into a potential World War III scenario, with the US-NATO alliance leading murderous proxy wars in Syria, Ukraine, and the South China Sea. Capitalist economists have predicted that a collapse in the world capitalist system is on the horizon. And racist policing in the US has set into motion a movement that will only grow as the repressive apparatus inside of the empire seeks to maintain control under crisis conditions.

As George Jackson wrote in his manifesto Blood in my Eye, the time is now to “Settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation, understand that fascism is already here, that people are already dying who could be saved, that generations more will live poor butchered half-lives if you fail to act. Do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love in revolution.” The 2016 elections open up more political space to actualize George Jackson’s words. Dumping the Democratic Party and uniting third party efforts would advance the process. Whether we are up for the task remains to be seen.