(Ahlul Bayt News Agency) - Former US Senate candidate Mark Dankofin an interview offered his insights on the possibility of a third major political party gaining power in the United States.The following is a transcript of the interview:
Q: According to a Gallup poll, the majority of Americans support a third major political party to challenge the traditional two-party system. Why do you think most Americans feel the need for a third major political party?
Dankof: I think corporate interests, Wall Street interests and Zionist interests bankroll and control both of the major parties in this country. What we have is a situation, however, where -- as your report has also indicated -- there are certain hurdles to any third party becoming successful in providing an alternative. One is the amount of corporate money that backs both the Republican and the Democratic parties; the second is ballot access laws and the way in which those laws are written by the Republican and Democratic party state legislatures, in a way, that effectively keep third parties off the ballot in many of the fifty states; and a third is the fact that if you had an effective third party and an effective third-party candidate, they would be denied much media coverage, because the same forces that economically control Wall Street and the corporate system of the United States own these major news media outlets and are effectively going to keep a third party -- right, left or center -- from getting the kind of coverage that it deserves.
Q: It seems that corporate interests, Wall Street interests and Zionist interests are the three common features of the US presidencies. Why do you think Zionist interests would rank as one of the top characteristics of a presidency?
Dankof: All you have to do in terms of the Zionist interests is look at the latest numbers released by the Washington report on Middle East affairs in terms of Israeli political action committee money going into the major party candidates as well as the presidency. It is a staggering amount of money. If [only] the American people could see the amount of money that is being devoted to these Zionist-backed candidates, and the way in which these candidates are handpicked, not simply by the significance of the particular races that they are running in, either in the US House or in the US Senate.
Look at the committee assignments of these people once they are elected. When you are looking at defense and foreign affairs and appropriations and banking, one discovers that these are the candidates that are handpicked by the Zionist lobby not only to win elections, but to gain certain committee assignments at both houses of Congress in order that the type of foreign and domestic policy that we have had at both the Republican and Democratic parties continues. As far as the presidential races are concerned, the last couple of American presidents that showed any degree of independence whatsoever from the Zionist lobby were Dwight Eisenhower and John F Kennedy. Since Kennedy's assassination and the advent of Lyndon Johnson, every American president that has followed Johnson has seemingly been even more with the Zionist lobby and with these Israeli governments than his predecessor has been...
Q: Considering the backdrop of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and perhaps Pakistan, and the deficit the United States has had, and given that fact that one out of six Americans is considered to be poor, do you think enough is enough in terms of Americans' point of view?
Dankof: I think that is exactly right. It seems to me that if the United States becomes involved militarily in Syria and against Iran -- which is precisely what the Israeli lobby wants -- this could be the straw that breaks the camel's back in terms of creating a pre-revolutionary situation within the United States. I would also caution people, as we have talked about third parties, to beware of one other dynamic and that is co-optation. Just as one can argue very effectively that Western intelligence agencies are attempting to co-opt legitimate revolutionary movements in the Middle East, the same thing is true here in the United States.
Take a look at the Tea Party for example. The fact of the matter is that the Tea Party has grown out of the Ron Paul ... wing of the Republican Party... It is interesting how all of these people are conveniently pro-Israel, pro-Zionist and pro-interventionist in terms of their Middle Eastern policy. This suggests that a legitimate groundswell of populist movement, in this case the American right that was coming forth to oppose some of these policies, is in the process of being taken over by forces that are pushing the pro-Zionist, interventionist people like Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich.
Q: The United States is generally said to be running on a set of policies that are irrelevant of what the president is thinking; a certain group may be behind the scenes that has certain policies in place that the US has to basically pursue. As a former US Senate candidate, perhaps you can shed light on this issue as we are going back to the Zionist entity again here.
Dankof: I think the Zionist entity is in turn tied up with the international banking interests that clearly control presidential and Congressional policies. When I was a constitution party's candidate in the United States Senate race in Delaware in 2000 against Tom Carper and Bill Roth, it was most instructive for me to get into the federal election commission records to see who is bankrolling both Carper and Roth. It was not simply a question of the same kinds of political and economic interests we have been talking about here on this program being involved in bankrolling the major party candidates, but you were seeing the same names cropping up on both of the major party candidates' contribution lists. In other words, they had their bets covered regardless of whether Senator Roth had been re-elected again or Governor Carper of course -- who did in fact become Senator Carper -- was elected.
The fact of the matter is that the same interest had a stranglehold regardless of how it went. In my particular case I literally raised no money in that 2000 Senate race, and yet I got to combine vote total of both the constitution party and reform party candidates for president that year in the state of Delaware. And I think had I been running not in 2000, but in a post 9/11 environment, a lot of the issues that are resonating now with people: overextension of empire, domestic police state in this country, the demise of the manufacturing sector of the American economy and all of the kinds of things that both Ralph Nader and Ron Paul might be talking about, I would have had an even more effective run in a post 9/11 environment than I did in the year 2000. So I would say again that to me the best possible scenario for a third-party candidate would be to emphasize this war and to emphasize the economy. Empires run out of men and they run out of money, and this is what is happening to the Unites States.
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