Miss Tick: I would actually take issue with two of the points you raised in particular.
One, I don't agree that Democrats and Republicans are equally bad. Republicans are an apocalyptic cult and Democrats are the coalition of those not in the apocalyptic cult. This is the reason why Democrats aren't the left wing we really want or need: it's not even a left-right distinction anymore as much as it is a sane-insane distinction.
Yeah I heard your argument about corporations owning both of them, but the problem with that is that the corporations and anarcho-capitalists really fucking want the Republicans in office. Of course the corporations donate heavily to both parties; they're hedging their bets, but they donate more to the Republicans, and it's the Republicans they want to actually end up in office. If both parties were really the same, they wouldn't care at all.
Yeah, I know the Democrats have their problems. This is, again, because they're a coalition of everyone not in the fucking apocalypse cult. It's kind of like you can vote for a party of pickpockets or a party of rapists and murderers. I don't even care about the arguments that the lesser of two evils is still an evil; they don't even fucking compare. Third-party solutions don't help in our current voting system, either, because they just take votes away from the pickpockets and directly contribute to installing the rapists and murderers. All my base are belong to the pickpockets.
You think it doesn't matter, but in 2016, four of the nine Supreme Court justices will be over 78 years old. Do you really not care whether quite possibly almost half the Supreme Court will be installed by the apocalypse cult or the coalition of the sane?
Granted, my views on the matter might be "tainted" by the fact that I'm a fairly garden-variety social democrat and would be comfortable with a mixed economy with meaningful checks on corporate power, obscene greed, the American Taliban, and the American landed gentry.
Two, I'm going to disagree with the idea that the common people have no power. I'd agree that the common people have no "legitimate" power, but I'm also not a pacifist. Occupy Wall Street might actually have worked if there was an actual potentially violent revolutionary movement active at the same time. A two-pronged approach with peaceful reform movements as the anvil and violent revolutionary movements as the hammer is absolutely necessary. Without the former, you get actual revolutions that go all the way and result more or less in local apocalypse. Without the latter, you get exactly what's happening now. Those in power have nothing to fear because the American Left (referring to the actual left, not just anyone in the coalition of the sane that is the Democrats) virtually presumes pacifism as a matter of course, and pacifism in the absence of another movement that shares similar goals but is willing to use violence is really just a pretty word for "toothless."
I would much sooner that a violent movement develops while we still have peaceful reform movements, because the credible threat of force driving the oligarchs to the negotiating table is vastly preferable to actually having to go all the way on force because there's no longer an alternative.
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