The author’s break with the Democrats began when Obama’s administration sought revenge on him for blowing the whistle on C.I.A. torture. Now he has many more reasons.
President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric H. Holder, Jr., after announcing Holder’s resignation, Sept. 25, 2014. (White House / Public Domain)
By John Kiriakou
Special to Consortium News
In the movie Network, newsman Howard Beale famously shouted (and made a living from it) “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” That’s how I feel today.
I hate the ugly, angry, and divisive politics of 2025. And I hate the two major parties that have been thrust upon us as the only choices we have.
They’re two sides of the same coin, even if they pretend to be polar political opposites. We seem to hear constantly about the “radical left” and the “fascist right.” Nothing could be further from the truth.
As background, I was raised in a solid, middle-of-the-road, pro-labor Democratic family. My paternal grandfather kept a framed photo of Franklin Roosevelt on top of the TV until the day he died.
Both of my parents were George McGovern for President volunteers in 1972, and I even remember them arguing about whether Sen. Frank Church (D-ID) or Sen. Birch Bayh (D-IN) would be the better president in 1976. When I was in college at George Washington University, I was vice president of the College Democrats.
The affinity that I felt for Democrats began to wane when Bill Clinton moved the party to the right and embraced Wall Street in 1992. Still, I just accepted it at the time as a reflection of the world we were in.
But my complete and utter break with the Democratic Party came in 2012 when the Obama Justice Department arrested me and charged me with five felonies, including three counts of espionage, for blowing the whistle on the C.I.A.’s illegal and immoral torture program.
That’s a story in and of itself that I’ve covered elsewhere. It was certainly one of the reasons why I left the Democratic Party, but it wasn’t the only reason. And it wasn’t even the most important reason. There were a lot.
Rigged Nomination Process
First, Democratic voters don’t really choose the Democratic presidential nominee. See, the Democrats have a system of “superdelegates” at their conventions. Every major Democratic elected official in the party is automatically made a delegate to the presidential nominating convention. The party thus stacks the convention so that the party’s preferred candidate always becomes the nominee.
This began relatively recently, in 1976. The reason was that in 1972, Sen. George McGovern (D-SD), an outsider, anti-Vietnam War liberal won the Democratic presidential nomination over others that the party apparatus preferred.
McGovern speaking to International Ladies Garment Workers Union supporters at a campaign rally on Oct. 15, 1972. (Kheel Center, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)
The party honchos in those proverbial smoke-filled back rooms would have much preferred Sen. Ed Muskie (D-ME), Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson (D-WA), or former Vice President Hubert Humphrey (D-MN) to the solidly progressive McGovern. McGovern won the nomination by appealing to anti-war Democrats, but he went on to lose 49 of the 50 states to Richard Nixon.
The Democrats, seeking to ensure that no other outsider ever won the nomination, then created the position of superdelegate. Democracy be damned.
The caucus system, versus the more democratic primary system, also has ensured that the party bosses’ favorite candidates win the nomination.
In 2016, for example, Hillary Clinton began the race with 523 superdelegates to only 39 for Bernie Sanders. In the 2016 Wyoming Caucus, Sanders beat Clinton 59-40 in the popular vote, but Clinton won 11 delegates to four for Sanders. That’s just one example. The same thing happened across the country.
Sanders and Clinton in New Hampshire in July 2016. (Marc Nozell /Wikimedia Commons /CC BY 2.0)
The unfairness of the Democratic presidential nominating process is just one reason why I don’t trust the Democrats or want to be associated with them. The more important reasons are policy-focused.
Donald Trump won all seven so-called battleground states —Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, Georgia, Nevada, and Arizona — for a reason. Or for several reasons.
Human Rights & War
First, the Democrats have, for the most part, walked away from human rights as a tenet of their platform.
They at least appear to not care one whit anymore about Palestinian human rights, and they gladly attach themselves to Benjamin Netanyahu, the notorious right-wing Muslim-hater who rules Israel.
It’s not an accident that so many Muslim-Americans and Arab- Americans stayed home on election day last year rather than to choose between an anti-Arab Democrat and an anti-Arab Republican.
It was also no surprise that Donald Trump won Pennsylvania and Michigan when the Democratic Party promotes free trade on the backs of the American union worker, rather than to try to protect those workers from unfair foreign trade practices.
I actually found myself cheering Donald Trump’s speech in West Mifflin, Pennsylvania, a week ago when he announced a deal between U.S. Steel and Japan’s Nippon Steel that included a promise to not close a single steel mill for at least 10 years, and promises of higher wages and better benefits for American steelworkers. Why didn’t the Democrats do that?
A woman’s right to choose whether to terminate a pregnancy is also an issue that has always been important to me. The Democrats had literally decades to enshrine abortion rights into law. But they didn’t. Why? Because they knew that they could use the issue to frighten voters into donating millions of dollars. “Vote Democrat! The Republicans will take away your right to choose.”
“Handmaids at the U.S. Capitol” protesting in support of abortion rights on May 8. 2022. (Miki Jourdan, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
And that’s exactly what happened. Literally everybody in America knew that the Republicans would seek to stack the Supreme Court and to overturn Roe v. Wade. That’s what they did. And the Democrats just stood there and watched it happen. And lest you forget, Democrats had a filibuster-proof 60-40 majority in the Senate from 2009-2010. They could have protected reproductive freedom, but they elected not to.
Issues of war and peace, and the way the Democratic Party handles them are also of great importance. When did the Democrats become the party of war?
Wasn’t it Democrats in the streets in the 1960s and early 1970s demanding that the U.S. withdraw from Vietnam? Now it’s that same Democratic Party that demands blank checks for Israel and Ukraine. It’s the same Democratic Party that votes for defense budgets of over $1 trillion — more money than the Pentagon itself even asks for!
March 26, 2022: U.S. President Joe Biden delivers remarks on the war in Ukraine, at the Royal Castle in Warsaw, where he said Putin “cannot remain in power.” (White House, Adam Schultz)
Our political system is such that we are supposed to just accept the duopoly. We’re supposed to just accept the fact that there are only two viable political parties. Just choose the lesser of two evils, they tell us. But the lesser of two evils is still evil, and I won’t do it.
The Republican and Democratic Parties are copies of each other, with minor differences around the edges. I want a party that respects human rights, civil rights, and civil liberties, not just at home, but abroad, too. That’s why I left the Democratic Party. I won’t go back.
John Kiriakou is a former C.I.A. counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act — a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration’s torture program.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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** I want a party that respects human rights, civil rights, and civil liberties **
You might think about supporting a party that respects the Constitution. Just a thought.
I don’t contribute to either corrupt US political party. My contributions only go to independent newsmedia people.
I voted for neither presidential candidate. The corrupt US corporate newsmedia is run by the deep state.
I’ve a similar Oddyssey. I voted for Nixon in 1972, while in Vietnam. I voted for Jill Stein and the Greens in 2024. I might have voted Communist if I’d found them on the ballot.
I have also spent 25 years teaching in China and not voting at all. In that thme, Americans have gotten pooerer and porer, while Chinese people have gotten riched and richer. I credit that, not to marxism, but confucianism.
Excellent comments from the discerning readers of Consortiumnews. Many of the structural problems are identified but how to rectify change will not come from reforming either party. What’s to be Done? hasn’t been answered yet and we are running out of time.
Money and the associated corruption, and now with AI’s help, will ensure that the system never changes. You want another JFK well they’ve got plenty of Lee Harvey Oswald’s. Revolution is the only obvious solution but poor education ensures the masses stay compliant and the facade of democracy persists.
BRICS rise and the demise of the dollar may ultimately result in changes but it won’t be pretty, quick or painless.
I grew up with pictures of FDR, too. When only one parent had to work because of good union jobs. I was president of my large high school’s Teen-Age Democrats before the Vietnam war destroyed that organization.
It took awhile to fully appreciate the total inversion, but looking back I could see that by the late ’70s the Dems were falling for neoliberalism. The Ds dumped proven New Deal economics for the dogma of Friedman and the Chicago School; empiricism be damned. Same guy who supported Pinochet because “democracy interferes with market efficiency.” They also abandoned labor, doing the same for the Rust Belt as they did to the Wall St. vultures who caused the ’08 crash–NOTHING!
The arrogance of H. Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” and Schumer’s “For every blue collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania we’ll pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs of Philadelphia and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” Tell us without telling us your only concern is yourselves. Recently, Fox News (ugh) was on in the background and I saw an item how the Ds are elitists. Sick when Fox tells the truth. Yep, they represent the admin and professional class, those who as bureaucrats keep oligarchies in business.
Then add that final bit of unconscionable horror. What the few remaining Dem party loyalists don’t want to admit–how during the Biden administration, neocons trained by Cheney ran the State Dept. Well, not much remains of natural resources or to strip through trickle up, but there are still plenty of opportunities for war profiteering.
I left the Democratic Party under Bill Clinton who used the UN to maintain genocidal sanctions on the people of Iraq with his Secretary of State Madelyn Albright who famously said the price of 1.5 million Iraqi children was worth the cost. In addition, the dismantling of Yugoslvia as well as the Commdoties Modernization Act of 1996 which gutted the Glass-Steagall Act. And of course NAFTA.
It only got worse under Obama, the bailout of Wall Street at the expense of the American workers in 2008, the overthrow of the Zelaya regime in Honduras and the immoral destruction of Libya and Hillary’s cackling like a witch at the death of Morramar Qadafi.
I could go on, but the Democratic Party is the warfare Party as well as the corporate party that wages war on the American workign and middle classes and their smug sanctomonious liberal self-righteousness
When did the Democrats become the party of war? You have to go back much farther than Ukraine and Gaza to answer that question. Democratic presidents during two world wars, the Korean war, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the bombing of Yugoslavia and Libya, and most major wars since then. GW Bush was a Republican, but his warmongering administration that took us into Iraq and Afghanistan quickly shifted to the Democratic party when Obama was elected and carried out their war crimes under the Democrats. The war in Ukraine didn’t begin under the Biden administration, it began under Obama when he approved the 2014 illegal coup, armed the neo-Nazis, and installed a puppet president. Today, war is a bipartisan policy and both parties are neck-deep in kickbacks from the “defense” industry. But the Democrats have the history.
Actually Trump armed the Ukrainians. Obama refused to, one reason being he didn’t want US arms falling into the hands of “thugs” as he put it, i.e., the neo-Nazis.
hxxps://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/11/us/politics/obama-said-to-resist-growing-pressure-from-all-sides-to-arm-ukraine.html
What would be best is to have no political parties (“Factions” in the original founders’ vocabulary). But due to large populations, mass manipulation is so damn easy that one man (person), one vote, also called multipolar democracy, is very difficult to achieve. Just say somebody is invading, or any other sort of fear mongering through organized parties, and will scare blocks of voters enough to win an election.
Never-the-less we seem able to discern quite a bit of truth in our candidates…for instance, the 2024 election could be called between the candidate for WWIII and dictator. We picked the dictator because WWIII would have killed most of us.
I call that a “rational”choice, but certainly not a good one.
Exactly. I went through the same evolution based on all the same points you mentioned, thank you. For me it was the aftermath of 2016. I thought perhaps the DP would reform. Instead they circled the wagons and declared that they and their donor system was who they were. They even went to court to prove it. And the DP base just accepted it Consequently, they all donned a little sign for the back of their shirt that says “Kick me again!” And sure enough, that’s just what happened. Now they are explicitly connected to the Banderites in Ukraine and the Zionists in Israel. I no longer believe that the DP can self-correct. The sooner it is off the scene the better. Perhaps something better will grow up but I expect that a fundamental change in the US zietgeist will be necessary first.
Well it certainly seems the natives have become restless. While John is correct he seems to not willing to put emphasis the money corrupting U.S. politicians.
That corruption has very resulting in the U.S. policy of ignoring Israel’s genocidal actions in GAZA. As either and democrap or a repugniklan I would be totally ashamed of myself.
I have only one thing to add here. and Yup I intend to beat an almost dead horse.
All of our problems will only get worse until the 2010 SCOTUS ruling that overturned to SCOTUS ruling on the Citizens United vs F.E.C. concluding in the courts statement that money was the same a free speech.
If anyone expects a bonafide political representation take note of the warning I’m issuing here and now. Then get ready for the fight of your lives.
So before Citizen United, all was roses and wine in the land of the free? I’ll remind you that the 2009 bailouts of the banksters who created the Great Recession was before 2010, as was the Iraq war, the war on terra, the war on drugs, passing of the Patriot Act, etc etc etc
Our problem is that the very function of representative democracy leads to self interested elite capture of government, esp the Congress. Thus, the Zion lobby captures ME policy, the big weapons lobby captures foreign policy, the big oil lobby captures internal land management, etc.
The answer is sortition, if we want to go there. Get to real representative democracy.
I stopped donating to the D. Party after witnessing what the DNC did to Bernie. I spend my money now on local elections for those progressives who really need it.
Vote Green Party!
The Dems are totally bought off by Silicon Valley, intel-MIC (the bloodthirsty Russophobes who routinely pop up on MSNBC), the deranged Zio lobby, and many elements in Wall St.
We desperately need a third party that’s not beholden to big money special interests. Or, if they are beholden to certain special interests, those special interests must be vested in the good of the common American working citizen.
I finally left the Democratic Party in July 2016 when Bernie Sanders endorsed Hillary Clinton
Solid move my friend. Stay strong.
A lot of us have passed through a similar process as John Kiriakou, though I won’t pretend that it is often so intense. Here’s to closure and clarity, I guess.
No one in power cares if you “boycott” an election. If you were not buying the product, you cannot boycott, and the people who buy elections do not do so by voting. If you are willing to go a couple blocks away to protest something, cast a third-party vote. No, the candidate won’t win. No, the vote will not likely be counted properly, at least not in public. But someone somewhere somehow gets some idea that someone voted for what you yourself want.
A vote for a third party does not suggest faith in the existing electoral process nor any of the people who run it and staff it. Meanwhile, not voting is usually taken to suggest apathy. From the point of view of kleptocrats, apathy is a beautiful trait. From the point of view of propagandists, it is an appreciable victory. It is a self-neutering done from frustration.
Voting accomplishes little these days, admittedly. Would we were in an authentic democracy rather than an oligarchy with vestigial shreds of democratic form. But not voting helps to seal away the little remaining public control over public policy.
One of the South American countries allows you to cast a vote for no candidate. If the remaining do not get a plurality new candidates must be selected with them running in a new election.
I’m upvoting Bardamu’s insightful comment
The Republican Party and the Democrat Party: “Two cheeks of the same backside” as George Galloway would say.
John’s disgust with the uniparty is entirely justified. But who will he vote for? If a third party is the only way forward, which party is it? And how does it defeat Democrat lawfare to keep it off the ballot?
I have never heard what the “worth it” was. What were those children sacrificed for? (We considered the Aztec’s barbaric for making human sacrifices)
I agree. Since we live in an “oligarchy with unlimited political bribery”, folks should not participate in a sham that only legitimizes evil.
Instead of voting, we should all boycott the election and protest in front of the polling places. Why do folks legitimize the sham.
Blowing up children, targeting doctors, nurses, journalists, torture, and genocide are the worst evils humans do to each other. Yet our “democratic choice” is between Genocide (R), or Genocide (D). There is no lesser, it’s the same thing!
Anyone who votes R or D votes for genocide. There is no moral relativism here