{"id":4512,"date":"2012-09-16T09:43:10","date_gmt":"2012-09-16T14:43:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.progressivefox.com\/?p=4512"},"modified":"2018-08-16T15:50:12","modified_gmt":"2018-08-16T20:50:12","slug":"how-and-why-other-countries-have-ended-the-two-party-system","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.progressivefox.com\/?p=4512","title":{"rendered":"How and Why Other Countries Have Ended the Two-Party System"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>from <a href=\"http:\/\/rt.com\/programs\/big-picture\/\">The Big Picture with Thom Hartmann (RT)<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<p><iframe width=\"450\" height=\"338\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/MiEt6703L1o?rel=0\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>So the conventions are in the books, and we&#8217;re two months away from the election. We&#8217;re two months away from Americans having an ultimate choice &#8211; vote for the Democrat or vote for the Republican. Actually&#8230;that&#8217;s not really much of a choice at all. In fact &#8211; other Democracies around the world would laugh at us if we claimed that a vote between one of two major parties here was ACTUALLY a legitimate choice. The truth is &#8211; a two-party system isn&#8217;t really that Democratic at all. And most of the other Democracies on the planet know that &#8211; that&#8217;s why they&#8217;ve reformed their elections to prevent a two-party duopoly from taking over their representative governments.<\/p>\n<p>Did you know there are six political parties represented in the German Congress &#8211; the Bundestag &#8211; and even more parties represented in state parliaments around Germany &#8211; including the Pirate Party? Australia, too, has six parties represented in their parliament. In the Italian Parliament as well &#8211; there&#8217;s six major parties represented &#8211; and more than two dozen smaller parties that are represented in some way as well. Brazil has 15 parties represented in Congress. Heck &#8211; Israel&#8217;s Parliament has like 18 parties in it. &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>from The Big Picture with Thom Hartmann (RT) So the conventions are in the books, and we&#8217;re two months away from the election. We&#8217;re two months away from Americans having an ultimate choice &#8211; vote for the Democrat or vote for the Republican. Actually&#8230;that&#8217;s not really much of a choice at all. In fact &#8211; [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[79],"tags":[128,1714,1715,1712,1716,1713],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.progressivefox.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4512"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.progressivefox.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.progressivefox.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.progressivefox.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.progressivefox.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4512"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.progressivefox.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4512\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4515,"href":"http:\/\/www.progressivefox.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4512\/revisions\/4515"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.progressivefox.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4512"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.progressivefox.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4512"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.progressivefox.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4512"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}