"Every four years as the presidential elections approach, the alarm bell clangs for progressive-minded people, warning them about the looming take-over of the country by Republican ultras intent on yoking the nation under a fascist regime. Every four years, the Democratic Party offers itself as the only bulwark against the jackboot. Every four years, this argument becomes more and more labored; the differences between the two parties harder to detect." "In this volume, the editors and writers of CounterPunch, the radical newsletter and popular website, reveal how each party is fattened by the same roster of corporate contributors; bows to the desires of defense contractors and media conglomerates; hawks an economic program that shifts money up the tree to the super-rich; imprisons the poor with starvation wages or puts them behind bars in a vast gulag mostly created by that bipartisan failure, the War on Drugs." "The message of this book is: don't put the cart before the horse. First come the ideals, the social movements, that create the gravitational pulls that politicians have to heed. Justice won't come to America just because some candidate pledged it on the final night of a convention. It will come through people's movements, citizens organizing together in the workplace, or on the front lines defending their air, their water and their forests. There's work to be done. Let's get to it."--BOOK JACKET.