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In these bleak times, I have decided to run for truth and justice, which takes the form of running for president of the United States as a candidate for the People's Party.

I enter in the quest for truth. I enter in the quest for justice. And the presidency is just one vehicle to pursue that truth and justice, what I've been trying to do all of my life.

The Grange movement in the 1800s was an agrarian political movement among farmers who were fed up with the corporate monopoly over grain.

Terence Powderley was a labor organizer in the late 1800s most responsible for making the Knights of Labor a national movement.

Along the way, farmers would unite with the labor movement, joined forces with socialists and progressive free silver activists

looking to break the wealthy stranglehold over gold. This alchemy of interests gradually became

known as the Popular Alliance. Their platform was known as the Omaha platform, and it included

some familiar ideas like increasing the money supply in order to make it easier to pay down personal debt, an eight-hour workday, nationalizing railroads, taxing the rich, and mostly reining in corporate power.

Like other upstart movements and parties, some of the bigger ideas were indeed incorporated into the American two-party political apparatus.

Ideas such as an eight-hour workday,

income tax on the wealthy, and the direct election of senators, for example, all conceived

in the populist alliance and codified by the early progressive movement under Republican Teddy

Roosevelt and his successor. Today, one of my favorite public intellectuals, Dr. Cornell West, announced his

candidacy for the President of the United States. He's running under the banner of the People's Party,

which credits much of its platform to the legacy of the Populist Alliance. While I don't normally

comment on topics like this immediately, the idea of Cornell West on the national stage

is just too tempting to pass up. Now, listeners of the podcast will understand why this is a complicated

issue for me and might even be a little more forgiving of my gut reaction and my analysis than a leftist

or a social Democrat just discovering you in FTR. This moment is the ultimate what-if proposition that challenges my

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