On Saturday, May 15, 2010, in Albany New York, the Green Party State Committee nominated its state-wide slate of candidates. I was a candidate for US Senate, and indicators were positive for the nomination. There were two open slots, and a dearth of candidates.
I was shocked when I lost. My surprise defeat, and the process on Saturday, were products of a process so flawed, I am prompted to resign from the Green Party State Committee, and its adjunct “Campaign Committee.â€
I hereby resign from the Party as a member, as well.
Here’s why:
- Bureaucratism and Undemocratic Procedures
- Cowardice on the 9/11 Question
- Cultural Bias Against Strategies that Could Bring Victory
Background
Let me clear the air. I bear no malice. I am grateful to Greens who reached out and tried to mollify me. Clearly, what happened on Saturday seemed wrong to me, but not me alone.
I paid my dues. I bounced back from my nominating convention defeat in 2006 and worked for the Howie Hawkins campaign. I joined the NY State Committee, went to Chicago for the Presidential nominating convention, and went upstate to GreenFest several times. But that doesn't seem to matter to anyone. Maybe because there’s a creeping realization that the GP NY is shrinking in size, yet can’t break out of its dysfunctional practices.
Anyone fresh and new to the party is treated with suspicion. The GP resents new ideas. Talent, accomplishments, and leadership are foreign to the lives of the established GP NY insiders, so people with those qualities are humiliated. I see now that this a cultural practice. The culture of the organization is not to engage in a rich political discussion in which best practices are brainstormed and refined.
This was clear in Albany. Over time, the GP NY has not refined itself, but coarsened itself, by alienating the good and re-nominating losers. The GP NY, and especially the State Committee, has become a collection of NY State’s most unelectable ultra-leftists with no people skills, low emotional intelligence, and an over-simplified, knee-jerk, PC left politics yearning for a socialism so antiquated even the GP platform itself doesn't call for it. [Mind you that he bears no malice-C4S]
For example, right after that surprising vote for Senate, I was stunned and down on the mat. Gubernatorial candidate Howie Hawkins came up to me, and asked what I planned to do for the Party and for the ticket.
Carl Person, an attorney general candidate, later asked me, “You worked for Howie, did he ever do or say anything friendly to you?†That gets right to the point: there’s a basic human decency missing from the thinking of this party, especially its leaders. Howie’s question was so badly-timed, devoid of empathy, I have to be honest—Howie is a mild choice of a candidate. He works the third shift loading trucks so unfortunately, he always seems half-asleep. But he’s a Union worker, and a Party founder, so the GP ignores all else, and makes the fatal assumption that other ultra-left voters will do the same.
The GP NY is slouching towards silent suicide. Let's face it: Their slate is the people who ran last time, voted in by the same people who voted them in last time. Einstein’s definition of insanity is when you do the same thing over and over and expect a different result. Last time was a disaster. Now the party's smaller. The GP NY will have a smaller disaster.
Maybe Howie Hawkins can win over 50,000 votes as Governor, since we did win him 54,000 as US Senator. But Cuomo is a stronger candidate than Hillary Clinton was, and is not running as an incumbent carpet-bagger, like Hillary. The GP NY couldn’t pull off a mailing to registered Greens last time around, so they have yet to prove basic competence.
The GP NY on race and gender is skin-deep. I was getting all the signals that the nomination was mine. Then, there was a quick decision, made somewhere behind the scenes by the old guard, to reshuffle the deck, and put two black ladies into the slate as the US Senate candidates. This decision was made suddenly, in a non-transparent, invisible way, and it was based in part on politics that rely on a shallow, PC-level understanding on race and gender.
Don’t get me wrong: Cecile Lawrence and Collia Clark will make fine candidates, both are bright and well-spoken. They are probably the strongest candidates on the slate, and are the freshest faces in the party. But look what happened with the other three slots on the slate: Howie Hawkins ran unopposed for the Governor’s spot. Long-time party insiders Julia Willebrande and Gloria Mattera were not even running at the convention’s start, but decided on the spot to enter the race. It became clear at convention’s end that this was a small club. The vote was controlled by the club to nominate members of the club. (Unless you were a black female, with whom the Party was desperate to “diversify†and nominate the kind people they wish they had in their membership.)
US Senate candidate Robert Gumbs is right to point out that this process was undemocratic. The state-wide membership of the party was never consulted, either with a series of regional meetings, or an online poll. That would have been a brilliant way to re-energize the alleged “25,000 to 50,000†registered Greens of NY. But no. Democracy scares this club.
I have resigned from the SC and the Campaign Committee, and I am leaving the party.
Let’s go back to the three reasons:
- Bureaucratism
There’s so much energy wasted in this party on questions of procedure, but when push came to shove, the rules were easily abandoned to satisfy bad political views. Let’s look at the Lynne Stewart question. Lynne Stewart was allowed on the ballot for Attorney General, despite the declaration made earlier in the day that she or her representatives had to phone in an intent to accept the nomination. She never did, but bad politics ignored that.
No one dated the mention the obvious: Lynne Stewart is a convicted felon for aiding terrorist Blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman. No matter what you believe about all that, it would be political suicide to nominate her. A responsible electoral party would not go near her candidacy. This is again, the think you do only if you want to impress other ultra-left friends and rivals. It will never win more votes than it will lose. But no one said that, and I was not allowed time to speak. We had a talented, accomplished candidate for Attorney General present and qualified to be on the ballot: Carl Person. But the GP NY instead voted over-whelmingly for “None of the Above.â€
- The 9/11 Question
The political question of 9/11 is over-whelming for ultra-leftists. It requires more moral courage than they believe exists in the human soul. It requires a dedicated anti-imperialist politics combined with a love for a political diverse mass movement, and the ultra-left mind just can’t do the latter. So, the Green Party State Committee’s Steve Bloom published a memo that sought to alienate me for my “leadership in the 9/11 Truth Movement.â€
It’s funny that someone should be attacked for leading a social movement. Who else in this Green Party NY has done so? The 9/11 Truth Movement is a huge giant awaiting some candidate to prod it from its electoral slumber. It could unleash an avalanche of votes if approached in the right way. But the ultra-left consciousness turns up its nose and calls the Truth Movement “tea-party politics.†Steve Bloom’s memo was plagued with such mediocre logic I haven’t lowered myself to respond to it. It’s funny that we will dismiss someone’s attack as “red-baiting†but there is no similar protection against “Truther-baiting†vitriol. That’s OK, look at how sloppy the argument from Bloom is:
“All of the credible questions and inconsistencies re 9-11 can be reasonably explained based on incompetence and a simple lack of attention and follow-through at the highest levels of the federal government. No conspiracy theory is needed.â€
This is demonstrably false. Even the heads of the 9/11 Commission admit now that they were “set up to fail.†Even the Chief Counsel of the 9/11 Commission, John Farmer, in a new book says that the Bush White House lied to the Commission.
We need a new investigation.
Instead, we have Green Party ultra-leftists nominating Lynne Stewart. Stewart herself was disinterested in her client’s own past with the CIA. It seems verboten for ultra-leftiststo ask the historical questions that matter. So at the convention no one had a chance to say that the CIA brought the Blind Sheikh into the USA in the early 80’s as a part of Operation Tailwind. He had done favors for the USA in the Soviet/Afghan conflict, so the CIA was able to over-ride the fact that he was on the Terrorism Watch List.
Nine years after 9/11, it’s not enough to limit your inquiry to “unanswered questions.†Bloom insists that only this is permissible, before then contradicting himself by saying “nothing to see here, it’s just government incompetence.†Bloom effectively is defending the Bush/Cheney/Obama official story, the CIA, the Mossad, and the ultra-capitalists like Blackstone, AIG, and Silverstein Properties, because a real investigation of 9/11 will lead directly to their doors. If you don’t know that at this point, you have your head in the sand.
There have been plenty of opportunities for lefties to wake up on this issue. In the past six months alone I have spoken at many peace and truther organizations who have begun to open themselves up to this 9/11 Question. After nine years, the people are ready for answers. Ready that is, unless you are like Steve Bloom, and you lack the moral courage or the logic to confront the evil in our day.
- I do plan to run for office someday, and I think there is a huge future for a new party formation. These are ideas I ran on this year for US Senate. They are not theoretical but based on real-world organizing.
a. Truth
What if a new party was founded on the idea that people do need the truth, and that daily life in America robs us of it? Our wars are based on lies, advertising is based on deception, we don’t get the truth about who killed our leaders, or pulled off the traumatic disasters in front of our eyes.
b. Love of the USA
The Left is right to point out the shortcomings of the USA: slavery, maltreatment of the Native Americans, imperialism. But the Left can not win elections on negativity. The full truth about the USA is to include the other side of the coin: the Emancipation Proclamation, suffrage, Civil Rights, the intense creativity that created the Automobile, the internet, the locomotive, jazz, hip-hop and rock and roll. The USA is the first country founded on an internationalist ideal of inclusion, not an ethnic identity. The USA is a model of organization for future associations of the Earth’s people.
c. Freedom
The Bill of Rights seeks to limit state power, and defend the people’s liberty, from an ever-encroaching state apparatus empowered by a false gospel of Terror. If we are positive about the positive aspects of the USA we connect with a huge amount of people. We continue to refine the mission of the USA, as a country that was a creature of the Enlightenment. We were born in the pain of slavery, but we struggled, and we emancipated ourselves from slavery. Now we have to continue that mission.
The First Amendment is such a radical document, it could be interpreted as a huge anti-war statement. The founders saw that the combination of State and religious powers lead to endless wars in Europe. So, the First Amendment protect five freedoms at the outset. The free-flow of information is tied to the freedom of religious beliefs. If you give people free access to information, their essential goodness is allowed to flourish, and they can’t be manipulated into wars. The modern equivalent is to observe how the internet has empowered a movement that demands the truth about 9/11, Anthrax and the Iraq Wars. Without the free-flow of information, we are more susceptible to be manipulated into a false religion of “war without end.†Nothing could be less American.
Instead, our destiny is to become the leader in the science of peace.
d. Run to Win
In the end, the Party laughs at you if you run to win. Carl Person stated that he actually sought to win, and that’s why he was reaching out to both Greens, Libertarians, and others. He had already won the Libertarian nomination, so the Greens decided to count this against him. His aim at victory seemed out of place in this party.
I too realize now that it’s easy to get laden down with pessimism. We have to take inspiration from people like Governor Jesse Ventura: he ran a rambunctious third-party campaign for Governor and won without compromising his views.
But instead of the Greens finding or nurturing their Ventura, they decided to slap together a ticket of the tired old guard.
My five years in the Green Party were a great learning experience, and I’m grateful to all the good people I have met there. But I think it’s time for a new party formation that is miles away from the authoritarianism, the pseudo-socialism, the close-minded-ness, the ultra-leftism, and the PC politics of this Green Party.
Onto new formations.
I will be holding a dinner meeting/brain-storming session, of my campaign volunteers, and Truth movement people, at the Ukranian East Village Restaurant, on 2nd Ave and E. 1Oth Street, at 6 pm, on Sunday, May 23. Let's talk about what we want to do next. I think it may be time to start the Truth Party. This meeting may well be highly historic.
S
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