This video was supposed to be posted a few days ago; however, due to the recent visits of Tropical Storms Uri and Viola, the dbc household has been without Internet service for the last three days. We were very fortunate not to have lost electrical service, as many of our friends and comrades did. The reduced-water-pressure phenomenon did occur here, owing to neighbors letting their faucets run at a drip to prevent freezing in the plumbing. (It's a Texas thing.)

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that Delilah (whose last name we're keeping out of this for now) may be the force around which the Green Party of Texas rallies and gains momentum for 2022. A relative newcomer to GPTX, she has brought fresh energy and a few folks willing to work on the campaign. These folks have come together mostly thanks to the Green Maps Project, and they have begun participating in GPTX business meetings.

Delilah is also new to the role of a candidate. As I hoped to capture in this interview, she brings the big-picture vision of the direction that our state and federal policies must take in order to help the people survive and even thrive. She brings a willingness to do what is necessary to raise the funds to make it all happen, and the infectious enthusiasm that will bring in volunteers.

​The Greens can hope that the vision, the people, and the dollars will combine to work the necessary magic to poll 2% in 2022 and thus maintain ballot access for another ten years.

From the Vision Come the People
Below is a completely unedited recording of our Zoom interview conducted last Thursday afternoon, 11 February (44 minutes long, give or take). Sorry if it's a little rough around the edges.

A Week of Twitter Angst
First, I have a request: Don't bother commenting on how you already knew (or perhaps even told me) that Nick Brana is a clever grifter whose People's Party is a Democrat-sponsored sideshow sucking attention and momentum from the Greens. You're not going to convince me, and I'm not likely to convince you otherwise.

My impression has always been that Brana is misguided but not wrong; that he is not evil or a tool of the Duopoly. The main phenomenon underpinning that impression is the number of people I respect, people who know bullshit when they see it, working to build and expand the People's Party. Brana is clever, but he's not clever enough to long-con the likes of Dr. Cornel West, Chris Hedges, Marianne Williamson, and Kaitlin Sopoci-Belknap.

Since 2018, when it looked as if the Green Party of Texas evanescing, I have been flirting with the idea of jumping aboard the Movement for a People's Party. MPP had energy, funding, publicity from YouTube progressives, and what I thought were some good organizing mojo; GPTX did not, especially after an attempt at regaining ballot access crashed and burned before it could really take off.

This past week, among other phenomena, I have seen

1. Move to Amend's Sopoci-Belknap announcing that she is switching her partisan registration in California from Green to People's Party, even in a state with (historically) one of the strongest Green Party organizations in the US;
   
2. AmpedUp podcaster Ryan Knight's withdrawal from the Advisory Committee of the People's Party, citing the party leadership's balking at embracing socialism (while welcoming individuals who identify as socialists), and then getting bitched out on Twitter by DSA members for his supposed "socialist-er-than-thou" posture despite being a relatively new convert to socialism; and
3. Multiple items like the one above from Our Revolution LA's Triston Mendez concerning the strange and alienating behavior that Brana et al have exhibited toward people who want to help with organizing.

In a nutshell, the People's Party has a better chance of electoral success than the Green Party with all its baggage...but currently it's not socialist enough or sufficiently well organized to bring about the policy outcomes it claims to want. Yep.

Last year, when ORLA announced that it was aligning with MPP, Brana was thrilled. It was the largest of several Our Revolution chapters that did what one would expect disaffected Bernie Sanders supporters to do: toss all ties to the Bernie-screwing Democratic Party overboard. Brana also seemed interested when I tweeted a proposal for a coalition between Greens and Peoplists (not the official shorthand for People's Party partisans, but I kinda like it); then that interest kinda disappeared in the run-up to the 2020 People's Party convention.

Enough with the Background and Context Already!
Agreed, that's enough. In fact, there's too much context to supply here, including repetitions of previous blog entries that you can read for yourself.

Here's the central message: I am not going to stamp CANCELED on the People's Party just because they've made a few errors in judgment or driven good people away. I couldn't do that to the Green Party—and believe me, I tried, back in 2018 when Harris County Green Party imploded—because Greenness is too interwoven with my identity. I couldn't do that with First UU Church for much the same reason, even when there were rifts in the congregation or ministers whose presentational style occasionally made me cringe.

However, I also agree with Knight that the solution to the problems of capitalism is not more capitalism, or even a more humane variant of capitalism. The solution that will help the most people live in dignity requires abandoning capitalism and implementing a socialism that has learned from socialist governments' mistakes.

I want to see the People's Party succeed—by which I mean "live up to its professed ambitions of providing a viable progressive alternative in all 51 states." Whether it embraces socialism or not, it should exist, and it should attract as many disaffected Democrats, Republicans, and non-voters as necessary to exist. (Even today the term ecosocialist is controversial within Green ranks). It will not succeed if sincere activists bail out on them or are pushed out.

I also want the Greens to succeed, and the Libertarians as well, because the two-corporate-party system is the main impediment to any people-centered legislation or policy. The system forces millions of people to vote based on what they fear rather than their aspirations, and millions more to walk away from the whole circus in disgust.

Beyond that, I will not tell any fellow Progressives what position they should take on this issue, if they choose to take any position at all. Y'all are intelligent people who can process the available facts and reach your own conclusions.

Interpersonal shit will happen within any movement: It's like a rock band that has more than one ego-driven creative type, each with their own ideas about The Direction of the Band. Sometimes the friction gets so intense that the band disbands entirely; other times, a member jumps ship or is cast aside, is (usually) replaced, and forms another band; still other times, the members work out their differences. (Just yesterday I read about the personnel problems of The Byrds over their ten-year recording career. Egad. Jim/Roger McGuinn should have just ended the project in 1968 and formed a new group, but being a Byrd was too lucrative to allow that.)

Democracy Overload
I may be reading this situation incorrectly, but it appears to me that Brana aspired to learn from the Green Party's mistakes and put that learning into practice. One of the "mistakes" common in Greendom (although some would consider it a virtue) is implementing a hyperdemocratic consensus-based decision-making process. Democracy is intrinsically good, but it sure can slow things down when certain folks at the meeting insist on having their say and can't keep their comments concise (yes, I plead guilty to a few counts of that)—or when principles rub up against practicality.

If you can't keep your meetings crisp and within the time constraints, people will not want to come to your meetings. The time for everyone trying to get their two cents in is not during the meeting; do that in pre-meeting and post-meeting communications. The Steering Committee sets an agenda and should follow it as close to the letter as possible; anybody who wants to add an item can show up at the Steering Committee meeting or email their ideas to a sympathetic member of that committee.

The picture of the People's Party inner circle managerial style, as painted by its detractors, shows an "our way or the highway" approach. They know what they want to achieve, and how to achieve it; they don't have time to listen to alternative suggestions that might steer them in the right direction but could also cause the party's course to waver.

Some active Peoplists may offer a different perspective, or even a thorough refutation. I would welcome a thoughtful, nuanced reply, in a non-Twitter format, telling me where I'm wrong or right. I just hope they understand that other people within the movement have had wildly different experiences. If they can't listen to the stories of those experiences--truly listen—they should question whether party building is worth their time and effort.

This short post is a continuation of this one, inspired by today's essay from Caitlin Johnstone.

Yes, I'll cop to having done some of the stuff Caitlin describes here. And I'd like to think that I've learned something from those mistakes.

While the goal of a united Left is an admirable one, if somewhat lofty, the virtue of having the left sorted into various advocacy groups is that it guarantees a diversity of tactics. Tactics that make progress in the correct direction should be emulated—not copied chapter & verse, but adapted to the needs & skills of each group. Unite around the policy aims, but get there in the way that makes the most sense to you.

Regarding the bickering over #ForceTheVote: The problem is duopolistic thinking.

• The Left is, or should be, anti-Establishment.
  
• The Establishment perceives the Left, or anything that differs from the Establishment, as a monolithic entity.
  
• So Lefty Group A dislikes the methods of Lefty Group B, claiming that such methods will undermine the credibility of this mythical monolithic Left (as if it has any credibility in the eyes of the Establishment as it stands).
  
• Lefty Group B accuses Lefty Group A of being a batch of chicken-shit suck-ups of the status quo.
  
• They block each other's Twitter accounts, and lines of communication are severed, thus undermining the effectiveness of the whole movement.

The slurping sound you hear is the Right licking its collective chops.

This isn't the first time the warning bells have been sounded about this matter. Democrats in Congress have filed this resolution, nicknamed the For the People Act, at the beginnings of several previous sessions. They claim that it's supposed to make the five improvements in the graphic above:

• End dark money SuperPACs
• Automatic voter registration
• Match grassroots donations
• Nonpartisan redistricting
• Stop voter suppression

Sounds great, right?—at least for left-of-center voters who want to see democracy enhanced in a political system in desperate need of reform (or, as some of us believe, replacement). The Progressive Reform Network, one of many nonprofits that send me far too much email, seems to think it's all cool.

However, there's an ugly snake in all that beautiful grass. That bullet point in the graphic about matching grassroots donations? That already happens, but this resolution aims to make qualifying for the matching more difficult.

For a moment or two, I thought I was hearing an adaptation of my post from yesterday coming from Jordan Chariton's lips. But he stopped at the part where we know which Democrats have the effrontery to vote against Medicare for All during this pandemic; he did not continue on to discuss how a floor vote would also reveal the currents of evil running through the DNC and the Democratic Caucus.

OK, all you progressive voices on YouTube and elsewhere: Go to your rooms and don't come back out until you can talk to each other with civility and respect!

It's been going on for just over a week now, but it already seems much longer. People I admire and respect are spewing toxins at each other on Twitter, second-guessing each other's motivations, smearing each other as either neoliberal tools or saboteurs of the Medicare for All movement.

This needs to stop.

All these folks agree that this nation needs Medicare for All ASAP, as the ongoing pandemic has illustrated so starkly. The disagreement is a matter of legislative strategy...oh, and also of Jimmy Dore's having the temerity to criticize (sometimes harshly) Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for not living up to her campaign rhetoric.

Today my @dbcgreentx Twitter account has had more notifications than I typically get in a month. Most of these concern likes and retweets of a tweet in which I was mentioned. What got the whole thing started was the unveiling of the Green Maps Project.

If you want to know the entire story of how this project got started, and who-all contributed to it, that's something you'll have to ask Christopher Lozinski. Lozinski isn't even living in the United States at present; he's in Poland. But through his connections in the US he is deeply committed to helping US Greens organize—or, in some cases, reorganize—toward becoming a bigger player in 2022 and beyond.

There's a particular variety of artwork of which I am fond and which I could never produce because I lack the patience. My term for it is Obsessive Art: It's the kind in which the detail-work is so intense even the details have details, and you can look at those details and say, holy shit whoever made this must have spent hours doing this one part. You can stare at the details until the room starts to spin around you.

I have the same kind of reverence for application developers who sweat the details. Lozinski is one such developer.

It's been about three weeks since the last entry here, but it's also been about that long since I did anything remotely political. Right now it's mostly about doing what we can to keep our bills paid on time.

The political activity will most likely recommence in January, as will the political bloggage.

Beyond that, I must confess that I'm watching more streams. For years I've insisted that the only TV I watched regularly was pro soccer matches. That's no longer true: COVID-19 has me staying home more and investigating other content.

Early this year, Kayleen and I bit a major bullet and switched our cable/Internet provider from Phonoscope to AT&T. I despise AT&T, but those are the only choices in our complex. We made the switch mostly for work purposes: We are both working from home, and Sharpstown-headquartered Phonoscope's service had been degrading steadily to the point of utter uselessness. We're talking week-long-Internet-outages-and-snow-on-almost-every-TV-channel degradation.

THIS PARAGRAPH HAS BEEN EDITED IN LIGHT OF KAYLEEN'S COMMENT BELOW: With our AT&T package, we have HBO Max included, and we're paying separately for Netflix, Starz, YouTube, all of which have content we're likely to enjoy (including our church's weekly services on YouTube). If we're paying for them, we may as well use them.

So we're watching one episode a week of The Sopranos and His Dark Materials via HBO, as well as occasional episodes of Dear White People on Netflix and rewatching Outlander on Starz. Dropping in on the Soprano family and crew after nearly two decades has been fun, especially serving as Kayleen's guide and Nablidan' translator through the series as she consumes it for the first time. (Credit to my first wife, who has Sicilian and Polish ancestry, for teaching me a lot of southern Italian dialect.)

Since last month's post about epic docudrama from The Zeitgeist Movement, entitled InterReflections, a post in which I expressed the hope that I would soon post a full review...well, how soon is now? Things got a little hectic as we moved full steam ahead on a collision course with Election Day. I just got around to watching the rest of the flick yesterday.

If one word describes TZM, it's woke. This is not the wokeness of identity politics and Black Lives Matter; TZM scoffs at identity politics, viewing it as just another way to divide people. This wokeness is one of understanding that the systems created by an elite few are inherently oppressive toward the masses; that the sooner we recognize our common humanity, with many of the same basic needs, and that infinite consumption is unsustainable, the sooner we will create a world of peace and plenty that works for us all.

Peter Joseph & company have assembled something far from perfect but marvelous nonetheless. I really should watch the whole film again to absorb some details I may have missed; however, for that purpose, I would prefer to watch it in one sitting, which is difficult when one cannot carve out a three-hour block of time and the Zeitgeisters throw a lot of information at you that is hard to digest all at once.

I use the word assembled with a purpose: InterReflections is three movies stitched together into one. That stitchwork feels, well, forced and artificial, reminding me painfully of the final episode of Lost. The viewer can almost forgive this because, as the three movies merge, the dialog alludes to the hokiness and semi-desperation of how it all comes together. As a novelist of a sort, I can attest that endings are the most difficult parts to write unless you begin the writing process from the ending.