DBC chillin' with Maximo Cortez Thursday night at the reception/rally.
- Former HAUSmate Mo Cortez (pictured above, to my left) was one of at least three of my couple dozen invitees to show up at Thursday night's opening reception. The reception was open to the public, and Green-curious Sanders supporters were especially welcome. Bernie or Bust organizer YahNé Ndgo was one of the featured speakers.
- As I mentioned in yesterday's entry, I missed most of the opening reception because I was driving eventual presidential nominee Dr. Jill Stein to and from KUHF on our rented, six-person, gas-powered golf cart.
- The six people on the cart to KUHF also included two of Jill's campaign team, Kayleen, and another volunteer, a recent graduate of Deer Park High School who is about to start attending UH's Moores School of Music. The young woman was thrilled to talk to and get a selfie with Jill.
- I also had the privilege of driving delegates and others to or from the airports, including amazing women like Ursula Rozum, Robin Laverne (Dragonfly) Wilson, Dr. Margaret Flowers, and Sedinam Kinamo Christin Moyowasifza-Curry. Ursula, from Syracuse, ran for Congress in 2012. Dragonfly and Margaret are running for US Senate this year in New York and Maryland, respectively. SKCM Curry was one of the five presidential candidates in attendance.
- SKCM had appeared on RT's Watching the Hawks earlier in the week, announcing that she would contest Jill's all-but-assured nomination. While Jill did receive the majority of delegates in state primaries and caucuses, SKCM had filed several procedural complaints. The Green National Committee apparently does not have the apparatus in place to address or redress those complaints, and I agree with her that this situation needs to be rectified with all due haste.
- Early Saturday morning, two of our delegates got "profiled." It's a long story, but essentially, they had crossed Wheeler Avenue to have a smoke in the parking lot, as UH is a smoke-free campus, and someone alerted UH Police about "two suspicious black men" roaming the lot. Gary Frazier of New Jersey was cuffed and stuffed in the back of a squad car, sans AC, for a half-hour. Kayleen, who was driving the golf cart that morning, rescued them, corroborating their story that they were Green Party convention delegates, and invoking the name of her foster daughter who works as an officer in HPD's UH patrol. In the video, there's a cameo from Dr. Cornel West, who gave the keynote address that afternoon. Brother Cornel gave Kayleen a hug and called her a hero.
- In addition to Tabetha Wallace from Watching the Hawks, there were plenty of media folks on hand for this event, mostly progressive/left sources, but also some of the local TV news crews. C-SPAN covered the actual nominating convention on Saturday. The Real News Network captured and posted quite a bit of video.
- After 16 years as a Green activist, I learned about FPVA, after picking up the representative from El Partido Verde de México at IAH. I also got to meet a visitor from El Partido Verde de la Republica Dominicana. Mexico has more elected Greens than any other country in the world, including at the federal level: six senators and more than 30 representatives in Congress. The current state government of Chiapas has a Green majority. Please be advised that the Mexican Green Party is considered much friendlier to big business, and more willing to form coalitions with the major parties (PRI in particular), than the US and Canadian Greens. That doesn't mean there aren't sincere ecology activists working within the party there.
Cornel West's hero with SKCM in front of the University Center at UH.
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