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This train of thought began with Briahna Joy Gray's observations (below) on the OH-11 special election about which I blogged earlier this week. The replies were full of Democratic loyalist trolling, which is typical for one of Briahna's Tweets. After all, she has actively campaigned to get Senator Not a Real Democrat (I-VT) nominated for the presidency. Normally I avoid wading into such an environment; however, the trolling included some abuse of the term "progressive" that I could not leave unanswered.
It chaps my whole nether region when I see centrist, incrementalist Democrats referred to as "progressive." It irks me even more deeply when that leads to McCarthyite tropes hurled at anyone to the left of Nancy Pelosi, as happened later in the thread. The question in my reply had a twofold purpose:
My reply made no reference to the Green Party itself. But of course my Twitter bio is quite candid regarding my partisan affiliation. So, relevant to nothing in particular, up came the "What Has the Green Party Ever Done?" line of argument. To that I replied (not shown below), "Far more than a single Tweet can encapsulate" and promised to put a complete answer on this site later. Well, more complete anyway, because I'm sure that my bulleted list below leaves out some important achievements.
Hey, I sense a theme here.
Recently, in my free moments, I have been thinking quite a bit about the necessity of political parties other than the two that have held sway for 160 years. I have been envisioning the evolution of the United States into a multi-party democracy more than usual. Yesterday's entry featured my Twitter thread about how electing Joe Biden in 2020 practically assures a Republican victory in 2024. That's assuming he isn't replaced in the first half of his term by his running mate, who turns out to be FDR-level awesome and just what the nation needs. The entry from the weekend before (25 July) featured a tirade against Jef Rouner's tirade against voting for third parties. Mostly I focused on the reasons many self-identified Progressives cannot in good conscience vote for Biden. What I didn't get into very deeply is that there are some good, healthy, positive reasons for voting for non-Duopoly parties in the US. That's out subject today. Third-party voting isn't entirely a matter of casting a protest vote against both heads of the two-headed War & Wall Street Party; it's also about building a new system to replace the imperialist, corporatist system that, despite its imposing grandeur, is already crumbling around us.  By GreenIn2010 - Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=87716286 Nothing will be official until 11 July, but Howie Hawkins of New York has amassed a simple majority of the 350 delegates apportioned for the Green Party's Presidential Nominating Convention. There are fewer than 50 delegates still to be selected.
This news is hardly unexpected given how the quest for the nomination has played out. Hawkins entered the race with an actual track record of running for high offices in New York State, and he is considered a co-founder of the Party. (Second-place candidate Dario Hunter has actually been elected to a school board in Youngstown, Ohio.) The Green New Deal on which Dr. Jill Stein ran in 2012 and 2016 started with Hawkins, whether or not he actually coined the term. In case you haven't caught the news, Teamster activist Hawkins has selected long-haul truck driver and activist Angela N. Walker as his running mate. For those of you keeping identity politics scoresheets, Walker checks off not only the African American and Woman boxes, but also the LGBT+ box. An Armed Forces veteran like Hawkins, Walker also has electoral experience, including a run for sheriff of Milwaukee County (Wisconsin) in 2014. They have also both worked with Socialist Party USA, which has endorsed their ticket; Hawkins-Walker will likely appear on the ballot lines for SPUSA and GPUS in New York, which allows fusion candidacies. On a personal note, I have donated to the Hawkins and Hunter campaigns, and I did not have a stated preference between them. My habit is never to presume anyone's nomination until it's signed, sealed, and delivered; I'm not happy about the way he has acted in public appearances as if his nomination was in the bag, appearing on programs such as Redacted Tonight VIP without more than an indirect reference to the other Green presidential candidates. However, I will be glad to be able to answer the inevitable question from the mis- and underinformed, "Who's your (y'all's) candidate?" without saying, "Well, the nomination hasn't been determined yet, and we have about six candidates contesting for it..." by which the asker has fallen asleep.  Presidential candidate Howie Hawkins (third from left, in the Teamsters t-shirt) met with some Houston-area Greenies at the Palmers' residence. First, a disclaimer: I like and respect Howie Hawkins as a candidate for president, but I haven't entirely made up my mind whether I'll be a delegate for him at the Green Convention in Detroit next year. I also like and respect Dario Hunter, the other Green who has met the requirements for presidential candidacy thus far, but I have yet to meet him in person.
That said, after last night (see this hour-long video of last night if you're so inclined), if Hawkins does win the Green presidential nomination, I plan to campaign for him as hard as I did for Jill Stein in 2012 and 2016, and possibly as hard as I remember promoting Ralph Nader in 2000. This is especially true if the Democratic Party nominates yet another triangulating centrist. I am willing to overlook recent missteps in which Hawkins echoed the establishment narrative about Russia interfering with US elections, because no candidate is going to get everything right. Folks who accuse Greens of imposing "purity tests" on candidates because we can't abide voting for centrist Democrats can stick those accusations where the proverbial sun don't shine. More importantly, however, I have enormous respect for some of the progressive luminaries lining up to support him, including the late Bruce A. Dixon and 2016 VP nominee Ajamu Baraka of Black Agenda Report. Plus, yesterday former Alaska senator Mike Gravel, briefly a presidential candidate in this cycle, urged his supporters to back...no, not Bernie; no, not Tulsi; Howie. Presidential candidate Howie Hawkins is making a few campaign stops in Texas. Confirmed so far: Dallas on 7 September, Houston on the 9th. GPTX activists Don and Laura Palmer have graciously offered their home as a venue for the Houston stop.
Here is the Facebook event. Key Howie facts:
Just a reminder: It's a resolution "Recognizing the duty of the Federal Government to create a Green New Deal," not the actual bill. It contains no details on implementation. As of this morning, it doesn't have a number. It may not be everything that fans of Jill Stein and the Green Party could ask for, but it is historic nonetheless. If nothing else, it will be terribly amusing to watch Republicans of the ilk of Louie Gohmert and James Inhofe turn themselves inside-out, asserting that they know more about climate science than the degreed professional scientists on the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (It's just common sense, y'know, that if the weather gets really cold, global warming can't be really happening!) Additional news on the GND front: Kate Aronoff of The Intercept has been doing some good work on the subject. She appeared on Democracy Now! this morning and told us not to get our collective knickers in a knot over Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's not being named to the special GND committee: AOC has noted that she can do more good as lead sponsor of the resolution and working her other committee assignments. In this Intercept post, Aronoff reports that AOC denies that Speaker Nancy Pelosi was making light of the proposal with her comment about "the Green Dream or whatever they call it." Pelosi on Thursday morning announced Ocasio-Cortez would not be on that select committee, though she was approached for a seat and declined to join. In a separate interview with Politico, Pelosi mocked the notion of a Green New Deal. “It will be one of several or maybe many suggestions that we receive,” she said. “The green dream or whatever they call it — nobody knows what it is but they’re for it right?” You may see this denial as naïveté, or blind worship of the most powerful woman in the US government, but what I've seen of AOC indicates otherwise. Last month, when she endorsed Pelosi in the House Speaker election and Progressives shat their organic bamboo Underoos in unison, my perception was not that she was just another fauxgressive sell-out. Sure, the optics weren't great, but for a neophyte she's a cannier player than most are able or willing to see. Her currying favor with the Speaker isn't selling out, and it isn't four-dimensional chess; it is a case of playing the angles to get her agenda on the table, so that it has even the remotest chance of passing.
Calling Madame Speaker a "climate champion" is AOC's way of putting her on notice that she needs to start acting like one. (EDIT: The NYT reminds us that Pelosi pushed for cap & trade, a market-based half-measure, as Speaker in 2009; she got it through the House but not the Senate.) It reminds me of when the Nobel Committee gave President Barack Obama the Peace Prize before he'd actually done anything beyond not being George W. Bush: a way of encouraging him to be the promoter peace his campaign rhetoric made him out to be. (His subsequent record on the peace front was mixed, to say the least.) Similarly, as breathtakingly stupid as Pelosi sometimes appears on video, and as stubborn as she is about not embracing socialistic solutions, House Democrats made her Speaker because she knows where the levers of power are and is well acquainted with their use. She can swat down uppity progressive Congressmembers as easily as she swats aside questions about single-payer health care. It's an open question whether Pelosi is aware that progressive/socialist policies are popular with the electorate, especially young voters, or whether she gives a flying fuck. To paraphrase Upton Sinclair rather liberally, It's difficult to make a legislator understand something when her campaign contributions depend on her not understanding it—even a legislator in a relatively safe seat. My friend Paul Schechter has granted me permission to copy and paste, without much commentary, his reply to an email solicitation he received from the Green Party of the United States. The message features the photo and words of perennial candidate Howie Hawkins of Syracuse NY. The only commentary I will offer is a bit of context: Paul is one of the co-founders of Houston Access to Urban Sustainability, a co-operative housing initiative in which I was involved for three years. He now lives in Madison WI, where he grew up, but he maintains a connection with the two HAUS houses: ownership. (He says he would very much like to sell the houses to the co-op, but this has proven more difficult than anticipated. Anybody want to help HAUS Project with a down payment?) The main thrust of the GPUS message is that Democrats in Congress will get their paws on the Green New Deal and water it down. This watering down is already in progress, according to some reports, and progressive Democrat Pramila Jayapal of Washington is actively pursuing this Green New Deal Lite. So the Greens would like to make sure that the program on which they ran in 2012 and 2016 remains intact. I don't agree with everything Schechter says here, but I also don't feel the need to rehash discussions we've had before. With only light editing and without further yada-yada, take it away, Paul! Howie, Remember when the business section of your local paper had several pages of stock quotes from the various stock exchanges, the options market, etc.? Wait, perhaps I should take a step back...remember when we still had newspapers?
With our digital subscription, we receive the print edition of the Houston Chronicle every Sunday, and it's kind of sad. With a cover price of US $4.00, it is pretty skimpy compared to the 50-cent Sunday editions I remember from my youth. And half of its thickness is blow-in advertising supplements. (Since our subscription costs $14.00 a month, that price is reduced to $3.50 per issue in a typical four-Sunday month. It also includes the online edition, which has been troublesome lately, but that's a story for another time.) In my youth, the only real reason I ever looked at the business section of the paper was to see the share price of companies I found interesting, such as my stepfather's employer. I certainly didn't pick it to read the articles, which were chloroform in print. But now I'm older and harder to put to sleep with mere words. I like reading the works of the Chronicle's business columnist Chris Tomlinson. He frequently makes points with which I agree. I find that weird, but encouraging. Tomlinson is certainly no flaming lefty, more of a common-sense conservative: In almost every column, he displays an uncanny ability to NOT spout orthodox classical econ talking points and base his punditry on actual facts. Therefore, Tomlinson's column from yesterday's edition didn't merely disappoint me. It infuriated me.
Since yesterday, I've seen some grumbling on Green Party Facebook pages about this recent development. Greens are not complaining so much about A. Ocasio Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and the Sunrise Movement staging a protest rally in House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi's office at the Capitol. What rankles them is that progressive Democrats are misappropriating the "Green New Deal" language that Jill Stein made the centerpiece of her presidential campaigns.
Also seen: Democrats wringing their hands about AOC and Tlaib upsetting the party establishment, virtually assuring that they won't get any committee assignments, let alone the ones they might want. If Pelosi et al. are that invested in bipartisanship and that petty about Progressives trying to shake things up a bit, that will reveal them as the Republicans in Democrat clothing they really are. Are the establishment Democrats smart enough to recognize that, though?
Sure, I would love to see these Democrats give full credit where it's due, tipping their hats to Stein and the Green Movement. If Green New Deal policies actually get implemented in full, without acknowledgment of their architects, I for one won't complain. We need to move forward on averting climate catastrophe with all due haste. Even if the Democratic Caucus adopts it but cannot get it past the Senate, I'll salute them for trying. However, if the Democrats in Congress propose a watered-down version of the Green New Deal, fuck 'em. If they even try to include Cap & Trade language, fuck 'em harder. Starting with a compromise, rather than battling toward one, is exactly why Democrats lose, both on Capitol Hill and in our polling places. On the issue of anthropomorphic climate disruption, science tells us that we have no space or time for compromise. |
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