queerbychoice | Why I Do Not Support the Green Party

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Why I Do Not Support the Green Party

I'm a registered member of the Peace & Freedom Party. Some people have asked me why I do not support the Green Party, because it's a far larger left-wing third party in the U.S. than the Peace & Freedom Party is. I would like to recommend that those people, and anyone else who actually cares about democracy, read the article "Rigged Convention, Divided Party: How David Cobb Became the Green Nominee Even Though He Only Got 12 Percent of the Votes".

As angry as I am that the Democratic Party has nominated for president a pro-war anti-same-sex-marriage Skull & Bones member who not only voted for but actually helped write sections of the USA PATRIOT Act and whose convention absolutely forbade all antiwar statements despite the fact that 90% of Democrats are antiwar, I don't honestly have any confidence whatsoever that the Green Party is any less corrupt. At all. Unfortunately, this leaves the huge majority of American voters with no worthwhile candidates who are actually listed on the ballot in their states.

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didn't everybody in the senate except one or two vote for the patriot act?

i mean, that doesn't make it right. but it's food for thought.

Yeah, the PATRIOT act was pushed through pretty hard with a lot of "You're not supporting the terrorists, are you?" rhetoric. Now we're sort-of stuck with it.

However: i do take slight issue with this part:

"who not only voted for but actually helped write sections of the USA PATRIOT Act"

A lot of the PATRIOT act is not that bad, in fact: some of it is pretty good stuff. However, there is also some of it that absolutely must go. The questions are: which parts did Kerry write? How much did he know about the rest?

I don't know the answers, but those seem to be relevant questions.

But anyway, i voted for Dean >.>

like bush says "if you aint' with us, you're against us"

from http://rwor.org/a/1243/kerry_war.htm:

Kerry voted for the Patriot Act. He boasts that he authored most of the law's money-laundering provisions--which can be used to attack political support of movements and groups abroad.

In fact, Kerry insists that the Patriot Act needs to be strengthened--and he criticizes Bush for not being tough enough on domestic security. "When it comes to protecting America from terrorism, this administration is big on bluster and short on action," Kerry said in March of this year.

Think about this: With all the fascistic moves that have been carried out by John Ashcroft and the whole current administration, Kerry says that Bush hasn't gone far enough!

On his campaign web site, Kerry lays out his policy of domestic repression--the "National Defend America Initiative." Among the proposals are:

A "Community Defense Service" to enlist hundreds of thousands of people as spies for the domestic "war on terror." Kerry says that these "service captains would act as a 21st century Neighborhood Watch." Somebody in the neighborhood speaking Arabic? Reading the Koran? Not flying the flag on the Fourth of July? Didn't stand for the national anthem at the Little League game? Kerry's "service captains" will be there to report. Kerry also says that Americorps should be doubled in size and its mission expanded to include "homeland security"--and that "homeland security" should be a central mission of the National Guard.

Kerry wants increased federal funding to add 100,000 new cops. And Kerry criticizes Bush for not drawing the local police forces enough into the "war on terror." Kerry calls for modernizing and further developing government databases and making them more available to local police forces.

Kerry wants to further break down the separation between domestic and international intelligence.

holy shit. the Community Defense Service!? isn't that where kids go and denounce their parents to get medals of patriotism after hearing them mumble "I hate Big Brother, I hate Big Brother" in their sleep?

Frightening, i guess that gets added to the file of "scary Kerry ideas".

I think picking out a few words with the purpose of provoking a reaction in your audience, quoting them out of context, and adding a few conspiracy theories to the mix tends to undermine the credibility of this piece. There's some good stuff in there, but stunts like that unfortunately make me tend to question the veracity of the entire piece...and I'm sympathetic to the POV presented. It's certainly not going to win over critical minds that are of a different opinion.

I think keeping a critical eye towards the Kerry campaign is a good idea, but it's also important to keep a critical eye towards those who disagree with the Kerry campaign.

Feingold (a Democrat from Wisconsin) was the only senator who voted against. one other senator (from Louisiana) didn't vote on it at all.

Feingold is, in fact, my senator.

He's up for re-election soon i believe.

Vote for him!

Planning on it!

Yes, they did and I don't forgive any of them.

Michael Moore said in this speech:

"John Kerry did what 70-80% of our fellow Americans did. He believed. He believed. And he believed that he was going to do something in a different way, but he believed in the majority of our fellow Americans believe. Do we point our finger at them now? Do you point your finger at your neighbors and your friends who supported the war at the beginning but no longer support it because now 54% of this country believes the war is wrong and never should have been fought? Do you?"

But my answer to Michael Moore is that YES, I do point my finger at those people and ask them to remember how wrong they were, and ask themselves why they fell for those lies when I didn't, and especially how a senator with John Kerry's or John Edwards's access to privileged intelligence information could possibly have been stupid enough to not see through lies that even I, with no access to anything but the internet and basic common sense, could see quite plainly were lies. About the only things I didn't know when the Iraq war began were that Saddam Hussein had absolutely zero weapons of mass destruction rather than just a microscopic enough number that extensive U.N. inspections had failed to find any, and that U.S. soldiers wouldn't settle for merely murdering Iraqi citizens and occasionally raping them in the standard man-rapes-woman and man-rapes-man rape positions already practiced in U.S. prisons and public streets but would also get female soldiers involved in committing rape and would be stupid enough to take zillions of photographs of it and get caught and cause an massive international scandal. Did I need to know those things to figure out that war was a completely horrible evil idea? No, I did not. Neither should John Kerry or John Edwards have needed to know, and I have a major problem with being asked to vote for people who are so lacking in morality and/or brains that they couldn't figure that out. Far worse still, despite how Michael Moore makes it sound, they still haven't fucking STOPPED supporting the war. They haven't even moved so microscopically to the left of Bush as to oppose having UNILATERALLY declared war without the approval of the United Nations. And the same thing applies to their voting for the USA PATRIOT Act: they not only voted for it at the time, but they continue to say they were right to have done so, and even though they criticize some of what the Bush Administration has used it for, they specifically oppose repealing it and just want us to "trust" that of course they won't "abuse" the powers and maybe they might modify some tiny portions of the act although they haven't actually specified any particular ones. But a good government is not built by giving authorities totalitarian powers and then just "trusting" that they'll be too nice to ever actually use them. If they have no intention of using the powers they shouldn't object to losing them.

It makes absolutely no sense to ask me to forgive someone for having done something idiotic when the person in question has no intention or desire to stop doing it. And I hate that Michael Moore imagines that it does.

but don't they want to repeal the patriot act?
(the war is another issue, i know that)

No, they don't. They oppose repealing it.

okay, that wasn't the word i wanted.
they support letting it die next year when it comes up for renewal, from what i gather.

Kerry's many other statements suggest otherwise.

can you show me some of that?
(this isn't a challenge, i'd honestly like to see it, because i haven't, and i have seen him say that he opposes renewing it, i think)

Sure. Scroll up a bit...

d'oh. i've just been responding via livejournal-emails.

interesting... *ponder ponder*

I've responded to the piece above. Also, a lot of people think "Kerry wants to strengthen the Patriot Act" means he wants to do John Ashcroft one better (as the above quote states). But of course that isn't the case at all. By "strengthen" he means improve on certain aspects of intelligence provisions to increase their effectiveness, and remove the parts that go too far in impinging on civil liberties:

http://www.johnkerry.com/pdf/pr_2004_0525b_a.pdf

And by "increase their effectiveness" you mean "spy on us better." Don't hide behind your words.

Instead, he should justify his premise that we need to continue the "War on Terror" at all.

I'm not hiding behind any words. I'm not a Kerry apologist. If you can show where Kerry says or intimates he wants to "spy on us better" I'm quite open to examining the evidence.

http://www.onnnews.com/Global/story.asp?S=1877191 , the entire section on "Reforming Domestic Intelligence." America needs an independent intelligence capability that focuses explicitly on domestic intelligence.

ah, that makes more sense, it pretty much fits with what i've heard about his position in the past.

after all, when kerry says "improve the efforts to fight terrorism" i don't think he means "do what bush does more."

Michael Moore is being idiotic and shouldn't let his success go to his head because he's starting to sound like a Democratic demagogue to me. of course i point my finger at them, who the hell else do we point our finger at -- the thousands of dead Iraqis, perhaps? and 54% is an abominably low number, abominably low; and this is *after* the Americans' supposed "enlightenment"? in Western European countries the number of people against the war tended to be around 80 and 90% *before* it was started, and even *before* Hans Blix expressed his unmitigated disgust with the lying belligerence of the United States. why should Americans be given a license to be stupid, anti-intellectual idiots when their country has so much military force that their "mistakes" could potentially turn the world into ashes!? does Moore or his fellow liberals have any idea how dangerous this is!? it is like arming a two year old to the teeth!

I don't think it's that his success has gone to his head; I think he just always was that way. It's the same way the huge majority of Democrats are: they point out a gazillion things wrong with Bush's policies, all of which happen to also apply to Kerry, and then they weirdly conclude that if everybody just votes for Kerry, the problem will miraculously go away. Most of them give no explanation for how they arrived at this illogical conclusion, although some of them say outright that they arrived at it by deciding that Kerrym ust just be lying and really secretly he opposes the war and the Patriot Act and averything else but he's just afraid to say so. Which is a lovely case of wishful thinking, but I don't buy it for a second.

> some of them say outright that they arrived at it by deciding that Kerrym ust just be lying and really secretly he opposes the war and the Patriot Act and averything else but he's just afraid to say so.

Do you have some examples of that? I would love to shove that in the face of some Kerry-backers around here...

I did have a specific example in mind, which was quite a long journal entry by

springheel_jack urging people to vote for Kerry on the basis of assuming that Kerry's actual beliefs are completely different from everything Kerry says he believes and has previously voted for. But I just went to the URL of the entry where he claimed it, and I got a "No such entry" message, so apparently he's deleted the entry. I'm not really sure how it would help anything anyway though, to just point out to Kerry supporters that some other Kerry supporters have resorted to just claiming that Kerry is lying and doesn't really have as horrible of politics as he says he does.

My hope was that it would either give me some insights as to how people can hold such an opinion, or make people consider whether or not they were implicitly thinking the same as the argument was explicitly making (and so, since the argument is pretty recognizable as bunk, so is their thinking).

I just found another instance of it! In response to Kerry announcing his support for "faith-based initiatives," according to this article, "A well-known atheist writer isn't worried. 'In any election, the guy on the left bends to the right & the reverse, to win undecided votes. He's bullshitting those fools. Nothing harmful will come of it.'"

"But my answer to Michael Moore is that YES, I do point my finger at those people and ask them to remember how wrong they were, and ask themselves why they fell for those lies when I didn't, and especially how a senator with John Kerry's or John Edwards's access to privileged intelligence information could possibly have been stupid enough to not see through lies that even I, with no access to anything but the internet and basic common sense, could see quite plainly were lies."

Amen, run on sentence and all!

I'm sick and tired of calling people out on this sort of stuff and then being treated like some sort of pariah when i point out that i, without access to any sort of privileged information, managed to come up with a more or less correct vision of Iraq while our government managed to not.

it's very unfortunate that we don't have great choices. :/

the article seems pretty unfair to me. in particular, number of registered party members is the wrong standard, since small parties can't get official recognition in many states. it's possible that some of the states in question have large numbers of active, dues-paying, self-identified greens who are registered as independents or democrats because green registration isn't a real option for them.

also, there isn't anything especially inconsistent about advocating that the government (a public entity with the unique ability to imprison people and collect taxes) be run one way, while running your private organization along different lines.

When your "private organization" is a political party holding a national election and aspiring to run the government and critiquing the way that national elections are run? I think there's plenty wrong with it.

the point is that it's critiquing the government for how binding elections are run. the Green Party's selection of a candidate doesn't force anything upon anybody. in theory, it doesn't even prevent the other candidates for seeking the presidency. it is essentially its decision, as an organization, of which candidate gets its stamp of approval. as long as members of the organization can look up the procedures and take their business elsewhere, i don't see what the problem is. they're holding a national election for a fundamentally different kind of thing (endorsement) then the elections operated by the government (which are elections for authority).

also, considered that you don't have to prove yourself in any way, or even contribute to the party or vote for its candidates in general elections, to become a ‘registered green’. if a large number of freaky conservatives decided to register in the Peace and Freedom Party for kicks, and proceeded to vote in the party primary or caucus or whatever for the nomination of Pat Buchanan, wouldn't you want the party leadership to have some way to work against them, even if it made the internal workings of the party seem less democratic?

The Green Party's selection of a candidate determines who gets listed on the ballot in states where the Green Party has ballot access and where other candidates have major difficulty getting it. Write-in votes are frequently not counted at all, so taking away a candidate's ballot access does force something onto voters: it leaves the voters with no ability to vote for a particular candidate while being able to trust that their votes will actually be counted.

If a large number of conservatives register in any party, their votes should be counted just like any other votes. If a large number of conservatives started registering as members ofthe Peace & Freedom Party, the Peace & Freedom Party would probably be very happy about it since having more registered voters is absolutely essential to gaining ballot access, and the Peace & Freedom Party previously lost ballot access in California in 1998 due to not having enough registered voters. The fact that voters are only allowed to register with one party at a time and cannot vote in a different party's primaries would probably discourage enough conservatives from switching parties that the conservatives wouldn't be able to outvote the old Peace & Freedom Party members, but if enough of them did switch parties, the mere fact that a party with the history of the Peace & Freedom Party had suddenly more than doubled in size would probably call enough media attention to the Peace & Freedom Party's history to make it worthwhile to put up with having to regroup and form a new party that would actually be left-wing.

the other candidates can in principle run ballot access campaigns on their own in those states. they would be at a disadvantage, but there are a lot of states in which the greens don't have automatic ballot access either.

also, in most states, ballot access isn't based on number of registered voters, but rather on the ability to pay fees, gather signatures, or secure a certain percentage of the vote in a general election.

and people could sabotage your new left-wing party too.

it's all even worse than this in some states (like Massachusetts, which was one of the green primary states cited), where you don't even need to be registered in a party to vote in its primary. in MA, ‘unaffiliated’ voters can decide which primary they want to vote in the day of the event. by the time of the Massachusetts primary Kerry was pretty far out ahead, and he was expected to do pretty damn well in his home state, so there were a lot of people who could have decided, on that day, that both of the major party primaries were boring anyway, and decided to see what the greens or libertarians were up to instead. given the small number of registered greens in the state, the easily amused outsiders could have represented a nontrivial portion of the vote cast in the green primary.

the point of a political party is to advance a particular ideology and general platform. democracy is about doing what others tell you whether you happen to agree with it or not. there's a natural tension here.

Unaffiliated voters can vote in any California primry too. It doesn't worry me, because I see no sign that actual third parties are actually being invaded by voters with completely differing beliefs. If anything, I see more sign of the Democrats being invaded by right wing voters than any of the third parties being taken over that way. And discussing potential emergency maneuvers that might theoretically become helpful in the event of a highly unlikely invasion of the Peace & Freedom or Green Parties by Pat Buchanan supporters does not seem to me terribly relevant to justifying the techniques used by Green Party members to circumvent democracy when Pat Buchanan was not invading. Peter Camejo, Lorna Salzman and Carol Miller were all longtime Green Party politicians who are in agreement with the Green Party's platform, and there's no reason to assume that the voters who voted for them weren't every bit as valid Green Party loyalists as anybody, no matter that they did happen to live in California instead of Iowa.

i don't love kerry at all (i didn't love any of the democratic candidates, really -- if i were eighteen in time for the primary, and if the IL primary had mattered a whit, i'd have voted for kucinich), i don't even really like him, in fact, every time i hear him speak, it deflates me a little -- but the truth is, i don't really care how irritating he is, or if he voted for the iraq war, or if he voted for the patriot act, or if he doesn't support same-sex marriage. if he's one jot better than bush in even the smallest way, i'll vote for him.

not that it matters, anyway, since i'm registered in illinois, which inevitably will go democratic.

I was less disgusted with Kucinich than I was the rest of the candidates, until I read his speech at the DNC (http://www.kucinich.us/insideout/072904/convention_address.php). "And [Democrats] are One for John Kerry. We will carry America for Kerry and Kerry will carry America for us."

It makes me want to puke.

eh -- honestly, i don't care much about that either. it makes me want to puke also, but politics in general makes me want to puke.

Yeah, that definitely wasn't one of his better moments. That's why I only have a Leonard Peltier icon and not a Dennis Kucinich one.

i just wanted to let you know that i am extraordinarily jealous of your journal (in a good way). you get like 6916735 replies per post. :)

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Why I Do Not Support the Green Party

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