Cynthia, Ralph, Obama and all that!

Borrowed this from Liam's blog:

Voting Green in the United States
Posted on March 7, 2008 by Liam
This piece by Steffie Brooks will appear in the Socialist Resistance magazine. Steffie Brooks is a member of the Green Party of New York State.

The Green Party of the United States is a young party, but with 21 state ballot lines, 200 or so local elected officials, 46 organized state parties and several hundred thousand members it is the most significant national electoral formation to the left of the Democrats and Republicans.

The Green Party’s platform and program are defined by its national leadership bodies (and state committees on the state level) and can be found here

It has staunchly opposed U.S. military interventions abroad and the USA Patriot Act. It is pro-environment and for a thorough-going electoral reform, including proportional representation in multi-seat bodies, instant run-off voting for single-seat elections, public campaign financing, and easier ballot access for independent candidates and third parties. The party’s eco-populist program is broadly defined by the Ten Key Values adopted in 1984 by green activists meeting at the first North American Bioregional Congress:

http://www.gp.org/tenkey.shtml

1. Grassroots Democracy

2. Social Justice and Equal Opportunity

3. Ecological Wisdom

4. Non-Violence

5. Decentralization

6. Community-Based Economics and Economic Justice

7. Feminism and Gender Equity

8. Respect for Diversity

9. Personal and Global Responsibility

10. Future Focus and Sustainability

The geographical and numerical reach of the Green Party is more impressive when we consider that the United States has the most restrictive ballot access laws of any so-called democracy.
It’s Not Easy Being Green

In Britain, for instance, all candidates for Parliament face the same ballot-access requirement –a simple filing fee. Candidates, regardless of party affiliation, get two free mailings to all the voters and a certain amount of free TV and radio time.

In the United States each of 50 state legislatures determines requirements for ballot access. These laws vary in their details but all require third parties to gather high numbers of petition signatures, and often place strict deadlines for gathering them. Meanwhile the Republican and Democratic parties are guaranteed a ballot line in the general elections. Even so, the signature requirements to compete in the Democratic or Republican party primaries are so high in some states that incumbents run unopposed in about one-quarter of all state legislative races.

Voter discouragement, if not outright suppression, is another problem for third parties trying to find their constituencies. Voting is just plain difficult. Election day is not a legal holiday but a regular work day. There is no same-day voter registration In most states, Several states have recently passed laws requiring voters to produce photo identification in order to cast their ballots, discriminating against the young, the elderly, and the poor — who do not own cars or possess drivers licenses. According to the Sentencing Project of Human Rights Watch, an estimated 4.4 million U.S. citizens are disenfranchised due to a past or current felony conviction, including over one million who have fully completed their sentences. The racial impact of felony disenfranchisement is breathtaking, with 13 percent of African American men –1.4 million people — disenfranchised, representing over one-third of the disenfranchised population.

It is not surprising, then, considering all these restraints on choice and on suffrage in the United States, that only 55 percent of the eligible population voted in 2004, compared to 80 percent in the late 19th century, according to Census Bureau figures,

The monopoly on ballot access is paralleled by a monopoly over media coverage and public political debate. As a result, the Democrats and Republicans are able to define the terms of political debate around a narrow consensus set by themselves. Other ideas, even those held by a majority of Americans – such as the desire for single payer health care or a rapid withdrawal of troops from Iraq – are painted as unreasonable or unachievable, two far away from the “center” which is defined by the orchestrated “realistic” choices at the ballot box.
So why bother?
The Myth of the Two-Party System

The notion that U.S. politics is inherently a two-party system is commonly repeated, but vigorous third parties have existed and have helped shape American history.

Prior to the late 19th century, ballot access requirements were minimal and third party formations were regular features of political life. Voters replaced major parties on three separate occasions in the first 100 years of the country’s history. The National Republican Party replaced the Federalists in the 1820s, the Whig Party replaced the National Republican Party, and the Republican Party replaced the Whigs in 1854. That year the newly founded Republican Party elected more governors and congressmen than did any other party. Four years later the Republican Party sent Abraham Lincoln to the White House, changing the course of American history. Twenty years of campaigning by two much smaller third parties, the anti-slavery Liberty Party and the Free Soil Party, laid much of the political groundwork for the rise of the Republicans.

America’s third parties (names we’ve forgotten such as the Greenback Party, the Union Labor Party, the People’s Party, and the National Reform Association, as well as those we remember) were the standard bearers of political and social progress. Their efforts animated the anti-slavery movement, the women’s suffrage movement, and the campaign for a graduated income tax. The major reforms of the twentieth century were put on the political agenda by three third party movements: the Populists, the Progressives and the Socialists. And the Green Party falls squarely in that historic tradition.

Despite the unfavorable circumstances confronting third parties today, the Green Party has grown rather rapidly over the past 12 years. Its relative success and influence is due in part to a fortunate if brief marriage with the tireless icon of consumer rights and clean government, Ralph Nader. In 1996 and 2000 Nader ran for president of the United States as the Green nominee.
The Ralph Nader Factor

In 2000 Ralph Nader received almost 3 million votes, or 2.7 percent of the total, qualifying the Greens for ballot status in a number of states, although missing the 5 percent needed to qualify for public funds in the next election. This was the most impressive showing for a left candidate since 1920, when Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs got 3.4 percent of the popular vote from the federal penitentiary where he was incarcerated for giving a speech that “obstructed recruiting” during the first World War.

The Green Party grew in numbers and influence as a result of the 2000 campaign, running a peak of 560 candidates in 2002. Most Green Party officeholders have been elected at the local or county level, with a few state-level officeholders and none at the national level.

But the success of the 2000 campaign brought in its wake charges that Nader had cost the Democratic Party the 2000 elections, and had imposed George W. Bush on an unwilling nation. The fiasco in Florida, where election irregularities and out-and-out voter suppression of African-American voters who would have voted Democratic, topped off by a Supreme Court decision that handed the presidency to George W. Bush, made little impression on forces within the Democratic Party. Refusing to conduct a Congressional fight over the decision, they blamed Ralph Nader for “spoiling” the elections.

As a result, the Green Party was under great pressure in 2004 not to “spoil” the Democratic Party’s chances to defeat George W. Bush, who began as a weak president but in the aftermath of 9/11 was able to implement the USA Patriot Act and invaded both Afghanistan and Iraq.

The result was a soft split in the Green Party. At a contentious nominating convention the official 2004 party nomination went to a Green Party activist, David Cobb, who ran a campaign that tried to simultaneously build the Green Party and not damage the Democratic Party’s chances in battleground states. Ralph Nader, on the other hand, chose not to seek the Green Party’s official nomination In 2004 but run an independent campaign with the support of much of the party’s rank and file.

Neither campaign gained one percent of the popular vote in 2004. The Green Party lost its ballot lines in several states and its membership declined. Ill feelings between the two wings of the Green Party persist today.

Again Ralph Nader was accused of “spoiling” the elections. His campaign was beset with lawsuits and challenges from the Democratic Party over the legitimacy of his petition signatures and his campaign finances, tying him up and burdening him with significant legal expenses. In late 2007 Nader filed a lawsuit against the Democratic National Committee, charging that they conspired to prevent voters from being able to vote for him in the 2004 election. That case, Nader v. McAuliffe, remains pending in the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Virginia.

Refusing to be silenced, at the end of February 2008 Nader announced another independent campaign for President. For his vice-presidential running mate Nader tapped Matt Gonzalez, the former president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and Green Party candidate for mayor of San Francisco in 2003.

http:// www.votenader.org/

When CSPAN asked him why he wasn’t seeking the Green Party nomination, Nader said:

“Well, because I think Cynthia McKinney is running, and I think it would be wonderful for the Green Party to have an African-American woman…. And the Greens have their way of doing things, and we have our way of doing things.”

Whether the two campaigns will work synergistically or at cross purposes remains to be seen. Many Greens wished these two candidates had found a way to run together on a single ticket. The challenge now is to combine political and human resources in defense of the rights of independent and third party candidates and on behalf of the political programs they seek to advance.
Enter Cynthia McKinney

http://www.allthingscynthiamckinney.com/

http://runcynthiarun.org/

Green Party activists had been trying to woo Cynthia McKinney away from the Democratic Party and into the Green Party for years before her announcement in October 2007 that she would seek the Green Party presidential nomination.

http://runcynthiarun.org/

The former six-term U.S. congresswoman from Georgia came of age during the Civil Rights movement in which her father was an active participant and with which she passionately identifies.

She was one of the most outspoken members of Congress on issues of war and peace and social justice:

“When the Democratic majority could have voted to stop war funding, they didn’t. When the Democratic majority could have instituted a ‘livable’ wage, they didn’t. When the Democratic majority could have rolled back the Patriot Act, the Secret Evidence Act, and the Military Tribunal Act, they didn’t. I’d had enough of ‘didn’ts’ and wanted to be with people who would.”

Her record includes the following achievements:

* Consistently opposed funding for bloated military and secret intelligence budgets;

* Introduced Articles of Impeachment George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Condoleezza Rice;

* Introduced and passed the Arms Trade Code of Conduct in the U.S. House, prohibiting the sale of arms to known human rights abusers;

* Wrote legislation to end the use of depleted uranium weapons;

* Led the fight for an amendment that forced the U.S. Department of Agriculture to admit its historic discrimination against Black farmers, and forced a settlement;

* Passed legislation to extend health benefits for Vietnam War veterans still suffering the health effects from exposure to the defoliant Agent Orange;

* Introduced legislation to establish a national living wage and to eliminate federal subsidies for corporations taking jobs overseas.

* Criticized human rights violations in Rwanda, Congo, and Israel; as a result of her outspoken defense of Palestinian human rights her Congressional seat was targeted for elimination by the strong pro-Israel lobby in the United States.

An organized right-wing campaign in Georgia used that state’s “open” primary – a primary in which Republicans can “cross over” and vote in the Democratic Party’s nominating election — to defeat her in the 2002 Democratic primary. In the following election she reclaimed her seat, although her Congressional colleagues did not return her seniority on Congressional committees, only to be defeated again in the 2006 Democratic primary.

McKinney tells the story of the campaign against her in Georgia, as well as the theft of the presidential elections of 2000 and 2004 in Florida and Ohio in the documentary “American Blackout.” Her campaign is promoting this devastating chronicle of the debasement of the American electoral process; it is also available for full-length viewing on the internet:

http://www.allthingscynthiamckinney.com/AmericanBlackout

Following her exit from Congress, McKinney served on the International Tribunal on Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the Brussels Tribunal on Iraq, and participated in War Crimes prosecutions in Spain. She has traveled widely, meeting with Green Parties in Europe.

When she decided to run for president on the Green Party ticket she vowed to win five percent of the popular vote, securing major party status for the Green Party in many more states. That was before Ralph Nader announced his campaign and Barack Obama became a serious contender for the Democratic Party nomination.

Currently McKinney is working to help the Green Party gain ballot status in a number of states and developing her campaign. The Green Party convention will be held in Chicago in mid-July.
The Politics of Race and Gender

The Democratic Party has not always enjoyed guaranteed supported from African Americans. For centuries it was the party of slavery and Jim Crow. The Democrats and Republicans essentially switched sides on the question of race during the 1930s and especially as a result of the Civil Rights movement of the1950s and 60s.

.

As we go to press, it is still unclear whether Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, will win the Democratic Party presidential nomination. But the possibility that the former party of slavery and Jim Crow might place a person of African ancestry into the White House holds a tremendous allure for millions of people, and offers a punctuation mark to the long struggle for Black rights, a necessary closure.

On the other hand, a number of vocal and unabashed Black radicals say the Obama phenomenon has no real political content, that the “movement” around Barack Obama is the kind of hype and “movement” that goes nowhere.

http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=553&Itemid=1

http://blackcommentator.com/

Cynthia McKinney also has strong support from an impressive array of social movement activists, including America’s most famous political prisoner, Mumia Abu Jamal, who articulates the need for real change rather than the appearance of change in his endorsement message:

http://runcynthiarun.org/Endorsements/MumiaAbuJamal

Although 2008 is a year in which even a majority of movement activists may pull the lever for a Democrat, McKinney’s campaign, which she is calling the Power to the People Campaign in a conscious effort to reach beyond the Greens, could build bridges between the Greens and a layer of activists, particularly within the African-American community. That kind of campaign has the potential to energize and enlarge the Green Party.

Nader’s campaign will continue to hammer away at the structural arguments he has popularized in his previous campaigns – corporate control and ownership of the two major parties and the political system as a whole, the need for structural solutions to the economic and social crises facing the American public. Depending on political developments domestically and internationally, the message could resonate again.

Many variables are still in play and it is unclear how the politics of race and gender within the Democratic Party’s base and within the ranks of movement activists who are supporting Cynthia McKinney and Ralph Nader will play out