Tearing Open of Old Wounds
After Ralph Nader spoke to the
Greens during their national convention in Reading, Pennsylvania last
July, the party looked incredibly united. Collectively they seemed to
recognize that in order to be a party of opposition they better start
acting like one now by distancing themselves from the failed policies
of old. Within hours, however, a principal architect of the disastrous
David Cobb “safe state strategy” in 2004 immediately began to unravel
the unity of the Greens.
Under the guise of what was purported
to be a unification proposal titled “We Will Run”, Phil Huckelberry, a
vocal delegate from Illinois, opened up all the old wounds of 2004 by
insulting the majority of Green Party members by condemning those who
voted not only for the corporate candidate John Kerry, but also those
who backed independent candidate, Ralph Nader.
The first
question one might ask is why does the Green Party still have an
officer in place that helped devastate the party by supporting a losing
strategy in 2004? As it turns out, not only is Huckelberry still a
delegate to their National Committee, he has also been promoted to
their Steering Committee.
The Greens like to tell us how much
they hate corporate crooks, yet with Huckelberry they have emulated the
very worst of corporate America by promoting an insider who was partly
responsible for a major tactical failure in 2004.
In any
normal business setting, a manager who is responsible for lost
revenues, customer depreciation, and closing of plants would resign in
anticipation of being fired. Only the worst, the real corporate
criminals, reward such employees. The Green Party has chosen a
surprising model to emulate. The “safe states strategy”, championed by
officers like Phil Huckelberry and a sizable number of other Green
Party delegates, emptied the Green Party’s treasury, lost over 50,000
members, as well as the ballot lines gained by Ralph Nader’s candidacy
of 2000.
Those officers still remain in charge.
In an
effort to head off an impending disaster, John Murphy, a delegate from
Pennsylvania and a longtime Nader supporter, offered his own amendment
to counter Huckelberry’s.
“My proposal would have fixed
Huckelberry’s proposal and guaranteed almost unanimous support,” says
Murphy. “But Huckelberry ignored the amendment until seven hours prior
to the vote, which allowed delegates to tear each other apart for
almost a month. We had almost been healed, but not now.”
Such
persistent divisiveness seems to only exist within the rank and squalor
of the Green Party, which does not function like a democratic
parliamentary body. Instead of operating under “Roberts Rules of
Order”, the Green Party’s National Committee runs under a bizarre
system called “Consensus”, which was designed as a budgeting tool for
the Quakers. A Consensus approach might be of some use to a monolithic
religious organization, but it was never intended for a highly diverse
political party.
Little things like the democratic process
don’t seem to bother the Green Party leaders all that much anyway; they
gave the Green Party a presidential candidate in 2004 that only
received a meager 12% of the vote in the primaries. The Green leaders
believe in minority rule instead of majority rule. And they practice
just that. Literally, in the Green Party ruling bodies, you must have
super majorities — 20% of the Green Party officers can overrule 80% of
the Green Party officers.
With the Green Party delegates busy
tearing each other apart, Murphy took his frustration a step further
and called for the resignation of those responsible for the disaster of
2004. Not an unreasonable request.
Instead of those officers
resigning, however, Murphy was removed from the Green Party’s National
Committee internet discussion groups by “forum managers” who are, as
you might imagine, controlled by the Demogreens (the name given to
those Greens who remain philosophically joined at the hip to the
Democratic Party and were the “safe state strategists” of 2004). All
Murphy had done was publicly oppose his party’s failed leadership.
The End of Debate and Dissent
The
Demogreens could not risk another Murphy calling for their resignation,
so they are now voting on another proposal that will stifle debate and
put an end to any dissent within the delegates’ email discussion
groups. The argument, and proposal, goes something like this: There are
a few Greens who post too often so rather than letting the delegated
decide what they read, the Greens have opted to prevent everyone from
posting more than one letter per day. Apparently the Green Party
delegates just can’t handle excessive free speech. Of course the Greens
could move to a blog format or even an online forum — which would seem
like a perfect solution.
Nonetheless, one thing you have to
admire about the Greens is their transparency. They actually let the
public see these silly proposals. Anyone can go to
http://gp.org/cgi-bin/vote/index and get an education as to how the
officers of the Green Party really operate.
Green Party Turns Hard Right
Green
delegates from Tennessee have recently advanced a proposal which they
call “Moving the Money from Wall Street to Main Street”. Certainly
sounds innocuous enough. Tragically the delegates from Tennessee based
their proposal on a presentation made to the Green Party delegates at
their convention by a woman named Catherine Austin Fitts.
Ms.
Fitts, a Republican, was Assistant Secretary of Housing in the
administration of George Bush Sr. and now supports libertarian causes.
Why was Fitts invited to talk to the Green Party about banking issues?
Nobody really knows. Perhaps not surprisingly, one of the associates of
Catherine Austin Fitts is Franklin Sanders, a leading thinker in the
extreme right-wing Constitution Party. Sanders is also chairman of the
Tennessee chapter of “The League of the South”, yes, from the same
state of the Green Party delegates who offered the proposal in the
first place.
The League of the South is quite an outfit. They
advocate the ideology of “kinism”, and would outlaw racial
intermarriage and non-white immigration, expel all “aliens” (including
Jews and Arabs), limit the right to vote to white landowning males over
the age of twenty-one, and re-institute black slavery. The Green Party
is about to adopt a proposal based on the philosophy of people like
Fitts and Sanders. One has to wonder who would influence these guys if
they were savvy enough to win elections.
Nader Greens to the Rescue, Again
When
the Green Party delegates from Tennessee were made aware of the
implications of supporting a proposal based on the motives of Fits and
Sanders by delegates from New Jersey, Liz Arnone and Gary Novosielski
(both Nader Greens) — the folks from Tennessee decided to keep it
anyway by simply removing the names of Sanders and Fitts.
Take the gun, leave the cannoli.
Writings 
While the Democratic Party refuses to impeach President Bush, continues to fund the war and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan through 2009, spreads the same lies about Iran’s nuclear ambitions, and gives the administration a blank check for domestic spying, what are the leaders of the Green Party up to?
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