Sure, I understand; I’m USian and I vote. But if the Democratic party does not have a person who I can support running in the general, I am not sending them DNC any money and I’m not volunteering to phone bank for them, either. Full stop. Primaries be damned; fool me once and all that, and I am not eligible to vote in the Democratic primaries.
That’s not inevitable at all, although I admit it’s pragmatically true right now. Americans who care about the future of the human race have to do what people in other countries have done - vote for the third party candidate of their choice with the full understanding that they probably won’t win - because that’s the only way we can break the two-party system.
Your anti-Green meme is out of date, as I say every time this talking point raises its head. The Green Party is gaining ground in every state in the union because they are a national grassroots effort. The online sources show that Greens have been winning local and statewide elections in increasing numbers since the 1990s.
According to their website there are currently fewer than 150 Green Party office holders nationwide, with the majority being lower level officials such as school board members or water district officials. Don’t get me wrong, that’s real progress at the grass-roots level and a good start, but it’s certainly not the same as a senate seat, governorship, or mayor of a major metropolis, so going straight from that to the presidency without establishing a more substantial record of successful governance is still quite a stretch in my mind.
If Jill Stein was the most experienced & qualified candidate the party could put forward for the Presidency then that says a lot about the current strength of the party. I genuinely hope that the Greens will one day be a major political force to be reckoned with on a National level, but that day has not yet come to pass.
@Otherbrother, I think you probably aren’t aware of the state laws governing ballot accessibility in all 50 states. Most people aren’t, it’s no shame.
If you don’t run a candidate in the presidential election, you are not permitted on the ballot for some state offices, or you have to endure a far more onerous process to get there (more signatures, or similar roadblocks). The system is rigged so that pragmatically you have to participate in national presidential elections before you can compete at the state level in all 50 states. That’s why you see all those little parties on the presidential ballot before you see them on local senate races.
And if those parties get a significant level of participation - there are rewards at the 1%, 2% and 5% levels I believe - everything gets easier at the state level. That’s why it is necessary for us to vote for candidates who can’t win this election - it’s the best path to get state-level representation such as Green Senators.
It sure seems like you are committed to making sure that it will not. You post the same anti-Green memes repeatedly.
You could make a difference - if your hope is indeed genuine - by not seizing on every opportunity to slam the Green party publicly. For example, if you don’t like Jill Stein, which is abundantly clear, you could say something nice about Cheri Honkala or some other Green candidate instead of posting anti-environmentalist smears in widely read blogs.
I’m not anti-Green. I disagree with the party’s tactics, not its platform. A party that cannot build a broad enough coalition to win a single statewide office is simply not ready to run the Executive branch.
So therefore you take action to help prevent any such win. Seems pretty anti-Green to me.
It saddens me, because you are clearly an intelligent and literate person, who often makes insightful and meaningful posts. You could really make a difference working against corporate polluters and anti-humanist forces instead of aiding them.
Yes, we definitely need a political organization that can put forth candidates to counter the money machine that’s trying to eat our rights at the moment.
Is the DNC that currently exists the one to do that? That, I’m not convinced of.
I support the Green Party platform. I’ve voted for several (state & local) Green candidates in the past. Yet you continue to label me as “anti-Green” because I disagree with the party’s tactics for building nationwide grassroots support.
Think of this situation as a microcosm for how the Greens have failed to build the kind of broad coalition they will need to win national office: instead of accepting my qualified support as one of your natural allies, you’ve chosen to paint me as one of the adversaries keeping your party down.
I’m not one of the folks that thinks Putin rubs off, that coming into contact with him gives people KGB cooties. And I support engagement with foreign political leaders by US politicians. So I personally don’t share your concern over this.
But I have to applaud you for having a real issue - not one I care about, but a fact-based criticism - with the Green Party’s recent candidate. She did in fact attend a party that a bunch of quite reprehensible people also attended, and was seated with several of them.
Please don’t let your valid concerns about an individual politician prevent you from engaging with your local Green Party. America needs people like yourself to get involved if better candidates are going to be available. And remember, the GOP and the DP have run candidates (many of whom were elected) who were rapists and child molesters; so if we are going to judge a party by the actions of individual candidates, the Green Party will win hands down on that score.
They’re concerned that the candidate the National Green party put forth was one whose views and involvement in the US election was both influenced and possibly funded by Russia. That’s unfortunately tainted the image of the party at the moment.
I’ve supported my local Greens for many many years, donate to them, and vote for their candidates, but the national party’s going to have to be a bit more transparent if they want to regain trust.
I continue to label you anti-Green because you’re using disingenuous memes to propagandize against the Green Party online. When you stop, I stop, as you should know by now.
When you say what you think their strategy should be, you describe what their strategy already is. It happens just up-thread. The party is doing it’s best - though hampered by GOP anti-environmentalist propaganda and DP greenwashing - to grow at the grass roots level and get people elected to local and state offices. That is the strategy, and running presidential campaigns is a necessary part of that. Greens didn’t build the system.
And as for Jill Stein, do you think she doesn’t know that whoever runs for President as a Green is going to lose? Lose money, lose time, lose reputation due to billion-dollar smear campaigns, and for the present, they are going to lose the election. This is a necessary part of becoming the humanist party that will be able to defeat the corporatist two-party system. I admire Jill Stein for her willingness to throw herself into the gears of the political machines, because somebody has to. I don’t see you or I doing it, you know? And somebody has to. That’s the only way forward that has the slightest chance of working, unless you honestly believe that the DP one of the major parties can be reformed - a belief I do not share.
I really enjoy telling people that I voted for the nice Jewish woman. It’s a pretty good litmus test for a lot of things.
I understand and recognize your point, and I do appreciate that you are using fact-based argument. There are real problems with every US party’s headline candidate. The fact that the Green Party is (in my opinion) ethically and pragmatically superior to the DP and GOP doesn’t mean I think they are perfect, or that Jill Stein is above reproach.
However, from where I’m sitting, the USA is in the midst of a Red Scare orchestrated by pro-Democratic party media, so I can’t really speak to this particular concern. I am very pleased that Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, and Jill Stein have all interacted with the head of the Russian Federation. I am less pleased that Vladimir Putin is that head of state, and I am very displeased by Donald Trump’s interaction with Russian organized crime figures, of course. But I’ve never cared for know-nothing politicians, I approve of public interactions with elected foreign leaders.
Given that we factually know that Vladimir Putin was either approving of or actively involved in activities to alter the course of the Presidential election, it’s hard for me to see Jill Stein’s visit with him before the election – alongside Mike Flynn – as a purely diplomatic one. But if you support that sort of thing, and consider everything negative about it to be Democratic propaganda, there’s really nothing else I can say here.
I do infosec for a living, among other things, and I’ve seen literally zero actual evidence of any “Russian hacking” - just unsupported claims by politically motivated agencies with track records of anti-Russian propaganda. I would appreciate any evidence you can supply, as I have seen literally none. Seriously.
If you are referring to Russians speaking to Americans about our elections, in the hopes of influencing them, I am hardly in a position to complain - I am American, after all. In my lifetime, my government spent literally billions of taxpayer dollars to inundate the old soviet union with pro-capitalism radio propaganda.
My Russian friends and co-workers all say he was elected. They don’t like it, any more than I like Donald Trump having been elected, but they say he truly is the choice of the Russian electorate.
You used the words “Russian hacking”, I did not. I said that Putin or his operatives were actively involved in activities to alter the course of the Presidential election. It sounds like you’re in favor of that. I’m not.
He is literally the only choice for the Russian electorate to make, so in that sense, yes.
I guess I’m just more inclined to believe the US Government and our media institutions more than a random person on the interwebs who “does infosec for a living,” but that’s just me…
The Green Party is gaining ground in every state in the union because they are a national grassroots effort. The online sources show that Greens have been winning local and statewide elections in increasing numbers since the 1990s.