[Peace-discuss] Greens and the presidency

[C. G. Estabrook]

["Activist movements, if at all serious, pay virtually no attention to
which faction of the business party is in office, but continue with their
daily work, from which elections are a diversion -- which we cannot
ignore, any more than we can ignore the sun rising; they exist" (Chomsky).
Jeff St. Clair of counterpunch.org storms in with a Bastille Day column on
the fecklessness of the Green party presidential campaign, that of David
Cobb. I admire Jeffrey and think he says some important things about the
Greens, but disagree on strategy. As I have in every presidential election
in which I've participated (with one youthful exception) I'll try to find
the most effective way to vote against the incumbency.  So, thinking the
Green electoral strategy correct but being in Illinois, this year I'll
vote for Nader... (Excerpts below from the full column, "The Green
Deceivers," at <counterpunch.org/stclair07142004.html>.)  --CGE]


...Cobb and his gang say that the safe-states' approach permits them to
engage in party-building from the ground up by recruiting fidgety
progressive Democrats without scaring them off with the prospect that the
party might actually do some damage in the fall elections. Even taken at
face value, it's a silly plan. Why waste time trying to lure Democrats,
who long for a return a mystical era (usually represented by FDR or, even
more preposterously, JFK) that never really existed? They'll only flee
back to the Democrats with the slightest flurry of rhetorical coaxing. Why
not concentrate on the 50 percent of the electorate that has rightly
abandoned electoral politics out of boredom, frustration or anger at
having no one worth voting for?

...The Democrats have taken over the Green Party, just as they did the
Labor Party, neutered its agenda and extinguished its only real power --
the power to deny Kerry the presidency.  To reconfigure Hamlet, this is
how to support a war while seeming not to.  It's simply a Green deceit.
And the fact is that even in the so-called safe states Cobb is unlikely to
get more than a single percent of the vote. No one knows who he is and
he's working hard to keep it that way.

The Green convention that anointed Cobb was rigged -- in multiple ways --
to ensure one result. There's little doubt of that now. The Cobb backers
employed smear tactics against Nader and Camejo that were as vile as those
lobbed by Democrats. Nader was denounced as an autocrat, an egomaniac, a
racist, a sexist and, get this, a "millionaire."

...In many state conventions and in the run up to Milwaukee, Cobb's
mercenaries tried to suppress the vote. In several cases, they allowed
frothing Democrats to intimidate voters as they tried to enter the
convention buildings, while Cobbites continued the harangue on the floor
itself. How do you build a grassroots movement, when you spend most of
your time driving people away from your party? Ridiculous.

Even with all this slimy electioneering, Nader and Camejo still had more
than enough actual votes to trounce Cobb and his know-nothing running
mate, Pat LaMarche. But this Green junta doesn't count actual votes. It's
electoral process seems to have been devised by Baby Doc Duvalier, where
only the votes that have been pre-determined to count actually count.

Knowing that the Green electoral process was irredeemably flawed, Nader
was right to reject the Greens early this year when he announced his
candidacy. But he was foolish to court their support this summer. The
problem for Nader was that the Democrats launched a pre-emptive attack on
his campaign, fighting to keep him off the ballot in state after state...

Nader wrongly assumed that the Greens, when faced with the pro-war,
pro-corporate campaign of John Kerry, would throw their support behind his
anti-war crusade. What Nader didn't realize -- though he should have --
was that the leadership of the Green Party had been hi-jacked by
Democratic loyalists, many of them allied with non-profit groups getting
money from foundations, like that of the Bush-hating billionaire George
Soros, with a huge stake in a Kerry victory.

Starting in 2001, Cobb's sole purpose was to stop Nader, or any other
potential Green candidate, such as Camejo or Cynthia McKinney, who may
have wanted to run a serious national campaign that might threaten the
Democrats' chances of retaking the White House. So far, the plan has
worked. Although Kerry still seems more than capable of squandering the
election on his own -- that is, if they actually hold an election. Of
course, Kerry, perhaps sensing the futility of his own campaign, didn't
seem too ruffled about the prospect of Bush canceling the election,
telling the Washington Post only that "it was too soon to comment" ...

So who is this new champion of the Greens, David Cobb? In the 1990s, Cobb,
who markets himself as a working class hero, lived in Houston, where he
worked as a lawyer for an insurance company, the bane of Nader and most
poor people. There, according to a former colleague, Cobb's duties
included finding ways to deny claims to injured parties and sick people.

Cobb ran the local Green Party as a tiny autocracy, unilaterally deciding
which issues to take a stand on. According to several Houston Greens, Cobb
proved to be both politically timid, extremely calculating and
heavy-handed. In 1996, Cobb refused to oppose a local referendum on a
taxpayer-financed stadium, which ended up only being opposed by
libertarians. Cobb told a local Green organizer: "That vote was doomed to
lose so we didn't waste our time on it." Grassroots organizing? Hardly.
This is top-down organizing at its most petty and self-destructive.

Another example from Texas. In 2000 during the peak of Bush's killing
spree, a group of anti-death penalty activists got arrested during a
protest outside the killing chamber in Huntsville before the execution of
Gary Graham. They soon circulated a letter of support through the
progressive community. Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn signed on, as did many
local groups and churches. But not the Houston Greens. Not at first,
anyway. Cobb objected. According to an anti-death penalty activist, Cobb
said he didn't want the Greens associated with the campaign to save Graham
from the lethal needle because "he might be guilty." What does guilt have
to do with moral opposition to the death penalty? What kind of courage
does it take to oppose the execution of the innocent?

Eventually, more humane hearts in the local Green community over-ruled
Cobb and the party finally signed on. But too late to do Gary Graham any
good.

Bob Buzzanco, a history professor and radical activist at the University
of Houston, has watched Cobb's political peregrinations for many years.
"When the war broke out, in 2003, a group of Students at the University of
Houston, where I'm a professor, began to organized a peace group, and I
was an advisor to them," recalls Bob Buzzanco. "Cobb and the Greens came
to one of their meetings and acted in a most aggressive way and I had to
publicly tell them that it was inappropriate to try to hijack a student
peace group for the Greens."

What about Palestine? Nader recently denounced both Kerry and Bush as
being owned by the Israeli lobby in DC. But don't expect David Cobb to
stand up against the rampages of the Sharon government. Buzzanco had a
radio show on the local Pacifica station in Houston, KPFT. In 2002, he
came under attack from local liberals for his commentaries on the rampages
of the Sharon regime, a campaign that finally resulted in Buzzanco being
placed under an internal investigation by Pacifica's thought police.

"The local Greens were a major player in the Zionist slander campaign
here," Buzzanco told me. "Two of Cobb's friends, George Reiter and Deb
Shafto, were using KPFT as a campaign vehicle, to the detriment of other
Left parties. They were front and center in the campaign calling me and
others anti-semitic. When I talked to Cobb about it, he did nothing, far
more concerned about getting that 0.001 percent of the vote than in being
accountable for their candidates. The Houston Greens were a mess and Cobb
was, in my estimation, an ego-driven charlatan."

But take comfort. At least he's not a millionaire ... not yet anyway.

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