[Peace-discuss] Greens and the presidency

[Morton K.Brussel]

My 2¢:  I have listened to Camejo and Cobb, and I congratulate the 
Greens for their choice.

It seems to me that the talented St. Clair is overly bitter and in his 
own manner is sounding like a Christopher Hitchens. I would advise 
folks to look at the blog of Paul Street available on ZNet. Ted Glick 
also had a good, more balanced,view of what went on at the Greens 
Convention. I wonder if Jeffrey St. Clair would excoriate him too as 
another closet Democrat. What a slander!
MKB


On Jul 15, 2004, at 11:14 AM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:

> ["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.
>
> 	***
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Peace-discuss mailing list
> Peace-discuss at lists.cu.groogroo.com
> http://lists.cu.groogroo.com/cgi-bin/listinfo/peace-discuss
>