Response to "An Open Letter to the Green Party About 2020 Election Strategy"

I have great respect for the authors of this letter particularly Noam Chomsky (Manufacturing Consent), Barbara Ehrenreich (Nickel and Dimed), Kathy Kelly (Voices for Creative Non-Violence), and Ron Daniels (The Liberty Report), but I must respectfully disagree with their advocacy of a "safe-state strategy" for the Green Party in 2020. I'll leave it for the Green Party to give their official response, but here are some comments the Green Party probably won't say, so I will. Incidentally, I helped start the Green Party in 1984, so I have some interest in their success.

The authors state critically, "If Clinton got Jill Stein's Green votes in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, Clinton would have won the election." Here's what the Greens should say. "That's right, and we'll do it again."

This idea of voting for the lesser of two evils, shepherding progressives into the dead end of the Democratic Party is so old, so repetitive, and never works, so why do people keep trying to beat this dead horse?

The letter is based on a profoundly false assumption that the election of one person, the President (Trump), is the cause of all our problems, and voting for a different party will change it. Trump is not the problem. Trump is a symptom of the problem: The hijacking of BOTH major political parties and the entire political system by the 1% against the 99%.

Hawkins article in Counterpunch left out one major factor in Hillary's loss in 2016, which was Wikileaks release of her $600,000 speeches to Wall St., offering her unlimited and sycophantic support to them. Is any more evidence needed of Wall Street's capture of the Democrats? Oh, but Russia, Russia! Give me a break...Not like it's a big secret; Bill Clinton stated publicly in 1992 that the DNC was going to go after the same corporate money as the Republicans. They kept their word on that, if nothing else.

This is not to mention Hillary's support for the Iraq War, her orchestration of the destruction of Libya, the war on Syria and every other military bombing campaign undertaken by Obama. It's no longer left vs. right, it's people against the corporate military state. That's why Trump won in swing states! He promised to end the wars and bring back the jobs. Never mind that he's a lying narcissistic psychopath. Only Tulsi says that now, and the Democrats smear and marginalize her.

Here's why the letter is misguided. While Democrats blame the Greens for losing, they do nothing to change the system that brought us Trump. They could have solved the "spoiler" problem easily in one session of Congress, when they had the majority, by adopting Ranked Choice Voting (Instant Runoff) as they do in Australia. This eliminates wasted votes for third parties. But they have no interest in giving up their monopoly, and have done nothing to change it.

The authors should be well aware of Duverger's Law: A two-party system usually results from "winner-takes-all", "first past the post", single-member-district, plurality wins elections. We don't have a multi-party democracy like the rest of the world because the Democrats don't want one! They could have solved the Presidential problem a long time ago, by using proportional allocation of delegates in the Electoral College as they do in all their primary elections. Both Republicans and Democrats suddenly lose the ability to do fractions in the general election (see "A Tale of Two Parties").

Next Page  1  |  2

(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).