You can always count on people to whine about it when you point out that the Green Party is a Republican enabling, spoiler fraud. Greens are whiners, posers and players, not doers.
To see how big a fraud it is, more than three decades into its existence, the Green Party currently has, "At least 136 Greens hold elected office in 18 states as of August 1 2017". And when they say "elected office" they are stretching it, big time. In my state, the state which has what should now be considered the infamous distinction of having the oldest Green Party in the United States*, the list of all of the Green Party office holders includes:
Joshua Plourde, City Council, Bangor (Penobscot County) term through Nov 2017
Peter Starostecki, Town Council, Area 2, Standish (Cumberland County) term through June 2020
Patricia Jackson, Select Board, Mount Vernon (Kennebec County) term through June 2020
John Eder, Board of Education, At-large, Portland (Cumberland County) term through Nov 2017
Holly Seellinger, Board of Education, District 2, Portland (Cumberland County) term through Nov 2018
Anna Trevorrow, Board of Education, At-large, Portland (Cumberland County) term through Nov 2017
Sam Pfeiffle, Maine School Administrative District (MSAD) 15, Gray/New Gloucester term through June 2018
Gil Harris, Budget Committee, Limerick (York County) term through March 2019
Justin Reinhardt, Budget Committee, Limerick (York County) term through March 2020
Now,directing your attention to the last two on that list, I live in York County and know that to call a position on the Budget Committee an "elected office" is a wee bit of an exaggeration, as it is, in reality, an appointed board. What that generally means is that they talked some warm body into serving on it. I look at other offices listed in other states and suspect many of the others may have been "elected" if you mean that a local or county board which was, actually, elected, voted on appointments to them. Look at the descriptions of some of those, actually many of those offices touted by the national Green Party as its "elected" might in 2017.
You may, if you follow the obscurity of Green Party affairs, notice that on that list is one of the major celebrities of Green politics on what I posted, John Eder, who, if I'm not mistaken, held the highest elected office a Green has achieved in its existence as one member of the Maine Legislature from Portland, obviously the "Greenest" locus in Maine. That is before he lost the seat more than a decade ago, after two terms, as the Greens concentrated on their spoiler in the governors race who, if I recall correctly, came in fourth, something touted as a great achievement by the Green Party that year. I used to kind of like John Eder but these days, after what Jill Stein and her dupes did to give us Trump, all Greens are enemies of democracy, now.
I don't know how many of the others of the mighty 136 have their offices similarly inflated to make up that list but guess that, as is often the case here, that people who run for school board or local office may as well be volunteers because a lot of years they have trouble finding someone to run for even as many vacant seats as exist. I don't minimize the importance of those positions or the honorable service of those who fulfill them honorably, but I also know the realities of local politics and how these things work in real life.
The definition of a psychotic, someone who keeps doing the same thing and expecting a different result is the definition of not only the Green Party but, also the lefty magazines, radio shows and internet TV that promotes them as anything other than the Republican enabling fraud they are. That list I gave this morning that pissed off at least one person is a partial list as that delusion is one more generally held than is good for democracy. I can't believe anyone still holding it in 2017, after the elections of 2000, 2016 and other offices for other seats in which Greens have either successfully spoiled the results giving offices to Republican-fascists or nearly doing so, isn't doing so with a view of producing that end.
The Green Party was a dumb idea in 1984, it's a pathological idea, today, with three decades of futile enablement of Republican fascism to prove that. Democrats should flood Green Parties and end it before it can do more damage to the country and the world.
We're used to talking, endlessly, over the idiots on the right who vote against their own interests, who vote for the worst candidates but we never talk about The Stupid Left, who play and pose and posture and are often as plug ignorant as anyone imagined - often by them - to be the stupid, blue-collar voters who they blamed for electing Trump. Actually, they have a lot more to do with the real Trump base which included a large number of White college-graduates, probably many of them went to college with the play-lefties, The Stupid Left. I'm proposing that we start addressing the problem that this Stupid Left is because for the real left, the left that actually wants to get elected, make good law and make life better or even possibly sustained, The Stupid Left is a real and continuing and ongoing problem with a history of producing disaster. And a lot of the most prominent media figures of the left are as stupid as the stupidest of them.
* The Green Party of the United States exists today as a political party fielding candidates for office in most states and at the national level. It was formed when the state-level Green Parties came together in the mid-1990s. Thirty-three years ago, however, there were no state-level Green Parties, except one formed in Maine in January 1984, although various groups and organizations were discussing Green politics in other states. The effort to form a national Green Party began in the summer of 1984 and extended over several years of start-up work, including dialogue, debate, and outreach to spread the concept of a comprehensive Green politics.
As I recall it, their choice to have all decision making done on the basis of consensus was an early sign that it was a play-party that would never produce anything of any use. I, too, was deluded by the hype, as read in all of the four or five lefty magazines I subscribed to at that time and thought the Greens were a good idea, though I never saw them as anything but as a possible coalition partner with the Democratic Party to get the back of the liberal wing of the party and to give it more clout. Little did I suspect that the party the Greens were going to advantage were the Republicans by acting as spoilers in a number of elections, twice giving us the two worst presidents of my lifetime, perhaps in the history of the country. I can't help but recall how as the real, true, right-thinking radicals left the 1919 emergency meeting of the old and far more successful Socialist Party to begin the devolution into various Communist factions, as the commies under the leadership of John Reed met to form their alternative party, after a while one of them, the radical lawyer Louis Boudin left that meeting in disgust saying he hadn't left a party of crooks (the Socialists who fought off the hostile takeover by the communists under orders from Moscow) to join a party of lunatics. Such lunatics have been a repeated and fatally self-inflicted wound on the left. After a century, I don't think they or their great grandchildren will ever be anything else.
As the U.S. Green that maintains the list of elected Greens across the U.S., I call your attention to that Gil Harris was elected to the Limerick Budget Committee in 2016, finishing 2nd/4 candidates for three sets. Here is the link to the election results http://limerickme.org/ESW/Files/2016_unofficial_ballot_with_results.pdf. Since then, Gil Harris was elected to the Limerick Board of Selectman, to a term running through 2021 http://www.limerickme.org/Board_of_Selectmen.html. Justin Reinhardt was elected to the Limerick Budget Committee in 2017, running uncontested http://www.limerickme.org/ESW/Files/8_Ballot_2017.pdf
ReplyDeleteFirst, that's a non-partisan ballot so no one "ran as a Green". I live in a small town in Maine, we have non-partisan selectmen elections so I know how that works. Justin Reinhardt ran unopposed, his party affiliation is meaningless in such an election. Someone being elected when they run unopposed is best seen as a de facto volunteer position. That is the kind of "elected official" that constitutes a huge number of the fewer than 150 total, nation-wide Green success in elections. It is a bogus party.
DeleteI wouldn't disrespect anyone who serves on any minor, even very minor public office but any party which manages to elect fewer than 150 people to such offices any year, going on four decades, is a fraud.
The only importance the Greens have had is to act as spoilers to put Republicans in office, it is a scam and a fraud and Democrats should flood it and shut it down, once and for all.
The list of Greens holding elected office is just that, nothing more, nothing less. I was a Mayor of Santa Monica, California, it was a widely known fact that I was a Green, and I governed as a Green and showed how green policies work in office. Anytime a Green Party member holds an elected office, it is an opportunity for Greens to demonstrate that they have good ideas, and can govern. As for your editorializing about political party strategies, you are entitled to your opinion. Since the Green Party is in about 100 countries, it is obvious to us what the negative effect upon democracy comes with single-seat, winner-take-all electoral systems. Our whole country suffers as a result of that system, and the extra challenges smaller parties like the Greens and Libertarians face are just one small aspect of this. In the face of this, we prefer to work towards positive electoral reforms like ranked choice voting and proportional representation, while running and winner local offices.
ReplyDeleteYour wiki bio says that the council didn't choose to keep you in the job and you don't appear to hold an elective office at the present. It's like John Eder in my state, the highest office holder in US Green history who lost his legislative seat in about the "Greenest" city in the North East after two terms and hasn't regained it. In that position he had exactly no effect except to carry on the fraud that the Green Party was a real party.
DeleteThe status of Green Parties in other countries is of no relevance as to whether or not they are anything like a real party in any of them, certainly they aren't in the United States.
We happen to have an antiquated Constitution that does winner take all. "Single seats", what that means I'm not exactly certain. Explain it. Most elections are to fill a single office, no national office is held on any other basis. The federal government isn't a municipal board.
If you want to change that running a fraudulent party whose major contribution to American Politics is to serve as spoiler, putting Republican-fascists into office, where they can do things like invade Iraq and collude with the Putin mafia regime to destroy democracy and, oh, yes, run like a wrecker through environmental legislation and policy as Pruitt is doing at the EPA and Zinke is doing in the Dept. of the Interior. All with the help of Jill Stein, as Nader did Bush II. They have no interest in amending the Constitution to make it more democratic so your pretense of the Greens changing that is just that, a pretense.
I would like to know how many billionaires contribute money to Green politics in the United States because billionaire oligarchs would seem to be the primary beneficiaries of the U.S. Green Party.
In order for a political party to be real it has to win significant office in numbers large enough to make law and change law. The Greens have had more than three decades to do that and they have had exactly no success in doing that. The only time a third party did that in the history of the United States it was the Republican Party starting with the election of Abraham Lincoln. By the time it was the age of the Green Party it had governed the country for going on three decades, approximately the time that the Green Party has done nothing but help the Republican-fascists steal elections they lost.
You are worse than a fraud, you are accomplices.