The news accounts of the clear Republican use of Green Party candidates in today's election to ratfuck on their behalf says that the various politicians being used in phony ads, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or the six Green Party candidates those Facebook ads are supposedly endorsing has any relation to the fake organization which has put out the ads.
A Facebook page for a group called “America Progress Now” is running ads online urging progressives to vote for Green Party candidates in seven competitive races in the Midwest.
“People of Color NEED Marcia Squier in the Senate to represent them,” one of the ads says, promoting a Green Party candidate in Michigan. “Americans don’t have control over our government anymore. We’ve lost it to greedy, corporate capitalists,” says another, calling for voters to support Ohio Green Party candidate Joe Manchik.
The page features ads with images of prominent progressive politicians like Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Problem is, America Progress Now hasn’t registered with the Federal Election Commission, as all groups making independent political expenditures are required to do. Six of the Green Party candidates being promoted by America Progress Now say they have no affiliation with the Facebook page, and most say they’ve never heard of the group.
You can read the story and the details of how Facebook has refused to take down the ads, though it's clear they violate their own claimed standards - Facebook can stand in as the quintessential example of how the tech companies are as bad as any in the past when it comes to destroying democracy. I'm going to make two points about the story.
First, note that when they say "Bernie Sanders" they, correctly, say Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. Bernie Sanders, after running for the Democratic Party nomination for president in 2016, he, his campaign operation and his cult of followers causing no end of trouble for the Democratic Party and likely participating in creating the catastrophic results of that election didn't stay in the Democratic Party,. As soon as it was over he changed his registration back to Independent. BERNIE SANDERS IS NOT A DEMOCRAT yet he and his people and his cult are talking about mounting a second, and this time, absurd run for the DEMOCRATIC PARTY nomination for president in 2020.
On election day in 2020 Bernie Sanders will be 79 years old, in September the next year he will be 80. On that ground alone Sanders should cut the bullshit that he's running to win the presidency, he'd never get it, he's not stupid so he knows he's not going to get it. Even some of his inner circle are that smart, so they're not doing this in order for someone running as a DEMOCRAT will be president in 2021, he's running it with every chance that him doing so will be doing exactly what these Republican ratfuckers are doing with the ad that's using his image and name are doing, guaranteeing a Republican will hold the office.
Bernie Sanders, someone I agree with on many things and have expressed deep admiration for in the past is a hairs width away from turning into the same kind of Republican ratfucker that Ralph Nader, Eugene McCarthy and Jill Stein have been, ratfucking for Republicans from the alleged left.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who, in contrast to Sanders in the twilight of his career, is at the beginning of hers. She embodies a lot of promise, she should start cutting her ties to Sanders and other such Republican ratfuckers now. She deserves to become her own woman, to forge her own basis of credibility and repute apart from any of the people who will try to use her. We will see if she does that or if she turns into the same kind of figure that Denis Kucinich (is he still at FOX?) has become. I hope she chooses wisely and doesn't become the captive of whoever among her circle is most like Bernie Sanders' putrid campaign manager, Jeff Weaver.
The six Green Party phonies being used in this Republican ratfucking operation are, in fact, Republican ratfuckers, themselves. They can pretend to whine about being so used all they want, by running as Greens they made themselves what they are whining about now. The Green Party has long been suspected of being one big Republican ratfucking fraud and with Jill Stein, that isn't something you have to suspect anymore, not with her various connections with Putin, the patron of Republican ratfuckery. They can disclaim the effort all they want, even if this hadn't happened that's what their running as Greens is. The Green Party should be swamped by Democrats and obliterated, it is a fraud that has been used to help Republicans - the actual opponents of everything the Greens claim to stand for - for decades now. It is a fraud. That has been the nature of these groups and candidates "from the real left" for a long time. On the basis of the idiotic Marxist superstition that things going to the extreme right will force the dialectic to make a sharp left swing, they have attacked the only "left" that has a chance of actually winning an election and governing, the Democrats. That is so obvious that even in office Bernie Sanders has acted in concert with the Democratic coalition, in both the House and Senate - and, yeah, I'm even more pissed off at Sanders now because he should know that better than anyone. He further proved that because he didn't run an independent campaign for president, he tried to hijack the Democratic Party to do that, using the Democratic Party he was never a sincere member of to promote himself in the process.
The Green Party is a fraud that should have been ended decades ago, it is a fraud kept alive mostly through such idiocy as pushed by the lefty magazines, on paper and pixilated, and some of the flakier perennial professional lefty figures of the "real left". Any magazine that was carrying water for the Green Party in the past twenty years could probably have ceased publication and the results would be anything but negative, if there were any results.
To some extent I think that this has been a result of the folly of trying to base a left on the power of youth, something which arose with my generation because the cohort of young, new voters was so abnormally large. The young, those in the process of gaining college credentials, most of all, are inevitably callow, that's the nature of being young and inexperienced and not having seen enough of how things are. Their vulnerability has been something which dishonest politicians have long taken advantage of. In the case of the right (see the idiocy of Jacob Wohl) it works for them because their entire thing is based on lies and deceit and using that. It doesn't work for the left, at all. The excitement of the old-left, old-new-left revolutionary clap trap, the allure and fun of self-righteousness, and other such follies of youth, the unwelcome news that actual governance is not fun and exciting and will inevitably become hard and dirty and, on occasion, sordid makes young people particularly vulnerable to such con men and hucksters as can be represented by the Greens. I used to think Bernie Sanders wasn't one of those, I am a hairs width of concluding I was wrong about that. I know it about the Greens and such rags as In These Times and, yes, The Nation.
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I am going to again say that the Democratic Party needs to take over the mechanism of its presidential nominations and conduct its own national primary based on the actual membership of the Democratic Party. It has to get rid of the disgusting, anti-democratic, 19th century anachronism of caucuses - the source of Bernie Sanders' illusory strength in 2016, the source of endless squabbles REMEMBER NEVADA! should be the rallying cry for scrapping the caucuses.
The Democratic Party should adopt the strictly by-mail elections system to choose its nominees, sending secure paper ballots through the U. S. Mail to all voters registered as Democrats to be mailed back to a central location where they could be counted - with independent oversight - and tabulated in order to choose a Democratic candidate guaranteed to be chosen by registered Democrats. No more same-day Green Party ratfucking operations, no non-enrolled screwing with the choice of Democrats, none of the various bull shit of regional advantage for states like Iowa and New Hampshire, no non-Democrats trying to hijack the party. It would get rid of Republicans on the state level trying to screw us through various laws - it would be entirely extra-governmental AND IT WOULD COST THE TAXPAYER NOTHING TO IMPLEMENT. The ballot could be standardized in a form which was uniform and simple to understand, the order of names on ballots could be varied on a random basis so there would be no "top of the ticket" advantage (which is a matter of fairness, not necessarily a test of integrity or honesty). It could institute ranked-choice in which people got to vote for their first AND THEIR SECOND CHOICE. Having experienced rank-choice voting twice here in Maine, I love it.
Best of all, on the basis of those places in the world which conduct elections on the basis of the mail, it would certainly drive up participation and the choice would be made by a far larger number of voters who would, then, have a far higher chance of turning up to vote in November - that is assuming they wouldn't have the far more democratic and honest option of voting on a paper ballot by mail.
I can't see any downside to such a radical change and those, as they come up, could be corrected, internally, by the Party without interference from Republican in legislaturess or Greens (I repeat myself) - they could put those changes up to a mail-in vote of registered Democrats.
It would be a radical change and would, no doubt, lead to criticism but the present day patchwork of bull shit that the nominations process is leads to more. It would end the kind of bull shit discussed above and much more.
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