Dr. Steinister - Part Two

Near where I live, there is a house with a "Cease-Fire Now" lawn sign opposing Israeli military operations against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.  A couple of days ago, I passed by it and found another lawn sign next to it - a Jill Stein campaign sign.  

Although I am a former Stein voter who has since expressed regret for voting for her in 2016 - but not regretting voting for a third-party candidate, as I could never vote for Hillary Clinton - I continue to stress that while the once and present Green Party presidential candidate may have been a factor in costing Hillary the Presidency against Donald Trump in 2016 in the states in what used to be called the 'blue firewall,"  as the vote tallies in those states show above, she was not the only factor, and that Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson also cost Hillary Clinton votes in these states (as this CNN article from 2016 explains). Johnson was as much a possible spoiler as Dr. Stein was.  Moreover, many people who voted for Dr. Stein or Johnson might have stayed home if neither one had been on the ballot.

That out of the way, I am happy to present more evidence that Dr. Stein is a fraud.  I once complained how progressives did nothing to start a new party to replace the Democrats after Hillary Clinton's well-deserved loss and the Democratic party's descent into Whig-like irrelevance, but did you notice?  Dr. Stein was one of those progressives who sat on her hands.  In fact, she disappeared as quickly as I expected the Democratic Party to.  She sat out 2020 and let another Green Party member carry the standard in the presidential election that year, and now she's back, promising a more just society if she were to win against all odds.  Don't you believe it.

Her stand for the Palestinians seems contrived and incredulous, since she never spoke out about the Middle East before, but her emphasis on Michigan, with its large Arab and Islamic population, seems to be calculated into helping Trump at Kamala Harris' expense.   Because it is.  She has expressed no fear that her efforts to make inroads in Michigan could help Trump win, just as she doesn't regret that Trump may have won in 2016 because of her candidacy.

Justice for the Green Party should, as its name implies, include environmental justice, but Dr. Stein has benefited from mutual fund holdings that have investments in fossil fuels valued at up to $937,775, which Dr. Stein defended in 2016 by saying that her mutual funds invest in an array of companies and that oil and gas companies are only a small part of the mix.  Okay, so why, as MoveOn.org recently reported,  did she knowingly invest up to $500,000 in a stock index fund that invests in the Keystone XL pipeline that Dr. Stein says she opposes?  And why, after she denounced President Biden for his handling of the Norfolk Southern derailment in Ohio, did she knowingly invest in index funds that have holdings in that same railroad?  

It seems to me that if Dr. Stein really were concerned about fossil fuels, she would have made a sincere effort to invest in more environmentally friendly companies or in mutual funds that invest in such companies.  All you have to do is look at The Nation for ads for such mutual funds.  And if Dr. Stein were concerned about advancing progressive causes, she would be doing the work of advancing them every day, like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) does.  I don't agree with everything AOC says, and I have grown uncomfortable with her narrow test of what a progressive is (Martin O'Malley, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris would all fall short), but say what you will, she does just that - put in the work.  And it's easy to see why she ran for office as a Democrat even though the party was moribund when she entered politics.  Because even a declining, irrelevant, disconnected, out-of-touch Democratic Party is preferable to a Green Party at the height of its powers.

And the Green Party of the United States, unlike its European counterparts, will never be a player in national politics unless it gets rid of hypocrites and opportunists like Dr. Stein.

Justin and Jesse

It's been said that the most violent storms start as flaps of butterfly's swings. here to two such wing flaps that could produce a tempest on Election Day, exactly six months from today.

Justin Amash (above) is a congressman from Michigan and a former Republican Party member who famously broke with his onetime Republican colleagues by calling for Trump's impeachment.  He has now formed an explanatory committee to run for the presidential nomination of the Libertarian Party ticket, offering himself as a small-government conservative who would appeal to voters turned off by Donald Trump and Joe Biden and offering a voice to the many voters who feel left out.  Although he would like to reach out to center-right voters turned off by Trump, he might appeal to those considering support for Biden, which would make Uncle Joe's bid for the Presidency - especially his efforts to win Michigan - troublesome.

And there's this guy, whom you might remember from the nineties!

Former Minnesota governor and pro-wrestling icon Jesse Ventura, the only member of Ross Perot's old centrist Reform Party ever elected to anything, is "testing the waters" for a run for the Green Party's presidential nomination.  Ventura gets that party's nod, he could be an even bigger spoiler for Biden than Amash.  Ventura is popular with young working-class men who follow Bernie Sanders - and like Trump, he provides entertainment value and charisma that an old-school type like Biden couldn't hope to offer up.  Given that Biden needs the sort of voters Ventura would appeal to, that could spell danger for the Democrats and delight for Trump.  Biden has enough problems to worry about - some of which I'll get to later - and a Ventura candidacy on the Green Party ticket wouldn't help.

To be fair, even if the Greens nominate their own current front-runner - Howard G. Hawkins - they could be a problem for Biden.  Hawkins, a Green Party co-founder and a respected trade unionist, could run a strong, serious campaign against Biden not unlike the one Jill Stein ran against Hillary Clinton in 2016.  He could, like Dr. Stein, get enough people to buy into a moment and think they could be part of a budding, growing movement.  Well, take it from someone who voted for Dr. Stein in 2016 and even went to one of her campaign rallies (remember campaign rallies?  they were the thing before COVID-19) - that's not going to happen.  I voted for Dr Stein in the hope that it wold help the Greens get five percent of the vote and thus qualify for federal matching funds this year, but not only did the Greens fail to reach the five-percent threshold, they haven't done a thing to build up their "movement" since.  Progressive purists are the biggest waste of people's time.  In all the time that Trump has been President, the Greens could have made more than a token effort to expand their party, and they could have made some progress (no pun intended, but it's an appropriate pun nonetheless) in down-ballot offices.  And if Bernie Sanders supporters were disappointed with the Democratic Party to the point of disgust, they should have called a convention and founded a new party. No.  So-called progressives don't want to do any of that.  They just want to cause trouble for the Democrats and annoy the hell out of everyone else.

Truth be told, if I may return to Justin Amash for a moment, there's a precedent for the Libertarian Party to wreck the Democrats' chances simply because of all the moderates who cold have voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 but voted for Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson instead.  On MSNBC, shortly after the 2016 election, Chris Matthews (remember him?) even showed evidence in raw numbers that it was not Dr Stein but Johnson who took away enough centrist votes from Hillary to deprive her of victories in key states.  

The bottom line: Candidates like Amash and Ventura are electoral candy.  Voting for them is a waste of time.  A better use of time is to work to make elections more free and fair in the future.  Going third party before then won't make things better. It could make things even worse.

Look, I get it.  Joe Biden is not the best presidential candidate the Democrats could have put up against Trump.  The best candidate either didn't win the nomination or didn't run for it.  But I'm comfortable with him, much more than I could ever have been with Hillary, and I believe he will be a fine President - and we need to back him to get rid of Trump.  And to those progressives who are still steamed because Biden is the nominee . . . if you vote for Biden, you likely won't get everything you want.  But if you go third party or stay home on Election Day and let Trump win . . . 

Seeing Green

NBC News and the Daily Kos - two media outlets who think Hillary Clinton is a goddess - recently commented on a December 2015 dinner that celebrated the tenth anniversary of Russia Today (now known by its initials, RT), the English-language Russian TV channel.  Two Americans attended the dinner and were seated at Russian President Vladimir Putin's table. One was now-disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

The other was Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein.    

Dr. Stein is being called a traitor by establishment Democrats for being present at that dinner.  There's no evidence that she colluded with the Russian government and conspired with Putin to defeat Hillary Clinton.  She was at that dinner because she saw RT as a vehicle to get the message of her presidential candidacy across to American voters who, had they stuck to mainstream media, would not have even heard of her.  But the problem with the RT association is that the news channel is seen as a pro-Kremlin propaganda machine to influence the American electorate, and the optics of Dr. Stein at that dinner were unfortunate.

"Jill Stein was a part of Russia’s plan for the election," insisted Mark Sumner of the Daily Kos. "They gave her what the U.S. media had denied - attention and flattery. In return she praised RT and chastised the American media. Both sides got just what they wanted."

Yeah, well, I didn't make my decision to vote for Dr. Stein this past November based on any Russian propaganda.  I voted for her because I couldn't bring myself to vote for Trump or Hillary after my original and second choices - Martin O'Malley and Bernie Sanders - got eliminated.  If NBC News and the Daily Kos - both engaged in the sort of Russophobia associated with the Republicans during the Cold War - want to keep fueling such hysteria to explain away Hillary's loss, fine.  But they shouldn't blame anyone other than Hillary and the tone-deaf supporters who gave her the Democratic presidential nomination for Donald J. Trump.

Yet they're still blaming Dr. Stein.    

"Stein did well enough to help Russia achieve its aims," Sumner wrote. "Her vote totals in the crucial states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan were all greater than Clinton's margin of defeat, and arguably denied Clinton an Electoral College victory."

Not entirely true. Trump beat Hillary in Pennsylvania by 68,236 votes; Dr. Stein won 48,912 votes in that state, meaning that Hillary would still have been some 20,000 votes short without Dr. Stein on the ballot. But here's where my research found something interesting. I had said here earlier, based on the numbers I heard, that Dr. Stein's vote total in Michigan was greater than Hillary Clinton's margin of defeat and that her vote total in Wisconsin was less that Hillary's margin of defeat.  In fact, they were greater in both states; Trump beat Hillary in Wisconsin by 27,257, and Dr, Stein's vote total in Wisconsin - 30,998 - was indeed greater.  In Michigan, Trump beat Hillary by 10,704 votes, and Dr. Stein got  a greater tally of 51,463 votes.  But the election had already been called for Trump before Michigan's total was finalized, meaning that, without Dr, Stein, Hillary could have won Michigan but still would have lost the election.  And as long as Hillary was never going to win Pennsylvania even without Dr. Stein on the ballot, she could have topped Trump in Wisconsin and Michigan and still lost.

Got all that?

The bottom line is that even if the Russians did influence the election - and I'm saying that they did or didn't - Hillary lost the election not because of Russian propaganda or minor-party opponents but because she was a lousy candidate and should never have been nominated.

Having said all that, I'm not supporting Dr. Stein for anything any more, despite having voted for her in November.  Why?  Because she failed to do what she was expected to do.  Win the Presidency?  No, no one expected her to do that!  She was, though, expected to get at least five percent of the vote for the Green Party to get the party federal matching funds for the 2020 presidential election and help develop the Greens as a credible alternative to the Democrats.  She failed.  And when the election was over, I hit the reset button.  The day before the election, I was a supporter of Dr. Stein.  On Election Day, I voted for Dr. Stein.  The day after, I was a Martin O'Malley supporter again.  Because he was and he remained my first choice for President.  

The U.S. Green Party may one day be a party like its European counterparts and win enough seats in Congress and in state legislatures to get concessions from major-party caucuses, but it's never going to replace the Democratic Party as the major opposition to the Republicans.  Meanwhile, the "unity tour" between centrist Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez and progressive non-Democrat Bernie Sanders has been a flop, showing how bewildered and rudderless the Democrats are.  Again: I believe that the Democrats could go full Whig and disintegrate before 2020, allowing a new party to fill the void.  I still want Martin O'Malley to run for President in 2020.  But not necessarily as a Democrat, any more than Abraham Lincoln and William Seward would run for President in 1860 as Whigs.  Of course, they both ended up running as members of a new party altogether.     

As for Dr. Stein, she has already been the Green Party presidential nominee twice, and she will be seventy years old in 2020.  Thanks for being a voice of reason, Dr. Stein, but you should do what Hillary won't . . . retire from the political scene and let someone else carry the banner going forward.

Green Down The Ballot

Commentator and gay activist Dan Savage is getting on my nerves these days.  Not only is he dismissing Green Party voters as pasty-faced straight white people who don't care about people of color and LGBT folks, he has implied that the Green Party has focused so much effort on running  Jill Stein for President that it doesn't focus at all on down-ballot races where any political party worth its salt would start to build itself up.  He has said that maybe the Greens should contest races for smaller elective offices before going for the White House.

Dan Savage is full of crap.  The truth of the matter is that the Greens are running several candidates for all sorts of offices this year in the United States.  Overall, the Greens are running 279 candidates - let me repeat that number: 279 - across the nation in 2016, but you probably didn't know that because, when the media do talk about a third party, they talk about the Libertarians and their standard bearer Gary Johnson's ignorance of Syrian geography.  And the Greens have been running candidates in lesser offices, concurrently with their presidential candidates, for years.

Here are some more numbers, directly from the Green Party itself, on how successful it's been in building itself up in the U.S. as an alternative to the Democrats:  The party has won 31 percent of all the elections it's contested, it's put 1,013 people into local office and gotten 57 mayors elected since 1987, and there are 140 Greens who, at this writing, hold elective office.  One Green who has held office is a woman who got elected twice as a member of the Town Meeting in Lexington, Massachusetts.  The woman's name?  Jill Stein. 

The Democrats, aided and abetted by elitist supporters such as Savage, want you to think that a true party of the people can never challenge them.  Well, Hillary has offended too many people who are looking for real change with her hawkish forging policy proposals, her coziness with Wall Street, and her arrogant attitude toward environmentalists, and some of us had enough of her and her party's centrist claptrap.  The polls suggest that the Democrats may revitalize themselves in the elections, but it won't change the fact that it is declining and rotting from within just as much as the Republicans are.  The two-party system is closer to the verge of collapse then it's ever been since the 1850s, and it's time for new voices and new ideas.

And someone please tell Dan Savage to stop bullying Green voters and focus more on his . . . anti-bullying campaign.

I, for one, plan to vote for as many Green Party candidates on my local ballot as I can.  Alas, I live in a very Republican precinct, so Jill Stein may be the only Green I can vote for. :-( 

Campaign 2016: The Greening of America

This just got interesting.

The two major presidential candidates for 2016 have done nothing but undistinguish themselves in conduct unbecoming a President, and while Donald Trump is clearly the top Katzenjammer Kid, Hillary Clinton should be called out too.  But first, the Donald.  He actually had the nerve to discredit a Muslim Gold Star couple, Khizr and Ghazala Khan, for their speech at the Democratic convention against Trump's stand on Muslims in light of the sacrifice they made with the 2004 death of their son, Captain Humayun Khan, in the Iraq War.  Mr. Khan called on Trump to stop demonizing Islam and, also, respect the contributions of American Muslims to the country and respect the Constitution's protection of religious freedom.  He added that Trump has sacrificed nothing and no one during the fight against terrorism.  Trump, whose statements on Muslims demonstrated that he doesn't know anything about Islam or the Constitution, insisted that he has sacrificed to create jobs (he had to fly commercial first class instead of in his own jet?), demonstrating a tin ear to the sacrifices of Gold Star parents of any creed, color or faith.

As for Hillary, she got herself in hot water again over her State Department correspondence, insisting this past Sunday that she neither sent classified e-mails on her e-mail account  nor used more than one server. Both claims are untrue. Although FBI director James Comey saw no reason to prosecute anyone, his statements contradicting Hillary's claims suggests that she misremembers the recent past, just as her erroneous recollections of being under sniper fire on an airport tarmac when she visited Bosnia in 1996 as First Lady suggest that she misremembers the distant past.

Meanwhile, the Green Party rolls merrily along.  Presumptive Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein is now expected to be on the ballot in six more states, including - drum roll, please! - New Jersey! And Pennsylvania!  (The other four states are Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, and Vermont.)  Mind you, the petitions in these states still have to be certified, but get this - in these states, the number of signatures submitted surpassed, and in some cases doubled, the minimum amount required.  In New Jersey, petitions bearing two thousand signatures - more than the eight hundred needed, and two and a half times the minimum - were submitted.  It looks like I won't have to write her in after all.  

Meanwhile, meet Dr. Stein's vice presidential running mate! :-D

His name is Ajamu Baraka, and he is a renowned human rights activist.  (As far as I can make out, he is not related to the Baraka family of Newark, New Jersey, where Ras Baraka is the mayor.)  A native Chicagoan like Dr. Stein, Ajamu Baraka is a founding member and a former executive director of the U.S. Human Rights Network, which has sought to improve basic human rights in These States, and he has also been on the boards of Amnesty International and the National Center for Human Rights Education.  His credentials in fighting for basic humanity and dignity are impeccable, and he is a staunch advocate for the dispossessed.

"Ajamu Baraka," says Dr. Stein in a statement, "is a powerful, eloquent spokesperson for the transformative, radical agenda whose time has come - an agenda of economic, social, racial, gender, climate, indigenous and immigrant justice."

Just like the woman at the top of the ticket.

The Stein/Baraka ticket has its work cut out for itself, and the media are already trying to scare people from voting for any minor-party presidential ticket by saying that Trump could have the advantage in a three-way or four-way race. The insufferable Chuck Todd of MSNBC has already said that.  Perhaps it's time to scare both parties by getting behind the Green ticket.  Even if Dr. Stein is unlikely to be the next President, a respectable showing would send a strong signal that the days of the nation's current two-party system, in place since 1856, are numbered.