Vote Green - early, often, and conscientiously
Topic: politics

So you want to change the world? Or at least a large part of the Lower Great Lakes Bioregion? Well, next Tuesday you can help leverage grassroots democracy by voting Green.

It’s likely voters will go to the polls without ever having seen or heard the following names – thank you very much, local media – but here are the candidates I’m going for:

NY governor: Malachy McCourt.

Lt. Gov.: Alison Duncan. (Actually, David Paterson would be a decent choice, too, much preferable politically to his Dem running mate, Eliot Spitzer. But if you go for Paterson, do it on the Working Families line.)

Comptroller: Julia Willebrand. (See, you don’t have to flip a coin for public-teat sucking specialist Alan Hevesi or, much worse, the Republican.)

State Attorney General: Rachel Treichler.

US Senator: Howie Hawkins. (Beware the Working Families line here: they’ve cross-endorsed Hillary Clinton, enemy of peace and universal health care, etc.)

Last, a related matter of principle: never vote for anyone who’s accepted the Conservative Party endorsement. At the Public Market a couple weeks ago, I talked with a judge seeking re-election who tried to explain why she jumped on this joke party’s bandwagon. She didn’t try too hard. Judges always beg off discussing the issues – by invoking a code of ethics designed as much to shield them from questions as to preserve their neutrality.

But excuse me. Signing on with a party means accepting the party platform. And signing on with the Conservatives means tacit endorsement of an arch-reactionary agenda: limiting abortion rights into non-existence, stopping further restrictions on guns, unleashing a Texas-style judicial crime-wave of executions, and thrusting religion (specifically the “Judeo-Christian moral code”) deeper into public life.

I judge this insanity.

Update on Green blackout
Topic: politics
An afterthought to the 10/22 item below: On Wednesday 10/25, Amy Goodman did some excellent - and extensive - coverage of Howie Hawkins' being shut out of the debate at UR. The Democracy Now! segment included an interview with Hawkins and a League of Women Voters official telling the whole sad story - a tragicomedy that exposes our local opinion managers for what they are, and aren't. Check out democracynow.org for a download: (http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/25/1422220).

Closed to debate
Topic: politics

With New York’s US Senate race grinding to its inevitable outcome, I’ve been girding my loins – and realizing that discomforting old expression fits the situation all too well. I can actually feel a tightness south of the solar plexus when I think about Hillary Clinton’s easy victory. Here’s a candidate that preserves a reputation as a progressive while being pro-war, pro-death penalty, pro-corporate power and money, pro-inadequate health care, pro-homophobic marriage restrictions. Radicals, and even liberals, are justified in mourning, “With friends like that…”

Sure, she’s better than Republican challenger John Spencer, and way ahead of Alaric and Tamerlane, but no civilized person should cast a vote for her.

Yet there she is, at the head of the pack. And there she’ll stay, thanks in part to local institutions with curious ideas about democratic forms and intellectual honesty.

Here’s what I mean: Last Friday night, Clinton and Spencer took part in a “debate” – the term now meaning banter between candidates who basically are in agreement, answering journalists who move in lockstep – hosted by the University of Rochester. Time Warner’s R News broadcast the event from Strong Auditorium; WXXI carried the audio. As reported later on R News, everything looked peachy. No notes of discord, in the hall or outside. A fine exercise in electoral politics, and a credit to the home team.

But R News left out the real story. And the next morning, the D&C hardly did better, with this one sentence way down in a piece by Joseph Spector: “Howie Hawkins, the Green Party candidate for Senate, was not included in the event, drawing protests from him and the League of Women Voters.” You  have to look elsewhere in the news to find out what really happened. Hawkins didn’t take his exclusion lying down. He called the event a “farce” and likened the selection process to the accomplishments of Boss Tweed. And he noted that all four anti-war candidates (himself, a Libertarian, and two socialists) had been undemocratically dumped.

The League of Women Voters was mighty pissed, too, or whatever expression fits their respectable image. As reported by news outlets here and there, the League had determined, using in-house criteria that allow some subjective application but still are relatively fair, that the debates should include Hawkins along with Clinton and Spencer. Nevertheless, the local newspeople and the University went ahead with the farce.

This was particularly galling in the UR’s case – an institution of “higher learning” in cahoots with those who trample the most basic principles of fairness. Okay, okay – what planet am I on? We’re talking about the same institution that hosts the Simon School.

Luckily, we’ve got the internet, and you can check out the Hawkins campaign at www.hawkinsforsenate.org. Brace yourself: this is a pablum-free-zone, with well-thought out statements on the full range of issues. If you get tired of being challenged and respected as a voter, you can switch back to Hillary or John for a snooze.

 

Tasini wins on principle
Topic: politics

This summer more than a few people took a ride with Jonathan Tasini as he bicycled across New York State to galvanize his primary race against Hillary Clinton. Now the totals are in; Tasini got almost 14 percent of the Monroe County vote for the Dem nomination, and he reportedly got around 17 percent statewide. (The state elections board hasn’t yet posted the certified results.) Not too shabby for someone without instant name recognition or the “power of incumbency.” And oh yeah, Clinton outspent him something like a billion to one.

But the media did their usual part in keeping a principled insurgent in his place. Even a New York Times columnist remarked that “some may even believe that his first name is Little-known, given that he is sometimes referred to as Little-known Jonathan Tasini.” Some, indeed. A few weeks after Haberman made his point, the Times itself called Tasini “Mrs. Clinton’s little-known opponent.” And on primary morning, I heard a WXXI newsman call the shots: Clinton, he said, “is expected to trounce little-known candidate Jonathan Tasini.” I wonder how many iterations of this noxious phrase popped out of newsreaders’ and pundits’ mouths over the months as they systematically withheld the coverage that would have made Tasini well-known to the electorate.

Mindless repetition wasn’t the media’s only, or most grievous sin. In the Democrat and Chronicle, Joseph Spector and Jay Gallagher followed up a perfectly reasonable comment (“Tasini was hoping to pull off an upset modeled on Ned Lamont's surprising victory over Sen. Joseph Lieberman in last month's Democratic Senate primary in Connecticut”) with a bunch of crap, to wit: “But [Tasini] never gained any leverage as he attacked Clinton for not vehemently opposing the war in Iraq.” The crap part is the implication that Clinton opposes the war to some slight degree, and that Tasini would have been satisfied only if she made the rafters ring with demands for withdrawal. But the point is: as a senator, Clinton has been a strong supporter of the war, first by voting for the resolution that started the whole mess, and since then by refusing to repudiate her vote or join with actual anti-war people in Congress. (And don’t forget that Clinton was implicated by more than marriage in the sanctions regime that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis in the 1990s.)

The local “alternative” joined this media race to the bottom, as well. I couldn’t recall anything much about Tasini in City Newspaper, so I checked the paper’s online archive. The search turned up three items, one of which is a letter-to-the-editor, and another of which is a glancing reference to Tasini in a long article by Krestia DeGeorge on Spitzer nemesis Tom Suozzi. City’s only substantive coverage of the Tasini campaign appeared way back in March, when DeGeorge gave Tasini the equivalent of one decent paragraph in a long piece about a Democratic Party rural conference.

Whatever the vote tally – and Tasini’s 117,000-vote statewide total is no drop in the bucket – the New York peace insurgency aimed at taking back the Senate was well worth the effort. Tasini got voters talking and thinking about the war and Hillary Clinton’s hypocrisies. His platform also called for single-payer health insurance, another sane measure that Hillary Clinton has worked hard to derail. He ran to promote action against global warming, too. From top to bottom, in fact, his positions read like a progressive dream. No wonder he lost. He was just too good to lie or carry water for the folks that make a killing on war and misery.

Voices for peace and sanity
Topic: politics

Two remarkable people on the left got sandbagged this week.

 

First, with their usual alacrity and disdain for free speech, security staffers hauled Global Exchange leader Medea Benjamin out of the Congressional chamber where Iraqi PM Nouri al-Maliki was addressing our “leaders” – and asking for more US troops. Benjamin wore a “Troops Home Now” t-shirt, and she raised her voice to reinforce the message. In a news release, Global Exchange noted that Benjamin and others have been conducting a public fast in Washington and also have tried to arrange a meeting with al-Maliki to press their case – all to no avail. Now Benjamin may be prosecuted for her action. Meanwhile, the many top-level war criminals who were on hand to hear al-Maliki are avoiding arrest.

 

Adding insult to injury, a network TV newscast (can't recall which one - but they're interchangeable) mentioned that "a woman" had been removed from the speech. No name, and of course nothing about Global Exchange; heaven forbid. But I'm sure Benjamin, who as a founder of CodePink has become a respected national leader, and more importantly one who's deserving of respect, is used to the forced anonymity.

 

Sandbag number two: On July 26 the New York Times went with a story about US senatorial hopeful Jonathan Tasini, who’s running a campaign of sanity and decency against the retrograde incumbent, Hillary Clinton. The story, notable for a lack of background, mined a blog where Tasini was heard saying that Israeli attacks against Gaza violate the Geneva Conventions and could be regarded as terrorism. Tasini later told the Times that he did not and would not call Israel a terrorist state. But he added, “I have been critical of Israeli conduct in the occupied territories — Gaza and the West Bank — and in the current conflict, in the same way that I have been absolutely critical of Hezbollah.”

 

In the grand tradition of modern journalism, the story was finely “balanced” with quotes from a Clinton spokesperson, who said Tasini’s blog comments were “offensive and beyond the pale”; and someone from the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, who said Tasini’s “ignorance is appalling.” No room for views from independent left sources, of course.

 

Nor was there room for even a few sentences from Tasini’s easily accessible campaign material to flesh out his views on the Middle East and show how he’s actually pro-Israel, in the truest sense. So to fill in some of the blanks, below are some extracts from the campaign website (tasinifornewyork.org). Note that Tasini, beyond being articulate and correct, has the kind of bona fides that Hillary Clinton can only envy:

“From the beginning of this race, I was committed to speaking the truth, whether about the Iraq war/occupation or abusive corporate power or the corruption coursing through our political system… Voters should know a little about where I come from on the issue of Israel-Palestine and the raging conflict engulfing the region today. I speak about Israel out of love and pain, in the same way that I am a deeply patriotic American who is harshly critical of our government and its behavior in Iraq—and of Hillary Clinton’s vote to send our men and women to die into an illegal, immoral war.

 

“My father was born in then-Palestine. He fought in the Haganah (the Israeli underground) in the war of independence; my father’s cousin, whose name I carry as a middle name, was killed in that war. I lived in Israel for seven years, during which I went through the 1973 war: a cousin of mine was killed in that war, leaving a young widow and two children, and his brother was wounded. My step-grandfather, an old man who was no threat to anyone, was killed by a Palestinian who took an axe to his head while he was sitting quietly on a park bench. Half my family still lives in Israel. I have seen enough bloodshed, tears, and parents burying their children to last many lifetimes.

 

“For that reason, I believe passionately in a two-state solution, which includes a strong, independent, economically viable Palestinian state existing along side a strong, independent, economically vibrant Israel. It is the only solution that will bring peace to the civilians who now live in fear of death raining down from above—either because of the missiles of Hezbollah or the bombs of Israeli aircraft.

 

“I do not believe Israel is a terrorist state. I do believe that Israel has committed acts that violate international standards and the Geneva conventions. In Israel, such a statement that the military has committed acts that violate the Geneva convention and international standards and has also engaged in torture (or, as it is called, “moderate pressure”) would be a subject of debate but hardly considered novel or particularly radical.”

 

From there Tasini goes on to cite B’tselem, the highly respected Israeli human rights group (www.btselem.org), and he also mentions Rabbi Michael Lerner, the founder of Tikkun (www.tikkun.org).

 

In a tip of the hat to the latter, Tasini ends his statement with this: “As a Jew, I have always been proud of the Jewish concept of “Tikkun Olam” or “repairing the world.” I like to think that that is what brought so many Jews into the civil rights and labor movements in the 1960s and 1970s, and into the current anti-war movement—and, personally, guided me into the world of social justice work. I feel great sorrow that Israel is an occupier of another people and I believe that Israel can never be whole and can never be at peace until that occupation is ended in a just way. And I also believe that the concept of Tikkun Olam means that we must never be silent.”

 

Amen to all that.