Laura Wells and Main Stream Media.

For far too long, I have heard Greens talk about being given short shrift by main stream media. It has become such a truism that most Greens don't even try. 

Let me show you something what can be done if you try.  Laura Wells in the Sacramento Bee.  It can be done. All you have to do is become the story. In Laura's case, part of that story is having been the top vote getter for any Green in a CA partisan race.  That was as a candidate for Controller in 2002 when she out polled the top of the Green ticket, Peter Camejo.

 There is no secret to this.  Mainstream Media is always looking for a story.  So, give them one.  If you like this about Laura, then go visit her web site, become a fan of Laura on facebook, follow her on twitter.

More importantly, take some time  to Feel the spirit. Bill Moyers had it right.  We don't have the money to compete with a Meg Whitman or a Steve Poizner or a Jerry Brown with maybe $7 Mil in the bank.  But now one works their ass off like a Green.  We have to, but that is what is going to win elections and, who know, maybe make a heroine out of Laura.

Feelin' the Spirit

Winter Solstice, showers off and on. Sun came out, go pick some persimmons, rain starts gain. Quiet now, listening to Grant Green, Herbie Hancock and Billy Higgins Feelin' the Spirit (1962).

So what was so important to write about? Copenhagen COP15 meltdown? Health Insurance Company Bailout? Maybe this: The only answer to organized money is organized people. That is an idea so important that Bill Moyers repeated it three times in an address to students at Occidental College.

The only answer to organized money is organized people.

Again:

The only answer to organized money is organized people.

And again:

The only answer to organized money is organized people.

It was even the theme for his December 11, 2009 Journal on PBS.

I do not know of any description that is better for the predicament of the GPCA this year.  It is a year of statewide election where contestants are multi-millionaires like Poizner and Whitman, or have enough connections with said money as to be able to drive all contenders out of the race like Jerry Brown did... unless millionaire Diane Feinstein decides to retire from the Senate.


Greens don't have the type of money. We don't take corporate donations. So, we had better be a lot more organized than anyone else.  Greens have the long used the term Grassroots Democracy to describe their goal but some would seem to prefer grassroots anarchy, running away from the work of organizing, protective of some internal goodness that they would rather wait for self-organizing groups to come an ask for admission.  'taint gonna happen.


We are working toward a contested gubernatorial primary and that should be the impetus to do the organizing that our working groups have talked about but not done.


Here is a simple problem.  All of us have friends, family, neighbors, co-workers.  I am sure that we all know people who understand just how broken the current system is, how the lobbyists write our legislation, how we are so dependent on big money that even Ralph Nader says that Only the Super Rich can Save Us.  So let's each of us get one of those and convince them to register Green. I am not asking for much.  Just 1 new registration. A personal plea at the grassroots level.  You don't need a flier, you don't need a table in front of Safeway.  You just need to believe. 

You have until Jan 31.  I am sure that you can do it.  Just keep track of who you register because, come Feb. 1,  I am going to ask all of you, new and old,  to do it again.

A Conversation on Race

I started to watch Bill Moyers Journal last night and the first segment was so thought provoking that I turned it off and just sat in relative silence for a while. His guest was John McWhorters and the conversation that they had was on race, but it may not have been the conversation that Attorney General Holder meant in his Black History Month talk at the Justice Department.

Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and we, I believe, continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards. Though race-related issues continue to occupy a significant portion of our political discussion, and though there remain many unresolved racial issues in this nation, we average Americans simply do not talk enough with each other about things racial.

The rest of this takes more than I want to put on this front page and so you need to click Read more! to follow it.


Through it all, Moyers prompted McWhorters to define what he meant when he said that Holder was making a coded statement, and then pushed McWhorters to have the conversation that Holder was looking for. As a result, what I got was portions of two different converstations. One that McWhorters wanted to have with Moyers, the other that he did not want to have with Holder.

The first, is pretty much summed up with this statement.

White privilege is the way sometimes it's more provocatively put. And those things are there. But my question is whether or not we can eliminate those things within any time span that is less than geological. And so, yes, I know that there are arguments that there is institutional racism. But in terms of helping people who need help, it seems that they are very practical, hands-on strategies that we can use and that we can teach people to use that have a more interesting effect to me than crusading against the fact that society isn't fair.

Basically, I can't imagine the playing field ever being completely level. I don't know how you can create that. And this is the crucial thing.

The comments to Holder did not come until the end, when Moyers asked him how he would begin a frank conversation on race with Holder.

If he was sitting in front of me right now I would say, Mr. Holder, Eric, whatever it would be, are you afraid of the prospect of black America having to move on without calling on whites to acknowledge their racism? Are you afraid of the fact that despite the nastiness of our history, despite the injustice of slave ships, the Jim Crow, and everything else, that we're at a point where even though we're still in a position behind telling white people that they're racist is no longer going to do the job. It's not that I find it unfashionable or distasteful. You're not going to help anyone doing that. Are you afraid of us really having to take responsibility for ourselves? And what's important is I would say, Mr. Holder, you know that our taking responsibility for ourselves will involve calling on the government to do things to allow us to do that. So this is not some bootstraps argument. But still are you afraid of no longer talking about racism? Why is it that when you made a speech you wanted to take that line after Barack Obama's been elected president? Isn't it time to knock this off? That is what I would say to him. And, and I want to specify. It's time to knock this off because it is not helping anyone anymore. That is what I would say to him.

I sense that there is a generational change between that of Obama or McWhorters and that of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. Those, like Holder, who bridge that gap seem to have a hard time finding the language appropriate to the occasion when falling back on easily invoked coded speech may or may not apply.

I was challenged by this entire episode. It made me question whether I had a right to express my own opinion and desires. I know that my Mother had a very race free outlook. Moving to Flagstaff, AZ in 1953 was a shock to her as Flagstaff had very distinct and strong race problems and even then there was no racial majority of population in the town, though it was clear that the power was with the whites. Still, she always said that she did not care who I married as long as they were a Christian and I could not even do that.

Still, coming from that background, I can never think of the subject of race without questioning myself. Maybe that is all any of us can do.

Secretary of Food

I have, on occasion, made reference to Michael Pollan and his ideas about food. My earth day comments included a reference to Pollan's statement that you can do more to combat global warming by planting a garden than by installing CFL's. More recently, I referred to his recent letter to President-elect Obama that was published in the NY Times Magazine.

Last night, I watched Bill Moyers Journal as Moyers asked Pollan what he would do were he to become the Secretary of Agriculture in the Obama administration. Click Read more! to get my take.


I rarely get the opportunity to get ahead of Moyers. Maybe this time I was successful because he was on vacation. My Green Talk column in the very local Morgan Hill Times this week got at the same issue, though not as directly.

Still, I am of the opinion that possibly the single most important appointment the new president will make is to the position of Secretary of Agriculture. We have gone through an era in which the family farm has disappeared, in which factory farms and multinational corporations like ADM dominate not only the market but also the politics of agriculture.

There are two issues here. One is the fact that, as Pollan told Moyers that

...you have to understand that that department of the government, the $90 billion a year behemoth is captive of agri-business. It is owned by agri-business. They're in the room making policy there.

I agree with Pollan that making change in Agriculture has to go through Nancy Pelosi. We not only need to watch Obama's choice for Sec. of Agriculture, we need to pay attention to Pelosi's appointment to the Chairmanship of the House Committee on Agriculture. In the past, that committee has been loaded with Representatives from the mid-western farm states and California's Centeral Valley. They represent farm interests meaning ADM, Cargill and Blue Diamond Walnuts. (Yes. it get's that specific.) No one on that committee makes a habit of representing consumers for any other issue than driving down the prices of food and driving the family farms out of business.

There are a couple of actions that we can take. The easy one is to go sign a petition to Obama to name Pollan Secretary of Agriculture. As he told Moyers, he won't take it but getting some names on the petition is one way to make a statement without having to really do anything else.

More to the point, we need to create pressure on Pelosi in every way that we can. That means writing letters / OpEds to the San Francisco Chronicle, Challenging Michael Krasny to put Pollan on KQED's FORUM program again and then following up with call-ins and email questions. As I said at the end of my MH Times Column...

Even in my own Green Party it is not easy to get people to think of agriculture in this way. It challenges many deeply held, but false beliefs in how the real systems work. I am working to change that, in my community, in my party, in the whole country. Join me.

I need to stop watching Bill Moyers Journal on Friday evenings. I don't sleep well after. This time, he talks of the role of politics in controlling the media. There are those on the left who think it is the other way around, but I am not sure that they really understand what is happening with the 4th Estate.


Moyers begins this segment by citing novelist Russel Banks.

we choose our presidents not on the basis of their experience or even their political views, but on how well they tap into our basic beliefs, our deepest communal desires, including our religious or spiritual beliefs.

It is clear to see that is what is happening with Sarah Palin. It seems that no matter what the media does, and they have done a lot, people have responded to Palin at a visceral level that defies rational analysis.

He then goes on to show a CNN segment where Campbell Brown, not one of my favorite journalists, gained some esteem by not accepting the talking point that being the nominal commander of the Alaskan National Guard provided Palin with any valid experience. All Campbell did was to keep repeating the question that the McCain/Palin publicity flack kept ducking.

Can you tell me one decision that she made as Commander in Chief of the Alaska National Guard, just one?

This was set up as "belittling" her experience and the result was to cancel a McCain appearance on CNN.

This is the entire segment. The cited material as almost at the end.

We Greens have a real quandry. The truth about candidates does not make it through the media. Many of the public are reacting to the myth rather than the facts. The corporate media becomes the enemy, not of the public, but of the politicians who rail against the media so that you stop trusting them.

From the days of founding of this country, we have been told that an informed citizenry is essential for Democracy. Now, we have a bunch of politicians who are trying to make us stupid, who do not want us to be informed, but rather to be controlled.

If people want a myth to believe, what are we giving them? I hope that is is one of a new future, not a bleak past, of potential to be realized, not of opportunity squandered.

We may turn to the Internet, but then the responsibility for determining truth is now on us. Caveat emptor. I am not sure that most of us are up to the task. The internet is a very Balkanized space where people who share beliefs reinforce those beliefs with each other and do not reach beyond their immediate. If we are looking to the Internet to be the way we tell the world about ourselves, that we attract new members, then we probably need to provide a degree of professional management of what we say and how we say it.

If there is any one position in this party that we need to turn into a full time paid position, it is that of press secretary. The work to counteract the BS that is generally available is just too daunting to rely on volunteers to get the job done.

The work

Fidelity to Fact

I don't want to step on Alex's important post, but also want to make a real point about politics and the media. So, read what Alex wrote, and then click read more below to join me on the jump.


Following the presidential conventions, I knew that Bill Moyer's Journal would feature a conversation between Moyers and Kathleen Hall Jamieson. I tuned in to Moyer's Journal on PBS last night and was not disappointed. It was a particularly pointed conversation because both McCain and Palin had taken shots at the Liberal Media. Of course, Liberal Media Bias has always been part of the Rush Limbaugh rant and this time it became almost a chant in St. Paul.

What Jamieson did was to indicate that there is nothing sexist about the media questioning the readiness of any of the candidates.

Is it fair to ask about the experience of any candidate for vice president? Of course. Any candidate for president? Of course. And it isn't sexist or racist to raise that question.

However, she had little patience for those who, in the haste to break a story, get it wrong.

Now you have a moment in which journalism has deceived its audience because in the rush to make this point about possible hypocrisy, a major commentator (Soledad Obrien) on a major network (CNN) has asserted as fact something which doesn't hold up. It took the FactCheck.org researcher that I called on my staff about four hours to get back to the primary research documents.

In fact, the story that Soledad used had been circulating on the internet for a while before she, or her producer, grabbed it.

Moyer's raised the question that all of us should be asking, what are we to do when we can't trust the media. Jamieson had analyzed this in terms of the 2004 election.

The problem is that one can't trust anymore from some of these sources that there's going to be a fidelity to fact in the presence of contest. One of the things that we showed in 2004, from the National Annenberg Election Survey, was that those who are reliant on Rush Limbaugh and on Fox News accepted the Republican view of the facts.

Those reliant on NPR and CNN were more likely to accept the Democratic view of the contested facts. Now sometimes there's legitimate contest. Sometimes, however, what you essentially had was spin and distortion on each side. Those who are relying on newspapers and traditional forms of news were still more likely to hold a non-contested view of those facts.

The further we get away from any sense that elections have anything to do with the contest of ideas. the more I sense that we are vulnerable to a fascist pupulism and that scares the hell out of me especially as newspapers seem to be losing readership daily.

Bill Moyers Campaign Analysis

I watched Bill Moyers Journal last night on PBS. While Moyers is always interesting, and in his recitation of viewer email comments,I did seen one referencing the Green Party;

It's disingenuous to discuss candidates that are ignored in our corporate duopoly election system without mentioning or actually interviewing Green Party candidates... For all the indifference shown to the Green Party by the corporate press and derision by the so-called progressive press, the fact is the Greens have 234 elected officials in 28 states...The Greens are growing, whether you know it or not; whether you like it or not. Carl Lundgren

the most interesting segment was his campaign analysis discussion with Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the Annenberg Public Policy Center. She makes a very good case for the fact that Obama's wins have as much to do with superior organization and advertising as it does with the image that he has created of being the agent of change as opposed to the baggage that Clinton (e.g. NAFTA) from the first Clinton presidency.

BILL MOYERS: Aren't these text messages going to kids who aren't old enough to vote?

KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: They may be. But they're not going to people who aren't old enough to volunteer. There's no age barrier to volunteering. And what's important also, in the advertising stream this year, is that there is advertising to the young about issues of concern to the young. The Obama campaign has pioneered this. There is one Hispanic language ad for Senator Obama, in which a young person basically explains why it's important to get your parents involved for Obama. We know there's a generational divide. Older voters, more likely, particularly older women will be with Senator Clinton, younger, with Senator Obama. This is a trickle up theory. Get the young to influence their parents.

In most caucus states, Obama has done better than Clinton and amassed a large number of delegates... again a sign of having a superior organization in place, everywhere.

If we are to learn how to compete in major races, then we need to learn how to make superior organization happen on a similar level. By the time time the current electoral campaign is over, the Clinton legacy may be a text book case in how to lose an election in an age of electronic campaigning.

Bill Moyers on Steroids

The writings of Bill Moyers is a great source. full of things to think about, mull over, and then repeat... repeat often because they seem to fit so many situations. So it is with his recent essay on the Mitchel Report on the use of steroids in baseball.

There was a lesson in George Mitchell's report that I'm not sure even he recognized. The day Americans don't feel strongly enough about the need for level playing fields to fight for them -- the day when cutting corners and seeking an edge become the national pastime -- is the day democracy will be lucky even to find a seat in the bleachers.

I think that the term "level playing field" was chosen with great care. You find it often in the rhetoric of George W. Bush. It forms the basis of almost all discussions of Thomas Friedman's book, "The World if Flat". In the linked Harvard Business Review article, James Heskett asks a number of questions that we need to answer.

Who benefits most from a level playing field? A developing economy achieving productivity gains with volume increases achieved through low factor costs of production? Or a developed economy realizing productivity gains in totally different ways, for example, by leveraging already high factor costs through technology and the education and communication required to use the technology more effectively? Are these two types of economies even competing on the same playing field?

This goes beyond just an knee jerk anti-corporate reaction that I sometimes hear from Greens. I am not sure if that comes from a Marxist or an anarchist perspective and I doubt whether the protesters even know themselves.

If we want to make a serious run for national political prominence, we have start taking the answer to Heskett's question and translate that into specific policies. What do we do about NAFTA? Renegotiate, unilaterally withdraw from the agreement? Gleaned from the comments of those who responded to Heskett on the HBR web site:

Radhika Unni: That doesn't mean I feel that governments should stop the natural market dynamics, but at the same time it doesn't mean that countries should use the term "level playing field" as an excuse for exploitation.

Maybe it is time to re-examine the Platform of the Green Party, especially those section which deal with economic realities.

The Green world view, growing out of the vision of people grounded in the Deep Ecology of Arne Naess, recognizes the interconnectedness of things in the world of social / economic interactions just as much as we do in the world of nature. Not all Greens do. We can not deal with immigration and trade as separate issues. The roots are so intertwined that separation could be fatal to both causes. Does our platform call for a 30 hr. work week when most middle class families have to hold down three jobs just to maintain their standard of living and all the consumerism that this implies.

Moyers has a unique ability to cut through to the soul of this country, to understand and communicate those elements of our makeup that have mythic connotation. The American sense of fair play that Moyers fears we are losing has no better expression than the 10 key values of this party. If we want to move not to the right, nor the left, but forward to a new future, we had better figure out how to tap into these sensibilities.

Dark Age Ahead?

Once in a while you get fragments of ideas, images that are not quite clear, threads that seem to weave themselves into a tapestry that may or may not make sense. When that happens, I try to write it down to see if it still makes sense. That is what I am doing right now. So bear with me, this may be too long but I think that these glimpses of a possible future are somewhat frightening.

When I chose a college, it was a "small Christian College" called the University of Redlands. What I learned there was that I had little admiration for those who proclaimed the truth and a great deal of admiration for those who were searching for the truth. Maybe it was the thread of existential angst that ran through that era.

That is probably why I reacted positively to the discussion on Bill Moyers Journal last night with Anouar Majid. Majid is the author of a new book entitled A Call for Heresy: Why Dissent is Vital to Islam and America.

BILL MOYERS: You are saying that an election is not necessarily the measure of democracy or freedom. That it is the extent to which the society permits, if I may, heresy, dissent?

ANOUAR MAJID: Yes. People who cannot live comfortably with differences always have a tendency to slide into tyranny. That's why we have to maintain robust differences within any-- every society-- any society to continue to prevent those practices from ever taking root. Or at least of becoming dominant in those particular societies. Differences are crucial to the emancipation of the mind. And as Adam Smith and other of his contemporary said-- "To a happy life." I mean, there's nothing better than a conversation.

This is a very important point in light of the Pew Charitable Trust Report that asserts that the World Publics Welcome Global Trade – But Not Immigration To close the door to immigration is to shut down one of the paths by which we maintain robust differences in our society.

We in California tend to think of immigration as a US problem with Mexico. The Pew study shows that it is not. This fact is underscored by the report from Current TV on Immigrants and Skinheads in Russia. This report, along with comments from Diane Sawyer, was featured on both Nightline and Good Morning America thus breaking through to MSM, or at least part of it. Watch the report. It is frightening in that this could not happen in Russia on the scale that it is without at least a nod and a wink from the Kremlin. Orthodoxy reasserting itself.

Are we that far from this in America? How much difference is there between the skinheads in Russia and the Minutemen? How close are we to the Islamic orthodoxy of Wahhabism and the smug media use by an Ann Coulter who wants to "perfect" Jews.

I took that title of this from the last book by Jane Jacobs. In Dark Age Ahead she warns a culture that gives lip service to valuing science but has not developed the scientific habit of mind to question and then seek answers. Too often we fall back to the orthodoxy of the past rather than looking at the evidence right in front of us. We fail to ask the right questions. Majib warns Moyers about that.

If we do not have dissent, if we do not have heretics among us, if we do not cultivate these habits of mind, in other word to think creatively and imaginatively and so on we're gonna remain doomed.

The Green Party is nothing if it is not a home for heretics, for those who will question orthodoxy, including the orthodoxy of our own narrative.

Pogo was right.

In Thursday's New York Times, Nicholas Kristof entitles his Op Ed Column The Big Melt. You automatically know the subject is global warming. He begins with an interesting premise.

If we learned that Al Qaeda was secretly developing a new terrorist technique that could disrupt water supplies around the globe, force tens of millions from their homes and potentially endanger our entire planet, we would be aroused into a frenzy and deploy every possible asset to neutralize the threat.

Yet that is precisely the threat that we’re creating ourselves, with our greenhouse gases. While there is still much uncertainty about the severity of the consequences, a series of new studies indicate that we’re cooking our favorite planet more quickly than experts had expected.

This yet another instance where the focus of the so-called War on Terror has diverted our attention from dealing with the problems that really determine the future of man.

I watched Bill Moyers' Journal last night. Well, only the segment on Katrina Revisited. That as much as I could take. Maybe I was overloaded. I have just started to read Chris Mooney's newest book, Storm World. I am still learning the history of meteorology and it's divergent paths of development. But in the back of my mind is the knowledge that Tropical Storm Erin is bringing new floods to an already drenched Texas, the Hurrican Dean is now a Category 4 storm drawing a bead on Jamaica and that Typhoon Sepat has just battered Taiwan and is heading for mainland China. Mooney, whose family lost their New Orleans home, makes it abundantly clear that you can not associate any single weather event with global warming. But, you will see an increase in extreme events such as super hurricanes like Sepat and soon Dean.

Kristof concludes his column with the same analogy that introduced it.

In the same way, terror experts aren’t sure about the magnitude and timing of Al Qaeda’s next strike. But it would be myopic to shrug that because there’s uncertainty about the risks, we shouldn’t act vigorously to confront them — yet that’s our national policy toward climate change, and it’s a disgrace

Maybe the problem is the fact that Al Qaeda is a human sized problem with a human sized solution. But that is not a description of global warming.

Ultimately the actions we need to take involve ourselves, what we expect out of life, what we are willing to do to ensure the future.

I would expect that members of the Green Party would have the same degree of passion for this issue as they have ending the Iraq War or for the impeachment of Bush and Cheney, but they do not. Maybe there is a way to bring this down to a human sized problem. Moyers focused his segment on the issue of corruption and the manner in which corruption has siphoned off $ billions from what should have been a restorative effort. Politicians swarm around money like bees in an almond orchard They all know that the way to maintain power is to use public money to support the locally powerful. So, Moyers reports that "10 of the 23 original New Orleans hospitals remain closed." According to him "Associated Press reports tax breaks intended for reconstruction of homes destroyed by Katrina are being used to build luxury condos hundreds of miles inland from where Katrina hit…Conveniently located near the University of Alabama football stadium."

We all know what was needed and we all can see what the politicians did.

Here are a couple of questions:

• Why is Moyers one of the few who reports the story in this manner?
• Why is this not on the nightly news?
• What is the GPUS going to say / do on Katrina's anniversary?

This is much bigger than just global warming and Katrina. I think that it is a failure to understand the very nature of what this political party should be doing. We are so tied up in the culture of protest that we fail to work out that which will attract people to this party. Our future will be determined not by what we protest but rather by what we accomplish. As a political party, we need to be about the future, not about the past and that requires a change in leadership.

The GPCA needs someone to articulate change in the way that Obama is trying to do for the Democrats. I won't criticize those who are leading an impeachment effort. It is necessary to keep that pressure on as well, especially knowing that it won't happen under the current Democratic leadership. Still, we need the same intensity, the same passion, for the future and making fundamental changes in how we respond to what we know is going to happen.

• How do we achieve a sustainable water supply?
• What can we do to ensure that there is adequate housing for all?
• How are we going to educate all of our children?
• How can we ensure that there is fresh water for our grandchildren to drink?
• What will we do when the sea level rises?

At one point in Moyers program, the statement was made that the vision of Miami in the future can be seen in New Orleans today. We do not have to accept that.