Green Party Presidential Candidates Debate

A PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE THAT MATTERS

SUNDAY, JANUARY 13, 2008 AT 2:00 PM

HERBST THEATRE

VETERANS MEMORIAL BUILDING

401 VAN NESS (Opposite City Hall)

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA

(Public Transit: 3 blocks from Civic Center BART station, or by MUNI streetcar or bus)

(Parking available at Performing Arts Center Garage, 360 Grove St., 11 am to 7 pm, $12)

For More Details See Alameda County Greens Web Site At:
http://www.acgreens.org/debate

Debate Questions

With the Green Party Presidential Debate now scheduled for Jan 13 in San Francisco, I am interested in giving the organizing committee some input on the questions that we, the grassroots of this party, would like to have answered by our candidates.

This is not a time for cheap shots, trick questions that might have come from the mind of an Ann Coulter or a even of a nice guy like James Carville. These should be serious questions that I would want to see any Green Party candidate answering so that I know, when I vote, that they will be representing me.

I will start this off with three question of my own. They represent several of the top concerns from a recent poll of likely voters. I would really like to have them all but I am limiting myself to only 3 for now. I have already solicited some questions from a few others and had a response from a 2004 Green Party candidate, Lorna Salzman. So, I will also list her's here.

After that, I hope that you all will use the comment capability on this blog to register your own.

My Questions:

• There is no longer any doubt that the world is warming and the we are the cause. As Pogo said, We have met the enemy and they is us. As President, what steps would you take, what changes would you make in energy policy to reduce our contributions to Global Warming.
• Immigration, trade policies and agricultural are all linked together. Changing one affect the others. Is there a way to achieve a satisfactory solution to all three? If so, what is it?
• The effect of the Iraq war and the way that the current administration has pursued it's reckless war on terror, has lost America the moral standing that it once had. How would you restore this country's soul?

Lorna Salzman's questions:

• Will you work for a universal single payer health care system?
• Will you work for a carbon tax on fossil fuels?
• Will you work for a revival and expansion of a government-run, national passenger rail system, including a high-speed passenger rail line on the east coast?

That is two takes on the debate. What do you want to hear about?

Green Party Presidential Debate

The first, and so far only, Green Party Presidential Debate will take place in San Francisco on Sunday, January 13. The announcement has not yet, as far as I know, gone out to press but it has shown up on the Alameda County Green Party web site and has been posted (by someone) to the Third Party Watch site as of very early this AM.

Time: 2 PM

Venue: Herbst Theater/Veterans Memorial Bldg
401 Van Ness (opposite City Hall)
San Francisco

If this announcement is correct, it is mostly good news.

I knew that the effort to organize this debate was underway. The last I had heard was the Nader's participation had not yet been confirmed. I hope that the inclusion of his name on the Alameda County announcement means that he has agreed to participate. His name is on the ballot for the California Primary. It is my understanding that he will be in attendance. What he does here will tell us a lot about what his intentions are.

This debate will take place on Jan 13. Absentee ballots will already be in the mail. Some may already have voted. Personally, I will not vote until after this debate and, if Nader wants me to vote for him, he will have to participate in this debate on an equal bass with other candidates. The risk that one would run is that Nader might choose NOT to actively seek the nomination as a Green and then my vote would have been wasted.

You may note that there are two candidates on the national GP web site whose names are not included in this list. I am assured by the organizers that they were invited and either had conflicts (Kat) or have not yet responded (Jesse).

I cross posted this at Green Commons. Some of the emphasis might change as these posts will be geared toward questions surrounding the California Primary. The one thing that will not change is my belief that a credible Green Party candidate needs to be able to respond to questions on a wide range of issues: Global Warming, Health Care, Economics including tax policies, Iraq War and other foreign policy questions, immigration and trade policy. This must not become only a matter of "electability" or in Green Party terms, of how many new voters they can bring in to the party. We need to recognize that we can only build this party based on what our candidates stand for now, today and what they will do to make this a better America, continent, world.

To that end, I will later today be posting at California Greening, a list of questions that I would like to see be answered by our candidates as well as soliciting questions from others.

Hip-Hop

Today, while looking for something else, I ran across the links to three parts of a four part series on Hip-Hop and the Corporate Music Industry. This is of prime importance for Greens because we have three candidates for the Green Part presidential nomination who are part of the African American community from which hip-hop came: Jared Ball, Elaine Brown and Cynthia McKinney. This series was developed by Dr. Jared Ball, one of those candidates and uses Hip-Hop to explore more fundamental issues. (Bold emphais is my doing.)

Given the societal need and function of mass media and popular culture, all that is popular is fraudulent. Popularity is in almost every case an intentionally constructed fabrication of what it claims to represent. Too few who comment on the lamentable condition of today’s popular hip-hop seem to grasp this, the political nature of the nation’s media system, nor the political function that system serves. Hip-hop is often taken out of the existing context of political struggle, repression, or the primacy of a domestic/neo-colonialism in the service of which mass media play a (the?) leading role. Media, often incorrectly defined by their technologies, are the primary conduits of ideology or worldview and must be seen as such. Therefore, their highly consolidated ownership and content management structure (corporate interlocking boards of directors, advertisers, stockholders, etc.) cannot be understood absent their ability to disseminate a consciousness they themselves sanction and mass produce. Nowhere is this more clearly demonstrable than in hip-hop.

I have seen a lot of commentary about hip-hop and rap on programs like Oprah. Much of this is about the denigration of women.

I think that we need to sort through this. Dr. Ball is saying that the popular, mass producd cultue is not the true hip-hop. He also says on his web site that he has plans to use hip-hop as one tool to help build the Green Party.

To that end we are developing a campaign which seeks to break convention by centering attention and focus on culture, those most oppressed and those who have long since given up on the vote and are looking for a new politics and new organizations. We are working with “the mayor of DC hip-hop” Head-Roc and others to provide a hip-hop and progressive artist tour which will reach out to the Indigenous, Black, Latino and poor communities who will help us develop new bases of support for the Green Party.

I think that we need all the help we can get. The Greens I know are all older, white, not connected at all to the culture that younger people inhabit. My idea of "cool" was Miles or Mulligan and avant-garde was Ornette Coleman. I rather think that Jared has the right idea here and that we need to do this whether or not Jared is the nominee.

Creativiy and Community

I've been doing some varied reading over the past several weeks and, though it was not intentional, I find that some of the same threads keep coming together in a way that makes me wonder about the books I selected, both now and in the past.

If I go back a few years, I remember going to hear Dr. Richard Florida speak about his book, The Rise of the Creative Class. Florida's thesis is that the communities who thrive, who ultimately "win" in economic competitions are the same communities that have a well developed community of creative people: artists, musicians, thinkers, scientists. These are all people who do not automatically conform to the structures of suburban bliss and are more accustomed to doing things in their own way. Of course, Florida has turned this into a consulting business.

I only reference that because I see a reflection of that idea in a Brooklyn (NY) based blog, Atlantic Yards Report. Blogger Norman Oder attended a panel discussion on the subject "Is NY losing is soul?" and gave us an informative recap.

Where's the soul?

Tocci suggested the city’s soul is made of artists and small businesses, and from her perch as president and group publisher at TONY, she sees a growing amount of anger about affordability. Darren Walker, a VP of the Rockefeller Foundation (the major funder of the exhibit and, a half-century ago, of Jacobs), noted the city’s growing inequality and unprecedented decline in its African-American population.

This panel was connected with an exhibit entitled Jane Jacobs and the Future of New York.
Jacobs was an urbanist best known for here landmark 1961 book Death and Life of Great American Cities. Throughout the Wikipedia article on Jacobs, you read the theme that she hated expressways and loved neighborhoods. Then, it is not surprising that I read the following in her last (2006) book, Dark Age Ahead. which I am reading now.

Not TV or illegal drugs but the automobile has been the chief destroyer of American communities. Highways and roads obliterate the places they are supposed to serve, as for example highways feeding the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge wiped out most of the formerly large Bay Ridge community in Brooklyn. (Is this so different from West Oakland today?)

Through this there are a couple of themes emerging. One is that creativity needs communities, at least no more expensive than middle class can afford. So, the load falls unevenly on different segments of our population. As Walker suggested above, it is urban populations of color that are in decline.

In a post at Green Commons today, I discussed the effect that undeclared big name candidates were having on the Green Party Presidential nomination. The focus was on Cynthia McKinney as her status seems to change with the group that she is addressing.

I would like to turn some of our attention to Jared Ball's candidacy, as it appears to me that he is addressing some of the issues raised by Jacobs, and Darren Walker.

It is time to build a genuine populist party, one built on the proper politics of those who, like Kwame Ture once made clear, are no longer willing to accept the lesser of evil because, “we will not vote for evil, period.”

To that end we are developing a campaign which seeks to break convention by centering attention and focus on culture, those most oppressed and those who have long since given up on the vote and are looking for a new politics and new organizations. We are working with “the mayor of DC hip-hop” Head-Roc and others to provide a hip-hop and progressive artist tour which will reach out to the Indigenous, Black, Latino and poor communities who will help us develop new bases of support for the Green Party.

It appears to me that Jared would have been very comfortable sitting down with Jane Jacobs and that is a plus. It is obvious that he understands the connection between creative artists and community and that is another plus.

The candidate is....

The GPCA has had it's General Assembly in Riverside, decided on a list of candidates (Jared Ball, Elaine Brown, Jesse Johnson, Kent Mesplay, Cynthia McKinney, Ralph Nader, Kat Swift) to place on the primary ballot for California's early primary.

I was working on a post supporting one of those and the ground is changing under my feet. Cynthia McKinney has sent a letter to the national steering committee asking that her name be withdrawn from the ballot.

For many, this is not surprising. While some hoped that she would run, I always felt that her final decision would be to not run, to not leave the Democratic Party. After all, she is a politician and politicians want to position themselves to win elections.

McKinney's withdrawal provoked two interesting comments: one from Gregg Jocoy and another from Alex Walker. Both can be read here, as Alex cross posted his comments as a response to Gregg. Both are worth your reading. Both have a lot of practical political insight.

Gregg made the following comment about a letter from California's Mike Feinstein.

Mike Feinstein wrote a long missive to the national Green Party, and no, I don't have a copy, in which he says that the California Green Party must address the problem of inability to cross the electoral threshold in partisan races. It's not the inability to win a congressional seat that has him concerned, but our inability to win county council, state legislative, judicial and other seats which are partisan. I'm not sure which seats are partisan, but those listed often are.

Having never seen that letter, I would hope that it contains some practical insight as to how we can manage to get this done.

Still, this is post is about the presidential candidates and I offer the following opinion. All of our candidates are anti-war. That is a given. We need to find those candidates who can best articulate the other problems we will be facing:
economic, environmental, social.

In my opinion, from the list of candidates that the GPCA will place on the ballot, there is no one candidate who can do that, not even Nader. I think that is is very important to have someone who can address the economic and social problems of the urban population. It is equally important to have a candidate who can talk about the environment, global warming and all that this entails.

From what I have gleaned from the videos of the Reading, PA Candidates Forum, this comes down to Jared Ball and Kent Mesplay from among those who are "home grown" Green Party candidates.

Will Nader run as a Green again? Until he says "yes" I will have to assume that the answer is "no".