As the dust settled on the first televised debate for this year's gubernatorial contest in Massachusetts, one clear truth emerged. There was one candidate, and only one, who could legitimately be called "the people's candidate."
While Scott Brown positioned himself as the people's candidate in his January special election victory, a late surge of campaign cash and get-out-the-vote efforts from Wall Street executives and lobbyists and other special interests surely put his campaign over the top. Capitalizing on the Democratic Party machine's condescending sense of entitlement to the late Senator Kennedy's seat, Brown asserted that it was "the people's seat", and rode his truck right into the leadership vacuum that the Democratic Party has helped to create. But Brown's slick posturing does not make for genuine leadership. And as economic and ecological meltdown continues, that leadership vacuum continues to grow.
Enter Jill Stein. Mother, medical doctor, public health advocate, climate activist, and community leader. As the Green-Rainbow candidate for governor, Stein is running the kind of campaign that is easily marginalized and sidetracked. In this two-party political system, voters and pundits alike don't know what to make of third-party political upstarts like the Libertarian Party and the Green Party (the Green-Rainbow Party is the Massachusetts affiliate of the Green Party of the U.S.). Even in Massachusetts, where 50% of registered voters are registered unenrolled, i.e. independent, there is a tendency to write off third-party candidates as a wasted or spoiled vote.
BOSTON - Jill Stein sparkled in the first televised gubernatorial debate of the 2010 elections, according to her supporters.
"It is now absolutely clear that Jill has the only truly progressive vision in this race." said Daryl Sprague, Stein's campaign manager. "All the others promised deep cuts next year to education, the state workforce, and health care. Jill was the only candidate to propose cutting the big giveaways tucked into the state's economic development portfolio. It was amazing to hear Deval Patrick threaten education and health care and then act as if he didn't hear Jill when she said it would be better to put the $1b in questionable corporate giveaways on the table."
While Baker and Cahill advocated general tax cuts as an all-purpose solution to economic woes, Stein was the only candidate to insist that tax cuts be part of a balanced package making the tax system more progressive.
On September 1, Nat Fortune will be appearing at the 2010 Get Out the Vote Coalition Forum. This forum will be for candidates for Auditor and Treasurer. It will be held at the Reggie Lewis Athletic Center, 1350 Tremont St, Roxbury at 6 PM (across the street from the Roxbury Crossing T Station). The major sponsors are MassVote, the Bay State Banner and the Dorchester Reporter and there are over 30 co-sponsors.
Nat plans to arrive about 4:30. He also plans to stay until the end of the forum at 8 PM and talk with people outside. He will have literature for us to pass out. I asked Nat for some talking points when we have a chance to talk with people as they arrive. I have included his entire list, so you will have a better idea of who we are supporting. I also urge you to go to his website:
Nothing else in the world... not all the armies... is so powerful as an idea whose time has come. -- Victor Hugo
Last night I got to see Bill McKibben deliver a typically rousing and depressing speech in his hometown and the home of the American Revolution, Lexington, Massachusetts. McKibben is one of very few leading lights building a global climate movement up to the task of preventing an all-out climate catastrophe. I credit McKibben more than any other single person with pushing those concerned about climate change to take meaningful collective action. So I was a little nervous when I got to ask him a question from the audience about something I find troubling about his approach.
Early in his talk, McKibben pointed out that the number 350 -- equal to the maximum safe level of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere -- was entirely non-ideological. He went on to suggest that we can build a movement that can shame and pressure our elected officials to act to price carbon high enough that we begin to phase out our devastating use of fossil fuels. Missing from this approach, however, is McKibben's own analysis that the paradigm of economic growth is an underlying cause of the climate crisis. While McKibben was clearly embracing the task at hand as a political one, he seemed excruciatingly timid about the fact that the political task at hand is an ideological one.
{ Excerpt from a piece I wrote for Swans Commentary, June 2007 }
But before the fires from the "shock and awe" military onslaught were even extinguished, Bremer unleashed his shock therapy, pushing through more wrenching changes in one sweltering summer than the International Monetary Fund has managed to enact over three decades in Latin America. -Naomi Klein, Baghdad Year Zero
In a searing article in Harper's Magazine in September 2004, Naomi Klein laid out a theory of the Iraq War that shreds even today's conventional wisdom about the motivations for our invasion. Her theory was that the neocons saw Iraq as a potential test tube for their ideological utopia, and pursued a strategy of shock therapy, where the devastation of war would force Iraqis to rebuild their nation from scratch. Out of desperation (not to mention shock and awe), they would be receptive to U.S. economic policy unimaginable in any other country. The common refrain that Bush did not have a postwar plan is inaccurate. According to Klein, the neocons' plan started to backfire once the companies they were counting on to privatize the country hesitated to jump on board, and not for the reason you think. Yes, the security situation wasn't perfect. But more importantly, companies decided to wait for the creation of an Iraqi government because international law prohibited the United States as an occupying force from running the show.
Of course, there were other parts to the ideological impetus for this war, including but not limited to Iraq's tremendous oil reserves, the extension of US hegemony through the establishment of military bases, and the ever-present profit motives of the military-industrial complex. While Naomi Klein exposes the neoconservative drumbeat for war that we all love to hate, these other reasons hone in on a rift in the antiwar movement that must be overcome. That rift, my friends, is between those of us who hold out hope that the Democratic Party can be moved to spurn these deeper-rooted motivations for war, and those of us who know they cannot and will not.
Past a certain threshold of energy consumption, the transportation industry dictates the configuration of social space. Motorways expand, driving wedges between neighbors and removing fields beyond the distance a farmer can walk. Ambulances take clinics beyond the few miles a sick child can be carried. The doctor will no longer come to the house, because vehicles have made the hospital into the right place to be sick. Once heavy trucks reach a village high in the Andes, part of the local market disappears. Later, when the high school arrives at the plaza along with the paved highway, more and more of the young people move to the city, until not one family is left which does not long for a reunion with someone hundreds of miles away, down on the coast.
Equal speeds have equally distorting effects on the perception of space, time, and personal potency in rich and in poor countries, however different the surface appearances might be. Everywhere, the transportation industry shapes a new kind of man to fit the new geography and the new schedules of its making. The major difference between Guatemala and Kansas is that in Central America some provinces are still exempt from all contact with vehicles and are, therefore, still not degraded by their dependence on them.
As Green-Rainbow Party candidate Jill Stein called out the backroom deals with a monopoly utility at last week's Cape Wind debate by MassINC, her demands for transparency, accountability and fair competition by municipal energy providers surprised many observers. David Bernstein of the Boston Phoenix didn't even know how to categorize her criticism, incorrectly pigeon-holing Stein's critique as opposition to the Cape Wind project, end of story.
The Boston Globe reported on Martha Coakley rushing in to show that they weren't hiding anything. Nothing to see here! So it was interesting when the Boston Herald reported that Coakley's 85-page report to the Department of Public Utilities was heavily redacted. According to the Herald:
The report, which was Coakley's official justification of her rate settlement with Cape Wind and National Grid, includes "redacted" words, numbers, sentences, paragraphs and charts. It even blanked out a question asked of an energy expert hired by Coakley's office - and the expert's response was also crossed out.
WASHINGTON, DC -- The Green Party of the United States congratulates Australian Greens (http://greens.org.au) on their 'greenslide' in Australia's parliamentary elections on Saturday, August 21. Preliminary results show the Greens will take ten seats in the Australian House of Representatives and Senate.
"The Australian Greens' impressive totals follow on the election of Caroline Lucas, the first Green to Parliament in the UK, in May," said Julia Willebrand, candidate for New York State Comptroller (http://www.juliaforcomptroller.com) and member of the Green Party's International Committee (http://www.gp.org/committees/intl). "It's only a matter of time before the first Green is elected to the US Congress. We need a shock to the two-party status quo in America, the kind of shock we're seeing now in Australia."
"When we get some Greens in Congress in the US, we'll see an enormous change in the direction of America -- a change for the better, since Democrats and Republicans will no longer take their exclusive control over US politics and government for granted. Like Australia and the UK, Americans will have legislators from a party dedicated to human needs, human rights, and the health of our planet," Ms. Willebrand added.
"Who should be running the shadow war?" asks a recent New York Times article which simultaneously exposes and lends support to the recent shift towards secret, unaccountable, and unconstitutional military aggression by the United States government.
The attack offered a glimpse of the Obama administration's shadow war against Al Qaeda and its allies. In roughly a dozen countries - from the deserts of North Africa, to the mountains of Pakistan, to former Soviet republics crippled by ethnic and religious strife - the United States has significantly increased military and intelligence operations, pursuing the enemy using robotic drones and commando teams, paying contractors to spy and training local operatives to chase terrorists.
The White House has intensified the Central Intelligence Agency's drone missile campaign in Pakistan, approved raids against Qaeda operatives in Somalia and launched clandestine operations from Kenya. The administration has worked with European allies to dismantle terrorist groups in North Africa, efforts that include a recent French strike in Algeria. And the Pentagon tapped a network of private contractors to gather intelligence about things like militant hide-outs in Pakistan and the location of an American soldier currently in Taliban hands.
While the stealth war began in the Bush administration, it has expanded under President Obama, who rose to prominence in part for his early opposition to the invasion of Iraq. Virtually none of the newly aggressive steps undertaken by the United States government have been publicly acknowledged. In contrast with the troop buildup in Afghanistan, which came after months of robust debate, for example, the American military campaign in Yemen began without notice in December and has never been officially confirmed.
Obama administration officials point to the benefits of bringing the fight against Al Qaeda and other militants into the shadows. Afghanistan and Iraq, they said, have sobered American politicians and voters about the staggering costs of big wars that topple governments, require years of occupation and can be a catalyst for further radicalization throughout the Muslim world.
Gotta hand it to The Onion for saying it better than anyone else has.
PORT FOURCHON, LA-In what may be the greatest environmental disaster in the nation's history, the supertanker TI Oceania docked without incident at the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port Monday and successfully unloaded 3.1 million barrels of dangerous crude oil into the United States.
According to witnesses, the catastrophe began shortly after the tanker, which sailed unimpeded across the Gulf of Mexico, stopped safely at the harbor and made contact with oil company workers on the shore. Soon after, vast amounts of the black, toxic petroleum in the ship's hold were unloaded at an alarming rate into special storage containers on the mainland.
From there, experts confirmed, the oil will likely spread across the entire country's infrastructure and commit unforetold damage to its lakes, streams, and air.
It's Democracy Day today, and Massachusetts voters have a clear choice before them. They can support the one candidate who refuses to take corporate money to fuel her campaign, or the 3 candidates who swim through lobbyist-fueled campaign coffers like Scrooge McDuck. They can support the one candidate who unequivocally stands up for justice and sustainability, or the 3 candidates who treat ill-fated and harmful get-rich-quick schemes as though they were sensible, thoughtful, and helpful policy. They can support the one candidate who is standing up for real democracy -- clean elections, open meeting and public records laws that apply to the legislature, and meaningful transparency and oversight of government spending -- or the 3 candidates who laugh at real democracy as though it were a joke.
With the Green-Rainbow Party putting 3 candidates for statewide office on the ballot November 2nd -- Jill Stein for Governor, Rick Purcell for Lt. Governor, and Nat Fortune for Auditor -- Massachusetts voters have some real choices. These candidates will unwaveringly support, and fight for, government of, by, and for the people. They have great ideas to strengthen the Commonwealth and a compelling vision of our common future. While Bill McKibben laments the shameful collapse of the mainstream environmental movement's ability to push climate legislation, the Green-Rainbow Party's leadership never held out hope that our government -- nearly entirely beholden to corporate interests -- would have the answers.
I am increasingly disheartened by the Boston Globe's apparent dismissal of Jill Stein's gubernatorial campaign, in the opinion pages and news coverage alike. The Op-Eds ignoring her are mounting. Whether Adrian Walker's glaring omission was mindful or mindless, and whether Joan Vennochi's dismissal was ignorant or spiteful, these biased actions deserve to be countered. I submitted a letter to the editor in response to Walker's column, but the Letters editor called me to ask whether I was a paid staffer for Jill's campaign. I told him that I've been working on a grassroots fundraising campaign that is poised to turn into a paid job, but that it's message is an important one for Globe readers to learn about.
The following is an Op-Ed I submitted as a counterweight to their bias, but I didn't hear back from them and wanted to get this out before August 10th. I think I'll create a section on Green Mass Group called "What the Globe won't print" and just start collecting people's Op-Eds and LTEs that don't make the paper. What do you think?
The discussion of how energy is used to move people requires a formal distinction between transport and transit as the two components of traffic. By traffic I mean any movement of people from one place to another when they are outside their homes. By transit I mean those movements that put human metabolic energy to use, and by transport, that mode of movement which relies on other sources of energy. These energy sources will henceforth be mostly motors, since animals compete fiercely with men for their food in an overpopulated world, unless they are thistle eaters like donkeys and camels.
Green Mass Group will be "publishing" an installment series from Austrian philosopher Ivan Illich that originally appeared in Le Monde in 1973. His radical critique and vision for how we move ourselves around is no less relevant today, and perhaps more so.
Thanks to Steven for pointing me to it, and if you just have to read the whole thing NOW, you can do so here.
The first installment, The Energy Crisis, below the fold.
Energy and Equity Ivan Illich
El socialismo puede llegar solo en bicicleta. --José Antonio Viera-Gallo, Assistant Secretary of Justice in the government of Salvador Allende
This text was first published in Le Monde in early 1973. Over lunch in Paris the venerable editor of that daily, as he accepted my manuscript, recommended just one change. He felt that a term as little known and as technical as "energy crisis" had no place in the opening sentence of an article that he would be running on page 1. As I now reread the text, I am struck by the speed with which language and issues have shifted in less than five years. But I am equally struck by the slow yet steady pace at which the radical alternative to industrial society-namely, low-energy, convivial modernity-has gained defenders. In this essay I argue that under some circumstances, a technology incorporates the values of the society for which it was invented to such a degree that these values become dominant in every society which applies that technology. The material structure of production devices can thus irremediably incorporate class prejudice. High-energy technology, at least as applied to traffic, provides a clear example. Obviously, this thesis undermines the legitimacy of those professionals who monopolize the operation of such technologies. It is particularly irksome to those individuals within the professions who seek to serve the public by using the rhetoric of class struggle with the aim of replacing the "capitalists" who now control institutional policy by professional peers and laymen who accept professional standards Mainly under the influence of such "radical" professionals, this thesis has, in only five years, changed from an oddity into a heresy that has provoked a barrage of abuse. The distinction proposed here, however, is not new. I oppose tools that can be applied in the generation of use-values to others that cannot be used except in the production of commodities This distinction has recently been re-emphasized by a great variety of social critics The insistence on the need for a balance between convivial and industrial tools is, in fact, the common distinctive element in an emerging consensus among groups engaged in radical politics A superb guide to the bibliography in this field has been published in Radical Technology (London and New York, 1976), by the editors of Undercurrents. I have transferred my own files on the theme to Valentina Borremans, who is now working on a librarians' guide to reference materials on use-value-oriented modern tools, scheduled for publication in 1978. (Preliminary drafts of individual chapters of this guide can be obtained by writing to Valentina Borremans, APDO 479, Cuernavaca, Mexico.) The specific argument on socially critical energy thresholds in transportation that I pursue in this essay has been elaborated and documented by two colleagues, Jean-Pierre Dupuy and Jean Robert, in their two jointly written books, La Trahison de l'opulence (Paris, 1976) and Les Chronophages (Paris, 1978).
--Ivan Illich: Toward a History of Needs. New York: Pantheon, 1978
As the House-Senate conference committee decides to hold closed-door meetings, it is important for the people of Massachusetts to weigh in meaningfully on this fast-tracking of legislation with incredible implications for the Commonwealth of MA.
Before passing the different versions of their casino bills, the House had refused to hold public hearings, while the Senate held one poorly announced hearing on the later versions of the bill (and one last year).
And House Speaker DeLeo, according to the State House News Service, is threatening to hold the rest of the legislative session hostage to his desires for slots at the racetracks (because of the 2 tracks in his district):
In an exclusive News Service interview, DeLeo indicated he would use the waning legislative calendar and his power over the agenda as a cudgel to force approval of slots for tracks, two of which are in or near his Winthrop-based district.
...
The increasingly bare-knuckled rhetoric from DeLeo, markedly more militant since hints of a compromise Tuesday, carry risk in that a Patrick racinos veto could come too close to the July 31 close of formal sessions for the Legislature to reverse or be sustained in the Senate. And a DeLeo stick-up of other bills over slots threatens to send lawmakers into the election season without major résumé bullets on a variety of high-visibility policy matters.
...
Asked whether he planned to block other legislation as a way of leveraging racinos into the bill, DeLeo replied, "Through the last weeks of session, there's going to be a whole host of issues and pieces of legislation that sort of become intertwined in conference."
"It's inevitable that a lot of the legislation becomes intertwined, especially as you're getting down to the final days of the session," DeLeo said. "And, again, I just want to reiterate, as I did yesterday, jobs and local aid are very, very important to me, and I presume they're important also to the governor and Senate president."
In the latest Open Media Boston editorial, Jason Pramas weighs in against Deval Patrick's neo-liberal addictions to corporatist ideology, and wonders if there might be a cure:
How does one treat people under the spell of an ideology that dictates that the private sector can run every sort of program better than the government when long experience with this kind of boondoggle shows that extracting profit from government monies budgeted for service provision equals ... surprise, surprise ... worse service provision?
How does one remind such people that the "deficit" as flogged by right-wingers is a paper tiger, and that social investment by a government is well-known to produce a stable working-class and a growing middle-class who can then bulk up the tax base and stabilize government budgets in a happy virtuous circle?
How does one explain to such bought-off and/or befuddled corporate shills that we wouldn't be in the current economic crisis to begin with if we strengthened the regulation of corporations - and most critically, the financial sector - and TAXED them as they were once taxed; so that the public good was served over the private good?
Then he goes on to state the cure (below the jump)...
Sucks that a candidate like this -- by all indications more serious than any of the other gubernatorial contenders (though without the resources that come from being a corporatist candidate) -- has to waste her breath saying she should be included in the debates.
But despite the hurdles, Stein lit up Greater Boston last night:
Patrick, displaying a front-runner's confidence, responded with a call for eight debates, including two in western Massachusetts, though he did not specify they be televised. He also specifically urged that the debates include both Cahill and Baker, underscoring the benefit he believes will come through a three-way race in which Cahill draws from Baker's potential conservative vote.
...
"The governor hopes that Tim Cahill and Charlie Baker will join him in one debate a week between Labor Day in September and Election Day in November, for a total of eight debates overall," said a statement from spokesman Alex Goldstein.
...
Meanwhile, Stein complained in her statement that movie producers and biotech companies continue to receive breaks amid the national recession while state aid to cities and towns is cut.
She said voters "are looking for some way to end the giveaways" and redirect spending to town budgets.
"Charlie Baker and Deval Patrick are ducking debates already," Stein said. "Governor Patrick has refused to appear on stage with other candidates on multiple occasions, allowing only forums without cross-candidate dialogue and real challenge. Often Charlie Baker is not showing up at all. Their fear of real debate is telling."
It's official, Deval Patrick and Charlie Baker are afraid of real debate, and afraid of the people's candidate, Jill Stein!
While the Herald chooses to ignore Jill Stein's voice on the issues, the Stein campaign calls out the Governor for protecting Raytheon, Fidelity and biotech while slashing critical services left and right:
Stein Decries State Budget As A "Tragedy Of Misplaced Priorities" by FRIENDS OF JILL STEIN on JULY 1, 2010
BOSTON - Green-Rainbow gubernatorial candidate Jill Stein decried the Massachusetts state budget signed by Governor Patrick yesterday as a ''tragedy of misplaced priorities, declaring that "This budget signifies Beacon Hill's accelerating abandonment of critical services that people need now more than ever."
Stein challenged Governor Patrick's assertions that the painful cuts were unavoidable. "The Governor cannot duck his responsibility for the cuts or for the tax and fee hikes" according to Stein. "These cuts are there because of deliberate decisions made by the Governor and the Democratic Party leadership. They decided to protect powerful special interests and put the burden of balancing the budget on the backs of those least able to defend themselves. "
"This budget hits struggling education programs with another $180 million in cuts, including cuts to public schools, and higher education - already cut more in Massachusetts than any other state over the past five years. Programs that provide for our elders, at risk youth, the disabled, the mentally ill, disadvantaged children and distressed families are all under attack. State and municipal workers providing essential services are being fired."
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Only one species on earth does not have full employment and that is Homo sapiens.
--Paul Hawken (Blessed Unrest)
We built what history will record is the broadest and best-organized grassroots organization this Commonwealth has ever seen... We didn't build up this grassroots just to win an election. We built up the grassroots to govern in a whole new way, to make change real, and lasting, and meaningful.
Deval Patrick acceptance speech
Nov. 7, 2006
and Now...
We had this incredibly rich relationship that we built with the grass-roots network the last time. And then we got in, and we let it go. And there are reasons for that. But I think it's a terrible thing. We missed it. I missed it personally. And I think a lot of the folks in the organization missed it.
Governor Deval Patrick, to a room of supporters, trying to reignite the grassroots
February, 2010
Graphic by Jeff Walsh, Boston Herald
