The California Recall and Greens

From Marc Cooper’s L.A. Weekly article on the recall election

“Myth No. 4: The Green Party is a viable alternative.

This should be a historic opportunity for Green candidate Peter Camejo, who got 5 percent of the vote in last year’s gubernatorial election.

Fuggeddaboutit.

Camejo has pushed marijuana legalization and instant-runoff voting (IRV) to the top of his agenda. These might be cutting-edge issues along the Venice boardwalk or in the UC Santa Cruz dorms, but they are not even remotely now on the minds of most California voters.

The Greens’ preference for talking to themselves rather than to others destinies, the party to soon wash up and splinter like the Peace and Freedom folks. Eventually the California Greens will be meeting in one guy’s house with different sectarian groups caucusing in the living room and dining room.”

Biting words, and Cooper is no friend of Greens. However, there’s more than a little truth in his words. As one who recently resigned his Green Party (GP) post, I had grown weary of pointless mind-numbing sectarian arguments that left little time for actually Getting Stuff Done.

Cooper is correct in saying that voters care not a whit about IRV. In fact voters tend to view Greens who talk endlessly about IRV as being from a different planet. IRV is a wonderful idea, however it is a terrible campaign platform — especially right now in California where economic matters are what everyone is thinking about.

My own painfully-arrived at conclusion is that the 2000 Nader run for President will in retrospect be seen as the peak for the GP, because the GP as an institution hasn’t the organizational structure or the will to run a serious campaign in 2004.

Here in California, in terms of voter registration, the GP is getting whacked on both sides. Some Greens are re-registering as Democrats so they can vote in the 2004 primary. Others are re-registering in the newly resurgent Peace & Freedom Party (P&F) because they want a more radical viewpoint. In fact, P&F is now the third largest party in Los Angeles County with the GP dropping to fourth. That’s right, P&F, a bunch of raggedy-ass Socialists, now have more registered voters in L.A. County than does the GP. This is not a good omen for the GP.

A serious campaign in 2004 by the GP could mean a full-throttle campaign nationwide by a major candidate. It could also mean not campaigning in states where Democrats might lose, giving the Democrats a pass in contested states in hopes of defeating Bush. But neither of these approaches can happen because there is no national structure in the GP for running a national campaign or for rallying the troops at the state and local level.

The times now call for the GP to get real, get organized, and get into the political fray. If it can’t I’m afraid it will, as Cooper predicts, disintegrate into irrelevance. Not for a lack of smart, dedicated people — because there are many of those — but because of a lack of any real organizational structure.

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Bare-knuckled pragmatism

Katha Pollitt on Howard Dean

“Every time the press pooh-poohs his chances, every time they gloat over some trivial misstatement, every time they make fun of Vermont and describe his supporters as “Birkenstocked” “Deanyboppers,” I think about the free ride the media give Bush, who says more false and foolish things in an afternoon than Dean has said in a lifetime, who is unmaking everything good about this country from Head Start to habeas corpus, who is stacking the government with faith healers and fanatics, my fingers itch to write Dean another check….

Right now, Dean is the only viable candidate who speaks to the anger, fear and loathing a large number of ordinary citizens feel about the direction Bush has taken the country…. He has gone out and actually asked for the help of these citizens, rather than taking them for granted. That is why 70,000 people have sent him money, and why 84,000 have shown up to work for him, and why tens of thousands of volunteers wrote personal letters to Iowa and New Hampshire Democrats and independents urging them to support Dean. His willingness to challenge Bush without looking over his shoulder at the last undecided voter in Ohio is the big story….

What the media see as progressive self-delusion is actually the opposite: a bare-knuckled pragmatism born from the debacle of the 2000 elections.

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ANSWER infiltrated!

From the truly loony right wing comes a ludicrous “expose” of those devious Lefties of the ANSWER coalition.

“The international Communist front A.N.S.W.E.R. recently held their worldwide conference in New York City to plot their diabolical ‘Action Plan’ for the upcoming Fall. Alan infiltrated it with a hidden video camera, and sat in on their strategy sessions and speeches”

I was at that NYC conference, and as the front door was always open, all Alan had to do was walk in. How breathtakingly daring of him. Darn it, I guess our secret mind control techniques didn’t work! Perhaps his pyramid hat made of tin foil saved him. As for that “diabolical action plan” it is posted on the ANSWER website for all to see, so I guess Alan didn’t have to do all that dangerous skulking about after all.
 
This reminds me of those who got arrested doing civil disobedience in L.A. the day the Iraq War started. The police questioned them, asking who the leaders were and where meetings were held. Which made me laugh, as all L.A. peace coalitions routinely post meeting annoucements on their websites — so all the police had to do was read a webpage and then actually go to a meeting.

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FirstEnergy, Enron Of The East

Millions for baseball, little for maintenance

From reader Timothy Perch of Mentor, Ohio (emphasis mine)

“On Thursday August 14, 2003, fifty million people lost electricity in the largest blackout in North American history.  New York City, Cleveland, Detroit, and Toronto all lost power.  The cause of the outage was not immediately known.  After further investigation, blame has been placed on the FirstEnergy Corporation of Akron, Ohio.

The investigation centers on three transmission lines south of Cleveland and a coal power plant east of Cleveland.  FirstEnergy, the 4th largest private energy conglomerate in the country, owns the lines and the power plant.  According to the Ohio News-Herald, the FirstEnergy coal plant located in Eastlake, Ohio, belched out massive amounts of black ash that covered surrounding property. 

Shortly thereafter, the transmission lines south of Cleveland failed.  FirstEnergy’s warning system that is supposed to detect such failures was not operational (August 16,17, 2003).  The power failure spread rapidly across the eastern portion of the United States and Canada.  This is not the first time that FirstEnergy has been in the nation’s spotlight.

The company owns the Davis-Besse nuclear power plant near Toledo, Ohio. The federal government has shut down this plant because FirstEnergy misled the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.  First Energy became aware of a football-sized hole in the lid of the Davis-Besse reactor in 2000.  For two years, the company hid this fact from the NRC in order to keep the power and the profits flowing.  According to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, “the unprecedented hole […] jeopardized the plant’s safety, rocked the nuclear industry, and is expected to cost the company nearly $400 million in repairs and replacement power purchases” (12/1/02).

Author’s Viewpoint

I live 15 minutes east of the Eastlake coal plant and within the 10-mile Emergency Zone surrounding the Perry Nuclear Power Plant.  As a response to September 11 and the Davis-Besse crisis, all residents living within 10 miles of the Perry plant have received coupons for free potassium iodide pills. In the event of a radiation leak from the Perry plant, residents will take a pill of potassium iodide to prevent thyroid cancer. The local county government and the State of Ohio footed the $30,000 bill for the pills. In the author’s opinion this is an incident of corporate welfare. FirstEnergy’s Perry plant is the source of the radiation threat, and FirstEnergy therefore, should be forced to foot the bill.

Out of all of this, what amazes me most is that FirstEnergy can afford to spend millions for advertisements on local media outlets and can sponsor the Cleveland Indians, yet they cannot afford proper maintenance at their power plants. After the fallout from the blackout and the $400 million dollar bill from Davis-Besse, the Indians might need to find a new sponsor because we might as well stick a fork in this Enron of the East.”

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Wave of sabotage hits Iraq

“A fresh wave of sabotage and violence took its toll on Iraq on Sunday as a second blaze hit a crucial oil export pipeline, a water pipeline was blown up and six Iraqis were killed in a mortar attack on a Baghdad prison.”

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