RE: EuroGreens, Camejo, and Iraq

["Eli Stephens" <elishastephens@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jose wrote: "But Eli seems to be willing to draw all sorts of extensive
conclusions
about Camejo's politics in this regard"

based primarily, I must assume, on this comment I made:

"what his stance is now [on the war] is totally unclear"

Well, needless to say, this is hardly an "extensive conclusion" about
Camejo's politics, it is simply a question. I don't claim to know what
Camejo says in private to his friends, I can only judge him by what he says
in public.

Jose further argues that Peter could not inject the issue of Iraq (or,
presumably also public power, the issue I raised in a subsequent post)
because of the way the debate was structured. But, as I pointed out, even if
he hadn't been able to twist some question or rebuttal into getting in these
points, which usually isn't THAT hard, he STILL had a two-minute rebuttal in
which to make his major points. These were clearly not among them.

Actually, I'm surprised that Jose hasn't hit on the one point which I think
IS legitimate criticism of what I have written, and in a way, it may explain
how to understand Camejo. As he made clear several times in the course of
the debate, Camejo is the GREEN PARTY candidate, he is not just "Peter
Camejo." Thus one can certainly argue that he would be out of line in
presenting any position which was not endorsed by the Green Party. On Iraq,
although the GP (and Camejo) were present at antiwar events BEFORE the war,
as far as one can tell from either Peter's website or the California Green
website (http://cagreens.org), they have taken no position AFTER the
invasion, i.e, "troops out now" or "bring in the UN" or whatever.

Likewise on public power. As I noted, Camejo spoke about renewable energy, a
Green focus, but didn't mention public power at all. From the California GP
web site (http://cagreens.org/platform/economy.htm), I find this: "The
keystone of the Green Party's economic program is community-based economics.
As an alternative to an economy owned by either government or gigantic
corporations, Greens favor a Jeffersonian model with ownership and control
spread as widely as possible among Californians." There's lot's more, which
I'm not quoting, but as near as I can tell they are strictly making the case
for small ("cockroach") capitalism, with no mention at all of public
ownership of even things like water or power. So again, one can presume that
Camejo is precluded from calling for public ownership of power because this
is not the GP position.

Which, one could argue, is precisely the weakness of running as a GP
candidate.

Now I simply must address one more point made by Jose. In talking about some
hypothetical progressive Latino candidate (I presume he's not referring to
Bustamante ;-) ), he says this: "If there was some point the candidate
didn't make, I think they would be looking for ways to amplify and
supplement what was said in the debate by the Latino candidate, and not
attack him."

I reject categorically the idea that I am "attacking" Camejo. I have written
before that I voted for Camejo in the last election and even donated to his
campaign, most likely I will vote for him again. While this list may be
"public" in the sense that it's archives are searchable and available to
anyone, as far as I'm concerned this is still a (semi)private list and
that's the way I treat it. I am hardly going to go the antiwar demo on Sept.
28 with a big sign reading "Camejo - Sellout" (even if that were my
position, which it isn't, it wouldn't be one I would express publicly).

I must add that I can't help but contrast Camejo's performance in this
debate to that of Dennis Kucinich in the Democratic Presidential debate,
which I caught yesterday in a rerun. Asked about healthcare, Kucinich
delivered a rousing denunciation of all the other  candidates' proposals as
tied to private insurance companies and the profit system, and a vigorous
endorsement of removing profit from the health care system (I tried but
couldn't find a transcript on the web; this is all from memory). This is
precisely the kind of thing that Camejo could have done vis-a-vis energy,
but didn't.

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