[Marxism] The Greens commit suicide

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Counterpunch, July 2, 2004

Suicide Right on the Stage
The Demise of the Green Party
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

"Ignorance of remote causes disposeth men to attribute all events to the 
causes immediate and instrumental: for these are all the causes they 
perceive."

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651)

So this is what alternative politics in America has degenerated to: Pat 
LaMarche, the newly minted vice-presidential candidate of the Green 
Party, has announced that she might not even vote for herself in the 
fall elections. The Greens, always a skittish bunch, are so traumatized 
by the specter of Bush and Cheney that they've offered up their own 
party-born out of rage at decades of betrayal by Democrats from Carter 
to Clinton-as a kind of private contractor for the benefit of those very 
same Democratic Party power brokers.

Take a close look at what LaMarche, a flighty radio "personality", had 
to say to say to her hometown newspaper in Maine only days after winning 
the nomination in Milwaukee.

"If the race is tight, I'll vote for Kerry," LaMarche said. "I love my 
country. But we should ask them that, because if Dick Cheney loved his 
country, he wouldn't be voting for himself."

This is the sound a political party makes as it commits suicide.

LaMarche's running mate, David Cobb, is no better. The obscure lawyer 
from California is a dull and spiritless candidate, handled by some 
truly unsavory advisors (more on them in future columns). In action, he 
functions as a kind of bland political zombie from a Roger Corman flick, 
lumbering across the progressive landscape from Oregon to Wisconsin and 
back again, to the tune of his liberal political masters. The tune? The 
familiar refrain of "Anybody But Bush."

Bland, yes, but it worked, thanks to the likes of Medea Benjamin and the 
pompous Ted Glick. At their recent convention in Milwaukee, the Green 
Party, heavily infiltrated by Democratic Party operatives, rejected the 
ticket of Ralph Nader and Peter Camejo in favor of the sour campaign of 
Cobb and LaMarche.

This won't harm Nader much. Indeed, it may liberate him. Free of the 
Green Party's encyclopedic platform, Nader can now distill the themes of 
his campaign and, unburdened by the concern of party building, Nader 
can, if he chooses (and he should), focus his efforts only on the 
battleground states, where Kerry must either confront Nader's issues or 
lose the election. It's as simple as that.

The fatal damage in Milwaukee was done to the Green Party itself, where 
Cobb and his cohort sabotaged the aspirations of thousands Greens who 
had labored for more than a decade to build their party into a national 
political force, capable of winning a few seats here and there and, even 
more importantly, defeating Democrats who behave like Republicans (cf: 
Al Gore). The fruits of all that intense grassroots organizing were 
destroyed in an instant.

But look: the rebuffed Nader continues to poll nearly 6 percent without 
the Green Party behind him. Yet, you can't discern Cobb's numbers with 
an electron microscope. Of course, the pungent irony is that's precisely 
the way Cobb and his backers want it.

So, the Greens have succeeded in doing what seemed impossible only 
months ago: they've made the quixotic campaign of Dennis Kucinich, which 
still chugs along claiming micro-victory after micro-victory long after 
the close of the primaries (indeed there have been more victories after 
the polls closed than before), seem like a credible political endeavor. 
Of course, Cobb and Kucinich share the same objective function: to lure 
progressives away from Nader and back into the plantation house of the 
Democratic Party.

But at least Kucinich remained a Democrat. Cobb and LaMarche were 
supposedly leaders of a political party that formed not in opposition to 
Republicans, but from outrage at the rightward and irredeemable drift of 
the Democratic Party. Apparently, the Green Party has not only lost its 
mind, it's lost its entire central nervous system, including the 
spine--especially its spine. They've surrendered to the politics of 
fear. And once the white flag is raised there's little chance of 
recovering the ground you've given up.

Always nearly immobilized by an asphyxiating devotion to political 
correctness, the Green Party has now taken this obsession to its logical 
extreme by nominating a pair of political cretins at the top of its 
ticket. Under the false banner of the Cobb/Lamarche campaign, the Green 
Party is instructing its members to vote for its candidates only in 
states where their vote doesn't matter. This is the so-called safe state 
strategy.

Safe? Safe for whom? Not for Afghani or Iraqi citizens. Not for US 
troops. Not for the detainees at Gitmo, Bagram or Abu Ghraib. Not for 
the spotted owl or steelworker. Not for the welfare mother or the 2 
million souls rotting in American prisons. Not for the streams of 
Appalachia or the rainforests of Alaska. Not for the residents of Cancer 
Alley or the peasants of Colombia or teen age girls slaving away in 
Nike's toxic Indonesia sneaker mills. Not for the Palestinians, the 
Lakota of Pine Ridge or elementary school students from the hard streets 
of Oakland. Not for the hopeless denizens of death row or three strikers 
in for life for a gram of crack or gays hoping to unite in marriage or 
even cancer patients seeking simple herbal relief from excruciating pain.

A crucial player in this unsavory affair was Medea Benjamin, the diva of 
Global Exchange. In rationalizing her decisive vote backing the 
Cobb/Lamarche ticket, Benjamin emitted this profundity: "John Kerry is 
not George Bush." Apparently, that tiny sliver of genetic variation is 
all it comes down to these days.

Yes, Medea, you're right. Kerry is simply Kerry, a bona fide war 
criminal, with a record of political infamy that is just as malodorous 
as that of George Bush-only it's longer. Over the past four years, Kerry 
has been complicit in the enactment of some of Bush's most disgusting 
policies. Indeed, these days Kerry offers himself up mainly as a more 
competent manager of the Bush agenda, a steadier hand on the helm of the 
Empire.

Kerry stands unapologetically for nearly every issue that caused the 
Greens to bolt the Democratic Party. He was present at the founding of 
the Democratic Leadership Council, the claque of neo-liberals that seeks 
to purge the Democratic Party of every last vestige of progressivism and 
reshape it as a hawkish and pro-business party with a soft spot for 
abortion-essentially a stingier version of the Rockefeller Republicans.

Kerry enthusiastically backed both of Bush's wars and now, at the very 
moment Bush is signaling a desire to retreat, the senator is calling for 
25,000 new troops to be sent to Iraq, where under his plan the US 
military will remain entrenched for at least the next four years.

Kerry supported the Patriot Act without reservation or even much 
contemplation. Lest you conclude that this was a momentary aberration 
sparked by the post-9/11 hysteria, consider the fact that Kerry also 
voted for the two Clinton-era predecessors to the Patriot Act, the 1994 
Crime Bill and the 1996 CounterTerrorism and Effective Death Penalty 
Act, which were just as bad if not worse.

Although he regularly hams it up in photo-ops with the barons of big 
labor, Kerry voted for NAFTA, the WTO and virtually every other 
job-slashing trade pact that has come before the senate. Kerry, who has 
courted and won the endorsement of nearly every police association in 
the nation, regularly calls for putting another 100,000 cops on the 
streets and even tougher criminal sanctions against victimless crimes. 
He refused to reconsider his fervid support for the insane war on drug 
users, which has destroyed families and clogged our prisons with more 
than 2 million people, many of them young black men, whom the draconian 
drug laws specifically target without mercy. Kerry backs the racist 
death penalty and minimum mandatory sentences.

A couple of weeks ago the Congressional Black Caucus jeered Ralph Nader 
when he spoke to them about his campaign, a bizarre reception for a man 
who has been a tireless advocate for civil rights and poor people. If 
this group of legislators actually cared about the welfare of their 
constituents, instead of merely their sinecure within the party, they 
would hire the twin Dominatrixes of Abu Ghraib, Lynddie England and 
Sabrina Harman, to clip a dogleash on Kerry (who disgustingly said he'd 
like to become the second black president) to interrogate him about his 
dreadful record on civil rights when he comes calling seeking their 
support. Of course, they won't. The Congressional Black Caucus is 
perhaps the only political conclave with clout as vaporous as the Greens.

Kerry, and his top advisor Rand Beers (a veteran of the Clinton and Bush 
National Security Council), crafted Plan Colombia, the brutal and toxic 
war on Andean peasants, waged for the benefit of oil companies under the 
phoney rubric of drug eradication. His scrawny energy plan, devoid of 
any real emphasis on conservation or solar power, calls for more 
off-shore oil leasing, widespread natural gas drilling, transcontinental 
pipelines and strip-mining for coal. His deficit-fixated economic 
policy, scripted by Wall Street bond tycoon Robert Rubin, is even more 
austere than Clinton's.

Like Joe Lieberman, Kerry markets himself as a cultural prude, regularly 
chiding teens about the kind of clothes they wear, the music they listen 
to and the movies they watch. But even Lieberman didn't go so far as to 
support the censorious Communications Decency Act. Kerry did. 
Fortunately, even this Supreme Court had the sense to strike the law 
down, ruling that it trampled across the First Amendment.

All of this is standard fare for contemporary Democrats. But Kerry 
always goes the extra mile. The senator cast a crucial vote for 
Clinton's wretched bill to dismantle welfare for poor mothers and their 
children and, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, he continues to 
hail the mean-spirited measure as a tremendous success.

This is merely a precis of the grim resumé of the man the Green Party 
now supports through the proxy candidacy of David Cobb. The message of 
the Cobb campaign is: a vote for Cobb is a vote for Kerry. Translation: 
a vote for Cobb is a vote for war, and everything that goes along with it.

It's also a vote for political self-annihilation. David Cobb is the Jim 
Jones of the Green Party. Form a line and pass the Kool-Aid.

Risk free voting? I wouldn't bet your life on it.

Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of Been Brown

--

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