Greens and Kucinich

[Dan Scanlan <dscanlan@xxxxxxx>]

Green/Peace People,

I didn't attend Daniel Sheehan's speech last night (in Grass Valley
CA) but I did hear him speak at Sunday's SYRCL party at Miner's
Foundry in Nevada City. He is serving as Dennis Kucinich's policy
director. I am not sure what a policy director does but here I exert
my ardent disagreement with what he asked Green Party members to do,
namely, temporarily register with the Democratic Party so they can
vote for Kucinich in the Democratic primary election.

I believe this is a flawed tactic that windows a flawed -- and
candidacy killing -- strategy.

There are two mordant assumptions in this strategy: 1) It assumes the
Democratic Party is somehow capable of leadership; and 2) It assumes
the Green Party is irrelevant.

We have the benefit of the long look backward and can see today that
the few progressive moves made in my lifetime (1943 to present) by
the Democratic Party were non-stoppable remnants of President
Roosevelt's earlier policies -- notably Medicare and Minimum Wage.
Kennedy, Johnson, Carter and Clinton were every bit as involved in
subterranean, murderous intrigue and wars as were the worst of the
Republicans. The recent loss of the country to myopic, ruthless
international business cartels, peaking in the Florida vote count,
was facilitated by the Democratic Party which focused on chads and
courtroom tension and ignored the disenfranchisement of blacks and
others turned away from the polls. As usual, the Democratic Party
fought the wrong battle. And blamed the Greens, despite having lost
millions of Democratic votes to Bush.

The Green Party has a positive and lengthening history of growth and
adherence to critical issues:  the protection of the environment, the
vote count, fair process, grass roots, deep structural change, no
corporate cash. The important stuff.

When Daniel Sheehan asks Green Party members to re-register, at least
temporarily, as Democrats, he is asking them to abandon progress and
ride on the back of a beheaded chicken that is running around
aimlessly because it doesn't have the brains left to know it is dead.

There is another strategy to take back the country, one that will
actually improve the process of electing our national leaders. This
letter is my own personal first salvo in that strategy. It is also
based on my own assumptions that Dennis Kucinich is speaking his own
truth, that that truth is congruent with my own, that he wants to
win, and he will survive the campaign.

Here's the strategy:

1) Dennis Kucinich seeks (and wins) the Democratic nomination by
convincing Democrats to vote for him in the primary election. During
the campaign, he chastises the Democratic Party for its numerous sins
and works to improve it by speaking strongly against its dependence
on corrupt corporate cash, its penchant for war and its failure to
tend to, or remember, its own progressive vision, and its failure to
keep the nation's airwaves unfettered by corporate constraints.

2) The Green Party nominates Dennis Kucinich, even though he is a
Democrat. There is precedence for this -- Ralph Nader was not a Green
Party member. By so doing, the Green Party says that it values the
end result -- the taking back of the country from the international
corporate cartels -- and is not mired in knee-jerk "party politics"
at any expense.

3) Renegade Republicans nominate Dennis Kucinich for the Republican
ticket, and introduce a proposal to allow non-Republicans to vie for
the nomination. The nation has a history of this. It is only unusual
in our time.

4) Dennis Kucinich seeks the nominations of the American Independence
Party, the Natural Law Party, the Peace and Freedom Party and other
small parties.

5)Kucinish, individuals and groups develop and use a vocabulary that
highlights the fact that the nation is at a crossroads that demands
quick, exciting, unusual and strong moves to save it for the benefit
of all and for our posterity, and by extension, the well-being of the
planet itself. This vocabulary gives voice to the fact that there is
room for all in the tug toward survival. Greens and Democrats pulling
in concert, for starters, followed by other parties and
organizations. The vocabulary becomes its own media and causes the
corporate news industry to scramble for new relevance.

6) Dennis Kucinich creates a Committee of the Vote Count which is
comprised of a wide variety of citizens, from high school age to
elders, who are skilled in law and computer technology and who donate
their time and skills to correct the flawed vote count in this
country. The vocabulary makes it clear that counting is the first and
simplest of computer functions and that "secret and proprietary"
vote-counting software is fundamentally corrosive to American
democracy and an affront to common sense. The verifiability of the
vote count ibecomes a major campaign issue.

The Kucinich campaign will be -- and will be seen and celebrated as
-- a multi-pronged, multi-party, unifying American experience that is
actually capable of returning the country to the folk. This
enumeration of a strategy leaves out hot-button and other issues
since it is aimed at roots.

Dan Scanlan
Grass Valley CA
October 28, 2003