The great men who came to political power in the Revolution modeled this exclusive answer: 8 of the first 10 Presidents owned slaves. These beginnings are among the most powerful answers to those who say that we must try to get back to the America of our founders. That America was wonderfully progressive for its time and but would be horribly racist in ours.

For two centuries, the argument about who is an American revolved around race. Slavery was the most contentious social issue over the next half century. Because the existing political parties agreed not to touch slavery, a new party was brought to life by men with a different answer to the question. The Party of Lincoln, the Republican Party, grew out of the idea that slavery should not exist in a democracy. The first Republican to win the Presidency, a Congressman from Illinois, converted that idea into government policy.

At the same time, the deadly expulsion of Native Americans from land that other Americans wanted, and the creation of a special legal category for millions of people who had always been here, was not nearly so divisive. Indians were not recognized as people in the US until the 1879 Standing Bear trial.

The victory of the Union in the Civil War destroyed the institution of slavery, but did not defeat those who continued to enforce a racially exclusive idea of who could be an American. After the failure of Reconstruction to enforce the 14th and 15th Amendments, the federal government just looked the other way as most states redeveloped racial separation and prevented black Americans from being full Americans.

The 14th Amendment still excluded Native Americans from citizenship, which was not granted until 1924. When black and Native American soldiers returned from fighting in World War II, they still could not vote across the US. Only the 1965 Voting Rights Act finally affirmed that race could no longer be used to exclude some Americans from being Americans.

Racism is based on fears about others, nightmarish fantasies about what they will do to us. The irrationality of fear leads to a harshness of behavior that can be itself frightening. Lynching was meant to be frightening to anyone who challenged the conventional racial hierarchy. Lynching depended upon the cooperation of law enforcement; it was the enforcement of racially separatist laws, some written down, some not.

The role of law enforcement in still maintaining the line between “real Americans” and others has made the news recently in East Haven, Connecticut, and New York City. Some police in East Haven systematically persecuted Hispanic residents to enforce the idea that they were unwelcome. The Chief, Leonard Gallo, “cultivated a racist and dishonest police force,” said a local Catholic priest. When the mayor, Joseph Maturo, was asked what his reaction to the Justice Department’s accusation that four police officers repeatedly harassed, intimidated, and unlawfully searched Latinos in East Haven, he said he “might have tacos”.

In New York police practice, American Muslims who originated in the Middle East became the official enemy of other Americans after 9-11. After seeing a training film in which the Chief of Police appeared, that argues that American Muslims are potential terrorists, NY police have routinely infiltrated Muslim organizations, spied on Muslim worship, and followed Muslim leaders.

Those who have argued for excluding some Americans from full rights, who have urged some Americans to leave because they weren’t American enough, who wanted to separate and classify and dominate people, have always been wrong. They posed as true Americans by claiming others were not.

The idea that race should determine who is an American has been defeated over the past half century. Another Congressman from Illinois, this time a Democrat, has fulfilled the promise that Lincoln first made by becoming the first black President.

But just as race seemed to lose its potency as a way to divide us, ideology has become the weapon of choice for those who want to exclude other Americans. Following the path forged by Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s, and widened by many conservatives since then, Congressman Allen West of Florida told the guests at the Palm Beach County Republican Party Lincoln Day Dinner that President Obama, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid should take their liberal politics and “get the hell out of the United States of America.”

We can reject the divisive ideas of our founders, still playing out in conservative politics, in favor of another idea they developed. On July 4, 1776, Congress appointed John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson to design a seal for the USA. In August they submitted a design with the motto “e pluribus unum”, “out of many, one.” We still have a long way to go to make this inclusive motto an American reality. We must fight the racial, ethnic, and ideological dividers for the soul of our nation.

Steve Hochstadt
Taking Back Our Lives 

Mark Lipman addresses press conference.

Fresh from a nearly three-hour meeting with senior Wells Fargo executives Monday afternoon, six key activists involved in various Occupy movement forces in Los Angeles expressed satisfaction that their concerns had been heard by leaders of the banking giant, but frustration that little concrete action had been taken and no promises made for future steps.

“The Wells Fargo team promised to take our ‘Eight Challenges for Wells Fargo‘ document back to their CEO and President,” reported Peter Thottam, a lawyer and the Occupy The Rose Parade organizer who coordinated the meeting from the Occupy side along with Carlos Marroquin, an Occupy LA activist and homeowner advocate.

“In particular, they said they’d address our demand for acknowledgement of culpability or responsibility for the mortgage finance scheme that not only bankrupted California homeowners but the whole country and beyond, and consider implementing a $2 billion write-off for homeowners who cannot meet their payments and are in danger of foreclosure,” Thottam continued. “They said they would also address a group of 27 specific homeowners here in Los Angeles and in Bernal Heights in Northern California.”

Wells Fargo officials had approached Thottam and others involved in the Occupy The Rose Parade event in late December, apparently eager to avoid disruption of an event the bank had heavily supported. A half dozen high-level Wells Fargo executives made the trip down from San Francisco, according to the Occupy team who met with them. Also invited were Regina Birdsell from the Center for Nonprofit Management, where the meeting was held, and Cooke Sunoo, Director of the Asian Pacific Islander Small Business Program.

“Wells Fargo came to the Occupy the Rose Parade organizers because they had two floats in the parade and didn’t want them damaged,” said Cheryl Aichle, an Occupy LA representative who attended the talks. “But today, they said they needed some time to digest the demands we presented.”

Although the press conference on the plaza outside downtown LA’s California Endowment Building where the talks were held began on a bright note, frustration soon bubbled out.

“The meeting was disappointing,” said Mark Lipman, another Occupy LA representative. “It was expected that they would have something to offer. They called for the meeting, after all. But instead, Wells Fargo did a lot of shifting the blame, showing how other institutions — Fannie Mae, JPMorgan Chase — had done much more harm.”

Others in the Occupy contingent agreed that the bank’s representatives did a lot of passing the buck.

“They presented lots of charts with numbers, lots of data. But they obviously have little understanding of human life, of what families go through with foreclosures,” continued Lipman. “That’s what we’ll remember from today.”

Kwazi Nkrumah, a most recognizable figure in the Occupy LA contingent, attempted to put the afternoon in perspective.

“The primary significance was that Wells Fargo thought it necessary to come down here to meet with a group of activists. What will come out of it, we’ll have to see,” said Nkrumah, who is now a key figure in LA’s Occupy The Hood effort. “We’ve had 12 million foreclosures in the last three years, 3.5 million more due for foreclosure this year. At least this meeting does show that every CEO of every multibillion-dollar corporation has some accountability for their corporation’s actions.”

Ellen Brown

Nkrumah wondered about the possible connection between Wells Fargo’s willingness to meet today and what’s happening in Sacramento where California Attorney General Kamala Harris’ decision to decline participation in the Obama administration’s multibillion-dollar, multistage mortgage settlement with the nation’s largest banks might be wavering.

“I hear now that she may change her mind,” Nkrumah said, shaking his head. “That would leave only Arizona’s and Nevada’s attorneys general to launch their own lawsuits.”

The Occupiers pointed to additional pressures on Wells Fargo, beyond their own demands and the potential lawsuits from the Department of Justice and potentially individual states: The City of Berkeley plans to move $350 million in deposits from Wells Fargo to a community bank at year’s end, citing Wells Fargo’s foreclosure abuse practices. The City of Los Angeles also has $370 million with Wells Fargo that could be put into play as well, according to the negotiating Occupiers.

Ellen Hodgson Brown, the lawyer who regularly writes on progressive banking reform issues, had the last word. “If this kind of negotiation doesn’t lead to anything substantial, the people will need to rise up themselves and form a class action lawsuit against these banks under the RICO Act.”

RICO, which stands for Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, is a federal law that provides for extended criminal penalties. That kind of talk might motivate even bankers to stop passing the buck.

Dick Price

Quality Collection Company was located in a grungy office building in downtown L.A. and was run by my friend’s father and uncle who pretended they were lawyers.

The company purchased contracts for items sold door to door in mostly black and Latino neighborhoods in Los Angeles and attempted to collect what was owed on those contracts.  Families may have signed up for a deep freezer, not realizing that expensive monthly purchases of meat were part of the deal; or found they had committed to purchasing aluminum siding they didn’t need and couldn’t afford.

My job was to send out the increasingly shrill collection notices on these contracts that included more and more bold black or red lettering and exclamation marks threatening to garnish their wages or repossess their belongings if they didn’t pay up.  Sometimes a family would show up at the office to either make a payment or ask to see the boss to get out of the contract they hadn’t realized they had signed.

While the “lawyers” lunched at their desks on take-out Chinese meals, I had to tell the families that the boss was not available.  Sometimes grown men would break down in tears about the predicament they found themselves in.  I was mortified to be playing a role in this charade.

I couldn’t quit the job because I desperately needed the money for college, but before I left that August, in my first act of civil disobedience, I mixed up all the index card files of clients and contracts so no one could figure out who had received which threatening letter, effectively destroying the company’s system of harassment.

And when I went off to Berkeley the first thing I did was join the civil rights movement on campus.

Vivan Rothstein
The Frying Pan 

Photos: Robin Doyno

You may have noticed that the comment sections in news magazines and blogs become endless tit-for-tat exchanges where one party cites an egregious error that the other group committed, followed by a similar example from the other side. These emotional polemic rejoinders can seem to go on forever, changing no one’s minds, but instead driving the convictions already held deeper and deeper as they up the ante of contempt. Far from being objective, they distract, nitpick, and obsess endlessly about meaningless details that resolve nothing.

In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman identifies two modes of thinking that highlight human irrationality. His theory offers a persuasive explanation as to why we fall victim to endless unproductive arguments. System 1 is fast, automatic, intuitive, metaphoric, and relies on gut instinct driven by the unconscious, while System 2 is slow, concentrated, deliberate, reasoning, analytical, and effortful. My experience and observation suggest that most political discussion takes place at Level 1, which to me seems analogous to a metaphorical tar pit of simmering hot-button liquid.

Level 1 is instinctively bound up in our identity as individuals, encompassing the many groups we associate with, especially our political affiliation. And while this is true of all parties, I have asserted elsewhere that conservatism demonstrably has more to do with identity politics than liberalism does. Conservatism is ideologically less inclusive, as evidenced by the political positions taken in matters of social concern. Conservatives often are very clear about whom they consider to be the out-groups. Still, all political parties rely on identity politics to a degree, which makes objective political negotiation extremely difficult.

I, myself, am very much aware of the danger of stepping into the tar pit in response to criticism about something I’ve written. My hot buttons work very well. There are times when I react before I engage Level 2, and I’m prone to respond to a jab with an overhand right. This is where one needs an internal referee, a ten count, some pertinent knowledge, and thoughtful reflection to have any chance of achieving the objectivity of Level 2.

Now, having made the claim that most political dialog is disingenuous at best, it is still my conviction that political dialog is a necessary condition of democracy. Our founding documents are proof that Level 2 reasoning is politically possible. But, for political discussion to be productive, we have to set aside Level 1, or at least keep a lid on it, and we have to care more about resolution than who wins the argument. This is very slow going, as one assertion at a time has to be put forth and agreed on before continuing.

Kahneman offers numerous examples of how we are susceptible to illusions, and he cites studies that show how quick we are to jump to baseless conclusions, suggesting that if our Level 2 system is preoccupied, we can be convinced to believe almost anything. System 1, he says, was shaped by evolution to be hyperalert, to keep us safe from threat and free from harm. Indeed, I think that’s an inescapable conclusion, but it puts our primeval biology at odds with our contemporary environment. We are no longer hunter-gathers. We overreact with systems developed to keep us from annihilation when we are simply striving to negotiate political matters to our mutual benefit. Kahneman’s work suggests we are rigged for illusion, snap judgments, and irrational argument. But this shouldn’t surprise us if we have two independent operating systems for discerning reality that frequently conflict.

In The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life, anthropologist Robert Trivers posits that the evolutionary purpose of self-deception is to allow us to better deceive others. In other words, we are not wired for democracy so much as for the Stone Age. Trivers says if we can deflect incoming information contrary to our views quickly enough, we can avoid retaining it in memory at all. Neuroscience supports this notion by showing that we counter contrary political information with a flood of emotion that acts as effectively as Star Trek deflector shields in keeping us from hearing the logic of opposition.

Is it any wonder that hot-button political dialog so often begets little more than expressions of contempt and anger? In my view, the only way to compensate for the ancient malware in our heads is to use the learning software that resides there, that is, if we can employ a perpetual anti-viral debugging strategy. We have to be as alert to our own deceptive tendencies as we are to our political opponents. And worse, we have to persuade our opposition to do the same thing. This is especially hard to accomplish with individuals who consider themselves privy to pure, unadulterated reality and endowed with a front-row view into the essence of virtue, which they can see clearly but which they believe remains hidden from outsiders.

At every opportunity, I make the case that what we need as individuals is an existential education, which simply amounts to deep enough knowledge in the humanities and of other cultures and traditions to enable us, through thoughtful reflection, to deal with the omnipresent angst that comes with the human condition. We must learn to accept our own mortality without misdirecting our anxiety by finding surrogates to blame for our fears, anger, and frustration. This degree of understanding would give us a chance to confer at Level 2 and meet other people in what Martin Buber referred to as an I-Thou relationship instead of the contemptuous I-It relation which is so common today.

I am an unabashed liberal, admittedly partisan, and I make no apologies for it. But if I didn’t believe myself capable of accepting the better argument on its grounds alone, and not on who is presenting it, I would bow out of political dialog altogether. When I hear conservatives declare what liberals want in life, I know without question that they are not speaking for me, and I grant conservatives the same benefit of knowing what they want politically without it being declared from a liberal perspective.

What seems clear to me is that there is much more common ground in America’s center than our media let on. Commercial media thrive on dissension, so their pursuit of perpetual conflict is easy to understand, even if it is not always forgivable. Moreover, media entertainment that is coarse and steeped in derision and disrespect is popular and cheap to produce. The realty television shows that depend upon public humiliation to draw an audience are, in my view, little more than modern day examples of barbarism.

I believe most liberals, conservatives, and libertarians want pretty much the same things in life; we just disagree on how to go about getting them, and our volatile emotions are triggered by different symbols of value that serve to blot out competing views.

Occupy Oakland did not spent months organizing broad public support for the group’s takeover of one of Oakland’s leading public assets; to the contrary, input on group decisions is limited to those with the time to attend Occupy meetings. For all of its claims to represent the true democratic spirit of the 99%, it seems that once Occupy Oakland decides to close down a public facility or seize a public asset, that’s all the democracy it needs.

Occupy Oakland’s belief that it was entitled to occupy the Kaiser building as a movement command center should force Occupy backers to think hard about what this entity has become.

A movement focused on economic inequality and the undemocratic abuses of the 1% now feels free to substitute the decisions of a very small group for the entire body politic of Oakland. Occupy Oakland did not care that ILWU leaders opposed the port shutdown in December because the group claimed it “spoke to workers” and concluded they supported a closure; in other words, Occupiers saw themselves as better representatives of ILWU members than their elected union leadership.

As for the Kaiser Convention Center that has remained vacant for six years, the obvious question is why is it vacant and what efforts have been made by community groups to either put it to good use or sell it for city funds. Shouldn’t the city’s elected leaders, with the input of community and labor groups, be the entity deciding a public facility’s future?

Occupy Oakland spokespeople defend their public targets by arguing that politicians are bought and paid for, union leaders do not represent members, and other rhetorical strategies designed to obscure a critical fact: there’s nothing “democratic” about a small group like Occupy seizing public facilities or closing them down.

It’s easy to shift attention from Occupy Oakland’s undemocratic processes – and, no, a consensus process by a very small, unrepresentative group in a major city is not how democracy is supposed to work – to Oakland’s excessive and even outrageously violent police response. Oakland Occupiers get the moral high ground when focusing on police abuse, yet speak little of who granted them the moral authority to speak for “the people” in dealing with publicly owned entities.

What Happened to the 1%?

When I heard that Occupy Oakland was prioritizing the seizure of public buildings, I wondered: what do these facilities have to do with the 1%? What happened to occupying banks and other institutions that, unlike the Kaiser Center, actually have a connection to economic inequality?

Some involved with Occupy Oakland have focused on stopping foreclosures and occupying foreclosed houses. Yet their efforts are now eclipsed by high-profile marches and protests whose public targets appear almost random.

After President Obama’s recent State of the Union speech, pundits came out in droves to note the impact of Occupy on his comments about income inequality and what is happening to the middle-class. Nobody doubts Occupy’s central role in shifting the national debate.

That’s what makes Occupy Oakland’s focus on public facilities rather than the 1% so sad. Instead of using the momentum created by the massive November 2 general strike to build a broader coalition against banks and the financial industry, Occupy Oakland shifted its target to public facilities and the city’s police and elected officials.

What Happened to Organizing?

Social movements are built through grassroots organizing. Is Occupy Oakland organizing to broaden its base, or operating as a group that is defined by those who show up at a particular meeting?

Organizing involves more than posting a flyer or sending an email announcing a meeting. Yet Occupy Oakland seems satisfied to operate as a small group that calls mass protests, missing the critical intermediary step of reaching out to neighborhood groups, churches and labor unions to achieve broad support for their actions.

One risk of organizing is that the people organized may have different opinions on strategy, tactics, and targets. A broader cross-section of Oakland residents might question targeting the Kaiser Center instead of empty, foreclosed homes where low-income people could live.

Occupy Oakland has dissipated much of the positive spirit that emerged from the November 2 general strike. It either gets back on track, or becomes yet another sectarian group disconnected from the 99% they claim to represent.

Randy Shaw
Beyond Chron 

Randy Shaw is author of The Activist’s Handbook and Beyond the Fields: Cesar Chavez, the UFW and the Struggle for Justice in the 21st Century.

These are Black Bloc tactics and they’re historically ineffective at spurring change. The now Gingrich-vilified Saul Alinsky in 1970 said the Weather Underground (the terrorist wing of the anti-war movement) should be on the Establishment’s payroll. “Because they are strengthening the Establishment,” said the “professional radical” Alinsky. Nothing kneecapped the call for the war to end quicker than buildings being bombed in solidarity with pacifist sentiments.

Here’s the key point: Occupy is not an armed conflict – it’s a PR war. Nonviolent struggle is a PR war. Gandhi had embedded journalists on his Salt March. He wasn’t a saint. That was a consciously cultivated media image. He used the press and its power to gain sympathy for his cause. What he didn’t do is say he was nonviolent “unless the cops are d*cks,” a sentiment voiced at Occupy. Nonviolent struggle has nothing to do with how the cops react. In actual nonviolent movements they welcome police overreaction because it helps the cause they’re fighting for.

At some General Assemblies this issue is referred to as “diversity of tactics.” It means basically if you’re not okay with property damage, but if someone else is, you’re not going to stand in the way. To a liberal ear it sounds like affirmative action or tolerance. It sounds like diversity of opinion – it’s not. It’s 3,000 people peacefully marching and two *ssholes breaking windows; which becomes 3,000 people breaking some windows in news reports.

Violent tactics taint everyone involved evenly – consenting or not.

Property destruction is not only a bad PR move (it costs taxpayers and small business owners money) it’s not constitutionally protected Free Speech. It’s also not what democracy looks like. The First Amendment specifically states the right to peaceably assemble to redress grievances.

Moreover the destruction of property is exactly what Occupy is protesting against; it’s what the banks took from us. Occupy has pointed out the criminality of the banks and the seeming collusion with government to take wealth and property away from working people and give it to the wealthy. So protest property crimes, by committing crimes against property? It’s nonsensical.

Destroying property destroys moral authority. You can’t rail against Bankaneers while trashing a City Hall. You can but you lose. Then the cops look justified in their show of force. Being quiet is seen as consent and being in solidarity with Oakland is standing with their well-documented embrace of “diversity of tactics.”

Occupy should denounce violence and property damage. There should be a statement that Oakland doesn’t speak for the movement as a whole. Holding solidarity marches against Oakland police brutality is exactly what that sounds like. It sends the message that Occupy is happy to cost the Oakland taxpayers millions in damages. If Occupy is to succeed it has to purge the extreme (read: ineffective waste) elements now commandeering the movement.

Some have emailed me and asked if the people who autonomously did these acts of vandalism and violence were “undercovers” or extreme anarchists. My response has been their goal is the same and their tactics are the same, so why does it matter? If they’re undercovers trying to undermine the movement then disavow them. If they’re anarchists who believe they are a part of Occupy, disavow them. The distinction means little if the endgame and the solution are the same.

It’s not true that no one speaks for Occupy. Those using violence are speaking far louder than the “people’s mic.” They need to be purged, or the the entire movement will be marginalized.

Tina Dupuy
Taking Eternal Vigilance Too Far 

Unfortunately, too many corporate Democrats, beholden to big-money donors or to a jobs sector dependent on militarism, vote for perpetual war and the surveillance state, replete with secret wiretaps, black hole prisons, and targeted assassinations. Far too many who are fearful or bought by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee vote for legislation that relegates Palestinians to second-class citizenship and threatens to take our country to the brink of an unthinkable war on Iran.

President Obama, despite his eloquence and initial popularity, has continued, and in some cases, expanded Republican Party policies under George Bush by

• escalating drone attacks on Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia;
• hiring deregulators from predatory banks to craft economic policy;
• repeatedly putting Social Security cuts on the table;
• lifting a 20-year moratorium on new nuclear power plants;
• signing NDAA legislation that eviscerates due process;
• increasing U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) raids and arrests of undocumented workers.

As the US empire crashes on the shores of rapacious greed, as power shifts from the federal to the local level, the Green Party can play a crucial role in creating and promoting local economies, worker or consumer-owned cooperatives, model municipal policy and participatory democracy.  The time is ripe for municipal federalism with its emphasis on cities sharing expertise, policies, and strategies for community building in a sustainable world.

I want to be part of that movement to create a post-empire future that rejects perpetual war, addictive consumerism and vulture capitalism to embrace a life-affirming vision of sustainability with measurable goals for energy, water and food independence.

As more people struggle financially and the cost of energy and optional travel increases, Americans will stay closer to home to invest and recreate more intensely in their communities and neighborhoods.   Our challenge in the age of withering empire is to set a new economic course that helps us invest our resources in ourselves, rather than multinational companies that extract our wealth and labor for the 1%.

While running Greens for federal office may help to register new Greens, to attract young people to the Party, the Greens’ resources – economic and grassroots – are best used at the local level where the Party has experienced the most success in the United States.

In 2011, 8 out of 12 California Green Party members running for local office got elected.

In Richmond, California, the working class city’s Green Mayor Gayle McLaughlin, representing more than 100,000 residents, took on Chevron, resulting in a $115 million pollution settlement, enacted a waiver on residential solar power fee installation; and spearheaded one of the nation’s toughest anti-foreclosure ordinances that exacts a $1,000 a day fine on banks who fail to maintain foreclosed property. McLaughlin was one of several Green Mayors to publicly oppose the dirty tar sands project, signing on to a letter to President Obama urging him to reject, as he recently announced, the XL pipeline that would carry the dirtiest crude from Canada across the United States to the Gulf of Mexico.

In the city of Fairfax in Marin County, Green Mayor Pam Hartwell-Herrero and a majority Green city council has banned intrusive Smart Meters, and authored successful ballot initiatives to ban plastic bags and the cultivation of genetically modified organisms. Fairfax is the third California city to have a Green majority on its town council, joining Sebastopol in Sonoma County from 2000 to 2008 and Arcata in Humboldt County, which had the world’s first Green majority on any legislative body between 1996 and 1998 and then again from 2000 to 2002.

While water board races are not often high-profile races, water board seats may be the front line defense against corporate privatization of our increasingly-scarce water supply. Kaitlin Sopoci-Belknap, President of the Humboldt Bay Municipal Water District, understands this. The youngest Green elected to local office,  Soppoci-Belknap is working to stop the sale of the county’s watershed to keep water in the public domain.

In Los Angeles, LA Community College District (LACCD) trustee Nancy Pearlman, elected first as a Green before becoming a Democrat (something that happens too often to avoid Democratic Party rival candidates), advocated for tough sustainability standards which resulted  in the LACCD becoming the first community college district in the nation to adopt a LEED environmental building certification standards.  Under Pearlman’s Green leadership, all nine LA community colleges developed green jobs training programs.

Nationally, Greens are leading the “Move to Amend” effort calling for a constitutional amendment to abolish “Corporate Personhood,” or as former Green Presidential candidate David Cobb describes, “the legal doctrine that allows corporations to overturn democratically enacted laws seeking to protect citizens from corporate harm and abuse.”  Cobb is now the National Projects Director for Democracy Unlimited, a coalition of Greens, Progressive Democrats, libertarians, and Declined-to-States organizing forums and rallies to challenge unlimited independent political expenditures by corporations.

Greens are also spearheading efforts to pass city ordinances embracing a Sustainability Bill of Rights, which would set measurable goals for energy independence, local food production, and clean air, land, and water. While Pittsburgh became the first city in the nation to pass a law protecting the rights of nature against corporate exploitation, Santa Monica could be next in line, thanks to the work of a coalition called Santa Monica Neighbors Unite! led by urban gardener Cris Gutierrez and Green Party urban forest advocate Linda Piera-Avila. Greens in the city of Santa Monica, which previously elected one of the first Green mayors – Michael Feinstein, a co-founder of the Green Party in the U.S. – are in the forefront of this effort to pass a Sustainability Bill of Rights ordinance that would recognize “the fundament rights of natural communities and ecosystems to exist, thrive, and evolve” – and set a goal of 100% local water use by 2020.

Throughout the US, Greens and allies are at the fulcrum of the occupy movement, defending homeowners facing foreclosure, practicing participatory democracy in the street, and successfully altering the national discourse from deficits and taxes to wealth inequality and privilege. In Oakland, Green Samsarah Morgan helped start the Children’s Village at Occupy Oakland, where children can play and protest peacefully. Former LA County Council Co-Chair of the Green Party Rachel Brunkhe mobilizes marches on Bank of America in San Pedro, home to the largest port in the country; former Green assembly candidate Peter Thottam organizes thousands at Occupy the Rose Parade, where Wells Fargo, one of the most notorious banks for robo-siging illegal foreclosures, was one of the parade’s chief sponsors; Al Shantz, Green Vice President of Napa Valley College’s Student Senate, launches Occupy rallies downtown and on the Napa Valley College campus; Harrison Wills, a Green President of the Santa Monica College Associated Student Body tells an Occupy crowd at his campus, “There’s socialism for corporations and capitalism for the rest of us.”

Rather than running candidates for every state and federal office, Greens can invest their energy in campaigning for local non-partisan offices, in electing Greens to neighborhood councils  and city councils; union leadership positions, pension and credit union boards, associated student bodies – and to movement-building and media messaging that injects and accentuates a Green anti-consumerist pro-sustainability vision into the economic discourse.

Power to the cities!

Though our emphasis should be local, our scope global as we solidify relationships with Green Party members across the world.  Let us hold the Greens from Europe to Africa close to our hearts as we reject nationalism – its attendant racism, xenophobia, and scapegoating – and embrace global citizenry  and planetary-caretaking.

Let us look to the German Green Party, the first to enjoy national prominence and the catalyst behind Germany’s decision to phase out nuclear power by 2022.  Encouraged by the German Greens, we must challenge billions in U.S. federal subsidies for new nuclear power plants and demand plant closures from California to New York.  With a void in leadership in the U.S. anti-nuclear movement, the Green Party can play a key role in re-invoking the moratorium lifted under the Obama administration.

Elsewhere in Europe, Greens have launched a Green New Deal (GND) aimed at “reducing inequalities within and between societies, and reconciling our lifestyles – the way we live, produce and consume – with the physical limits of our planet” through progressive taxation, tax incentives for green initiatives, and new economic indicators beyond the Gross Domestic Product.  For example, in Vienna, Austria, a GND initiative built “bike city” – a housing project that includes bike rental and maintenance, a compressed air station, 300 bicycle parking spaces, and extra large elevators for bike transport.

Let us build a new American landscape of bike cities, urban gardens, municipal credit unions, barter economies, and city-owned utilities with Greens organizing a new power-sharing worker-member-owner paradigm a la the Mondragon Cooperatives Cooperation in northern Spain. Based in Basque region, the Mondragon is a federation of worker cooperatives employing 84,000 people in four critical sectors: finance; industry; retail; knowledge.

Electorally, I envision a fusion approach – whereby Greens support progressive Democrats, just as Los Angeles Green Party members recommended my candidacy when I challenged war profiteer Jane Harman for Congress, and just as Green Party activists in northern California support PDA’s Norman Solmon to fill retiring Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey’s seat.  Endorsing progressive Democrats  – a la Congress Members Kucinich, Lee, Grijalva – on the national level – and Assemblyman Bill Monning and Senator Fran Pavley on the California state legislative level – makes sense until the Green Party is ready and able to successfully elect statewide and federal candidates of its own, either because the Party has exponentially multiplied its current voter registration, estimated at 300,000 in the nation; 110,000 in California, or because enough cities like Oakland, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Portland have instituted instant run-off or ranked-choice voting to increase the likelihood that voters will not simply cast their ballots for pre-ordained winners or lessers-of-evil but instead choose a candidate who truly represents their vision of peace, social justice, and environmental sustainability.

Ranked choice voting must be a strategic priority for the Green Party in the U.S., with Greens in every leadership position – be it a partisan office or a non-partisan environmental organization – introducing ranked-choice voting into their respective organization. Strategically, Greens might organize a coalition of third parties – Greens, Peace and Freedom, Libertarians, and the well-funded centrist Americans Elect – to institute proportional representation through state ballot initiatives for ranked choice voting.  Such initiatives would appeal to voters who want to save budget-starved states, counties or cities millions of dollars wasted on run-off elections.

In the meantime, until widespread adoption of ranked choice voting, the Green Party might leverage its power by becoming a fusion party, regardless of state laws like the one in California that prohibit candidates from becoming the nominee of more than one party.  On the grassroots level, endorsing Democratic Party candidates active in Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) would address the “spoiler” charge and position Greens as a swing voting constituency, much as a swing state can decide a Presidential election. Let the Greens be wooed; let every candidate running for city, state, or federal office feel compelled to address the priorities of the Green Party, and let our party learn the lessons of the Swedes and Norwegians who successfully challenged the 1% by building strong coalition governments and coalition movements behind those coalition governments.

While it’s true that California Democratic Party delegates can be stripped of their delegate status for endorsing Greens in elections, there is nothing stopping non-delegates active in PDA from participating in a blue-green coalition that endorses and works to elect local Greens. In fact, that should be the call to action, watering the Green seeds for the next generation.

In LA County, where there are 23,000 registered Greens, and over 900,000 Declined to States, the Party will participate in an aggressive voter registration campaign before the November 2012 election when a Green Party Presidential candidate, perhaps  pioneering environmental health advocate Dr. Jill Stein,  will likely enjoy ballot status in at least 17 states, including the largest state, California, with its 55 electoral votes, and swing states Ohio, Florida and Colorado.

Other Green Party ballot access states or districts include Arkansas, Arizona, DC, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Maryland, Maine, Michigan, Mississippi, New York, South Carolina, Texas and West Virginia. Though Green Party strengths lies in bottom-up organizing, running a Presidential candidate can provide a strategic stage for the left to critique and challenge the status quo, while attracting “millennials” or younger voters to a party platform that refuses all corporate contributions, supports single-payer health care, advocates zero-waste, calls for a tax on the rich, and opposes not only wars for empire, but weapons sales to other countries.

With strategic planning and a shift in focus, those newly registered Greens can rock the world of monopoly capitalism with a sturdy footing in city soil and municipal radicalism.

I will proudly stand with them.

Marcy Winograd

Marcy Winograd, a former congressional peace candidate, mobilized 41% of the Democratic Party primary vote in her challenge to war profiteer Jane Harman.  Presently, Winograd serves as as a board member of the Ocean Park Association in Santa Monica and is a member of Santa Monica Greens.  Winograd, a public school English and history teacher, helped organize OccupyLAUSD to protest education cuts in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Rep. Allen West (R-Florida)

Only a few weeks into the new year, and it seems that black conservatives made their way out of the gate on the wrong foot.

That’s not to say that they ever were on point, in my estimation. But these days, they seem particularly off their game, out of place, out of step and isolated. When the Republicans were a center-right party with a semblance of a big tent, black conservatives were useful tools – pawns who were willingly exploited to put a black face on regressive social and economic policy. And I’m sure they did it all for a chicken wing and a bowl of grits. Now, at a time when the GOP is tea party-owned and steeped in 100 percent pure corporatism, greed, intolerance and white supremacy, they are simply useful idiots.

Case in point: the lieutenant governor of Florida, Jennifer Carroll, said that she couldn’t think of anyone who epitomizes the values and vision of Martin Luther King more than Gov. Rick Scott. That would be Rick Scott, the anti-union, voter disenfranchising corporate fraudster, and perhaps the worst governor in the country, which is no easy feat.

Ward Connerly, the former California regent and anti-civil rights crusader, is accused of financial impropriety and is being investigated by the IRS. He earns around $1.5 million a year at the American Civil Rights Institute, accounting for half of the nonprofit’s budget. The person leading the charge against him is none other than Jennifer Gratz, the white plaintiff in the University of Michigan affirmative action case that struck down programs of inclusion in that institution. Gratz later worked for Connerly, but no longer does. And Connerly is portraying her as disgruntled former employee. So, a man widely regarded in the black community as a race-based con man who pimps colorblindness and quotas for personal profit is now being accused by his own supporters of being just that – a race-based con man who pimps colorblindness and quotas for personal profit.

Florida Leutenant Governor Jennifer Carroll,

Black tea party spectacle Jesse Lee Peterson said he agrees with Newt Gingrich that blacks lack a work ethic. Peterson’s solution is to send blacks back to the plantation, literally, not figuratively. Doubling down on Newt’s racial rhetoric, Peterson said “one of the things that I would do is take all black people back to the South and put them on the plantation so they would understand the ethic of working. I’m going to put them all on the plantation. They need a good hard education on what it is to work.”

And in an apparent case of buyer’s remorse, Juan Williams, Fox News’ resident black apologist, received a proper verbal beat down from Newt Gingrich at a recent GOP presidential debate in South Carolina. Williams appropriately exposed Gingrich for his comments on food stamps and the poor – including his remark that “black Americans should demand jobs, not food stamps” – saying the words were “intended to belittle the poor and racial minorities.”

Don’t get me wrong, Juan was right to attempt to put Gingrich in his place. But that was not the job for which Fox – and by extension the Republicans - pay Juan so generously. They pay him to be different from the rest of us, to engage in self-loathing and attacks on black people, poor and working people, liberal thought and progressive values. So for a moment, Juan forgot where he was, and that’s why the crowd booed him. I don’t know what caused Mr. Williams to lose his way, but if this is a sign he has found it, we should embrace him. But he must realize that a GOP debate is the wrong venue to address Republican racism and scapegoating of the poor. The base wants to hear about doing away with child labor laws, about forcing black and Latino kids to clean the toilets in their school for pennies, and about calling Obama a food stamp president.

As for the black conservatives who are embracing this ignorance in the era of the 99 percent, they are really just a sideshow oddity. It is likely the loneliest job in the nation as a person of color, to sell your soul to a nearly exclusively white-extremist-fringe movement, one that truly hates everyone who looks like you, and works hard to scapegoat you for political gain. It’s as if they’re turning their back on the mama who raised them.

Meanwhile, J.C. Watts - who has returned from obscurity after apparently not suffering enough abuse in the party – says that Republican candidates need black strategists at the table to help them win over black voters and avoid controversial remarks. “Somebody that looks like us needs to be at the strategists’ table to say ‘I know what you’re trying to say, but I wouldn’t say it like that,” Watts said at an even hosted by black tea party darling, Rep. Allen West (R-Florida). West said that blacks have conservative views but don’t vote Republican.

Watts and West are missing the point. Having a black face at the Republican race-card table never changed the game, and they are proof of it. They are the only ones who don’t realize that they are the punch line to this offensive joke, and the joke’s on them.

David Love
Black Commentator 

Gov. Tom Corbett (R-Pa.) praised Joe Paterno and ordered flags on all state buildings to fly at half-staff for four days.

That would be the same Tom Corbett who had said he was “personally disappointed” in Joe Paterno for not doing more to alert authorities in the Jerry Sandusky case, while acknowledging that Paterno did nothing illegal and followed university rules for conduct.

That would be the same Tom Corbett who, as attorney general, assigned only one investigator to the case in 2009, while devoting almost innumerable personnel and financial resources to prosecute high-profile cases that could help lead him to the governor’s office.

That would be the same Tom Corbett who had the authority to order the arrest of Jerry Sandusky as soon as the claims were made, but who allowed the investigation to drag two years.

That would be the same Tom Corbett who stepped up the investigation only in the third year, after he was elected governor.

That would be the same Tom Corbett who accepted about $200,000 in campaign donations from trustees of Sandusky’s Second Mile foundation and then danced around questions of why, as governor, he authorized a $3 million grant to the Second Mile.

That would be the same Tom Corbett who as an ex-officio member of the Penn State Board of Trustees, with the power to increase or decrease state appropriations to the university, big-footed his presence to demand that the Trustees do something to Joe Paterno.

Now, let’s look at the Board of Trustees. On Jan. 22, the day that Joe Paterno died from lung cancer, the Board issued a honey-dripped PR-laden written commemoration.

That, of course, would be the same Board that, influenced by the harpies of the media and a horde of the public who knew everything about everything, except people and football, had wanted to terminate Joe Paterno’s contract after his teams had losing seasons in 2003 and 2004. He was too old, they said. He was getting senile, they claimed. His coaching strategy was too conservative, they cried with the shrill cry of a wounded hyena. But, an 11-1 season in 2005 quieted their panic. And so they stewed, knowing that a football coach, educator, philanthropist, and humanitarian had a greater reputation than all of them combined.

That would be the same Board that violated every expectation of due process, listened to the other sanctimonious hypocrites who were quick to condemn someone without knowing the facts, and by a cowardly and impersonal phone call violated four levels of the chain of command and fired Joe Paterno hours after he had announced his retirement. It was their pathetic way to make people believe they, not the most recognizable person in Penn State history, were in control. The reality, of course, is they botched the firing in a feeble attempt to protect themselves, not Penn State and, certainly, not the rights of a tenured full professor, who had given 61 years of service to the university.

That, of course, would be the same Board that should have known for at least six months, and probably longer, of a grand jury investigation into Jerry Sandusky’s conduct, but apparently had no crisis management plan to deal with what would become the greatest scandal in its 156-year history.

That, of course, would be the same Board that had operated in a culture of secrecy that regularly violated the state’s Sunshine law and enjoyed its status as receiving state tax moneys while not having to be under the glare of the public right-to-know law.

That, of course, would be the same board that includes the CEOs of U.S. Steel, Merck, and a major division of the Bank of New York Mellon; and an assortment of senior executives from insurance, investment, and education. Even a retired assistant managing editor of The New York Times is on the Board. And, yet, this Gang of 32, which should have known better, bumbled, stumbled, and proved that malfeasance and incompetence is what it should be best known for. For the most part, they acted like undergraduates struggling to earn a grade of “C” in a course in human relations, having already decided they didn’t need the course in business communications.

Now, let’s turn to the new president. The Board forced the resignation of a respected 17-year president for not doing enough to investigate the Sandusky allegations. By most accounts, the new president, formerly the provost and executive vice-president, is a decent person with a good academic reputation. But, is it credible that if the No. 1 person should have known more and done more, how could the No. 2 person be ignorant of the allegations. Nevertheless, the Board sent the newly-minted president out on nothing less than a belated PR field trip to calm the rising storm against the Board for its incompetence and insensitivity in firing Joe Paterno. At three meetings with hundreds of alumni, the new president, facing alumni wrath, did little to alleviate their anger. But, he promised the university would do something—he didn’t know what—he didn’t know how or when—to honor Joe Paterno.

Of course, since the Board was so inept, secret, and hypocritical in its own actions, it had no idea what it was going to do. The Board statement the day of Joe Paterno’s death merely stated the university “plans to honor him,” and is considering “appropriate ways.”

The greatest honor will not come from the Board, the administration, or even the Legislature, many of whom sought the media spotlight to pander to certain voters by condemning the coach. At the statue by Beaver Stadium, thousands of students, staff, faculty, and community residents are coming to pay their respects. Hundreds had met him, for he was one of the more accessible persons in the community, often walking home alone from practices and games; his phone number was in the book; his home was in a quiet residential area not a mansion on a hill reserved for the wealthy. Most of the mourners had never met him, but they all knew him.

On Tuesday, about 27,000 people from all over the United States stood in line up to three hours to walk past the body of Joe Paterno, guarded by past and present scholar-athletes. NFL super-stars and football fans, academics and those who never went to college, all were there to honor the man who was an outstanding quarterback and cornerback who earned an English literature degree from Brown University, one of the more prestigious in the country; a man who later created the “Great Experiment” to develop and promote a winning football program that would make education and citizenship more important than sports, and would make “success with honor” more than words.

On Wednesday, thousands stood shoulder to shoulder and lined the streets of Penn State and State College, an honor guard as the hearse carrying Joe Paterno slowly moved from the Pasquerilla Spiritual Center, past Beaver Stadium, and to a private funeral.

On Thursday, more than 12,000 packed the Bryce Jordan Center for a memorial service. The first 10,000 tickets were claimed within 10 minutes on Tuesday.

Sue Paterno need not have worried when she quietly asked some mourners at the viewing to keep her husband warm. When journalism turns into history, it will be written that Joe Paterno had done more than was expected, in every part of his life. The people, not the governor or the trustees who will quickly be forgotten in the cold, will keep Joe Paterno warm.

Walter Brasch
Wanderings 

The quote is from a book I’m sure you were forced to read if you are older than 30. This was of course before the outrage over language that knocked it off the shelves in recent years. I’m speaking, of course, of the first truly American classic, Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain’s deceptively simple, meandering voyage through race and social custom in pre-Civil War America.

An old love was rekindled for me recently when I sadly picked up a copy of Huck Finn at the local library “buck a bag” sale. Classics a plenty were left on the tables, and this lonely copy of an old favorite was passed over by other patrons as they grabbed up the more lurid tell-all biographies. To add insult to injury, the book was stamped with a garish red “DISCARDED”. It looked to be a donation from the local Middle School and the book, otherwise in perfect condition, was obviously being purged from the shelves. It grieved me in a manner really only suitable to feel for other humans, not books so of course I had to grab up the book and save it from the indignity. As I drove home with several bags of books, I realized that I must read my old love again to fully rectify the situation.

The most searing moment of the book comes when Huck Finn discards the note he penned to turn in Jim, his runaway slave companion. “All right, then, I’ll go to hell” is the statement the boy makes as he realizes he does not have it in him to go along with the “morals” he has been taught since birth, that of the slave as being property. He grasps that he is going against the teachings of the church, the teachings of his elders, basically going against the full of society that he has been immersed in. The statement is heartfelt, as Huck sees his betrayal to hold serious consequences. He believes he will indeed go to hell, but has the overwhelming organic notion that adhering to the social norms of the day was simply not possible for him any longer. The depth of this selfless act is most likely lost on the myriad of kids who were “forced” to read this book. The twisted irony of this moment is the fact that losing oneself to a personal upwelling of good is indeed the correct choice; in this case, ignoring the voice of society connected him to the potential and the sublime.

The soul of America is complicated and nuanced. Our patriotism is always tempered by a foundation of dread — that of land theft, aggression and bondage. Even the most willfully blind in this nation know this fact in their core. Perhaps this nagging wound, knowing that there is an unholy footing is what has led to something of an over compensation in the American psyche. The concept of American Exceptionalism. These ideas come from a delusional culture that willfully looks away from truths. The well-adjusted can be aware of personal weaknesses; it’s the maladjusted that create myths and dogma.

In much the same manner as Huck Finn, scores of individuals in America feel ill at ease with everyday imperatives. For some it’s the Imperialism, even if they don’t know what to call it. For even more it’s the degrading, soul eroding workplace. We are to derive all measure of worth as a person by the presence of a job, and a well paying one at that. Most do not have a “good job” and even those who do, often have some measure of discord inside them due to the requirements lurking to keep said well paying job. Generally it involves hardening oneself off from the plights of others, and making excuses to condone any corruption inherent. If the strife in the mind becomes too unbearable, then suggestions are generally made to medicate oneself. This is sometimes enough to quiet the demons, but they are still there, to be sure.

Every civilization has made war on certain aspects of what it means to be human. During Huck Finn’s time, the very concept of being human was argued in percentages. 3/5 a person, not at all….? It’s ludicrous and sick to think our lawmakers ever spoke of this, but they did, and it wasn’t that long ago by any measure besides the paltry human lifespan.

The assault of our age is that of being considered a consumer, not a citizen. It was foisted upon us insidiously until we all started using the same verbiage. Our society said it was natural; that is was expected to be a “consumer” not a human or citizen. A consumer uses resources, period. A consumer is a measure to be managed and quantified. A consumer hasn’t the right to ask for dignity or happiness. It’s just a measure of flesh to use and produce and to be discarded when unable to perform these functions. We are seeing the expected and continued degradation of what it means to be human. Consumers need producers, and neither need to be particularly human. The demand of more productivity, the enhancement of the human as simply a cog in the machine that produces wealth for the few-that is what it is truly about. This doesn’t sit well in our souls simply because it is wrong. No amount of propaganda will rid us of the feeling completely, and that is why there is great interest in medicating the humanity out of us. The harmony will never be there under this system.

Change always seems impossible, at least change that benefits the many instead of the few. But there are instances of change that we can look back upon. Slavery was considered to be natural and expected, but through an incomprehensible number of disobedient acts, the collective delusion was lifted. Individuals found a moral compass removed from the shroud of society.

Our current assault on humanity is not as dramatic as a human in shackles. But make no mistake, to maintain the consumer death spiral, misery and even slave like conditions still exist. War is now an integral part of the system. The level of suffering is growing worldwide to simply advance the cause that the human is nothing but a mindless consuming machine, there to facilitate even more consumption by the top few.

The beauty of an “All right, then, I’ll go to hell” moment is that it takes no sophistication, no advanced degree. Just an individual presented with a small moment that they can control. These moments are hard to predict, but when they occur they can bring back humanity. The owner of these moments will probably have hell to pay in the short run. These incidents may be born of individuals who will not beat protestors, maybe employers who refuse to implement soul degrading practices. The possibilities are endless, as are the choices that we can make. And when we hear of such stories we need to share them far and wide.

“All right, then, I’ll go to hell”. Say it … because it truly is the path to redemption.