[Texgreen] Howie Hawkins: For a Green Presidential Campaign in 2004

[Ramsey Sprague]

this highlights many of the points i've been trying to make, especially
about Kucinich...

Ramsey
***

For a Green Presidential Campaign in 2004
By Howie Hawkins, Syracuse Greens

Presented at Regional Greens Meeting, Freeville, NY, June 28, 2003

Progressives are running scared today. They are scared of Bush and are
demanding that the Greens not run a candidate and back a Democrat, or
that the Greens backhandedly support the Democrat by not campaigning in
the swing states.

To be sure, Bush is scary. Constitutional rights restricted. Unilateral
presidential war powers. War budget hiked. International treaties
abrogated. Tax cuts for the rich. Worker safety and environmental
regulations gutted. Pandering to corporate interests in the midst of a
corporate crime wave. An anti-consumer bankruptcy bill. Invasions of
Afghanistan and Iraq, with threats of future invasions or proxy wars for
regime change in Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Venezuela,
Cuba, and who knows where else.

But the Democrats are scary, too. The majority of congressional
Democrats have let Bush have his way on every one of these issues.

If the Democratic Party won=92t resist Bush=92s policies in Congress, why
should progressives support them for the presidency?

The Democrats didn=92t even resist Bush when he stole the Florida vote in
2000. We now know that Gore won Florida handily from the recount done by
the media consortium that included the Wall Street Journal, New York
Times, and Los Angeles Times. But the Democrats, far more interested in
preserving the system=92s legitimacy than fighting its racism, refused to
make an issue of how the Republicans cut blacks from the voter rolls
through computerized racial profiling.

The Congressional Black Caucus gave the Democrats a second chance after
the Supreme Court selection of Bush, when it appealed to Senate
Democrats to object to accepting the Florida electors. The objection of
just one Democratic Senator would have forced an investigation of the
racial voter profiling and a recount of the Florida vote. But not one of
them -- not Wellstone, not Kennedy, not Feingold, not Boxer, not
Clinton, not Kerry -- not one of the Democratic liberals objected.

And the Greens are supposed to stand down and leave it to the Democrats
to fight Bush?

Yes, a Democrat might beat Bush. But no Democrat is going to beat
Bushism.

Just as electing Clinton did not beat Reaganism, but took Reaganism far
beyond what Reagan and Bush Sr. could accomplish, so electing a Democrat
will not defeat Bushism to change the basic foreign and domestic
policies of the US.

What was called Reaganism (to scare us into voting Democratic) was
really a bipartisan consensus around neoconservative militarism and
neoliberal economics. That bipartisan consensus was initiated under
Carter, supported by the majority of Congressional Democrats during the
Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations, carried far beyond what Reagan and
Bush Sr. could do by Clinton, and is now being taken even further by
Bush, again with the support of the majority of Congressional Democrats.

These policies were initiated under Carter, who increased the military
budget beyond Ford's projections and got the US into covert military
operations in Afghanistan with the hope, successful as it turned out,
that it would provoke the Soviets to invade. The US began in 1978
training the Islamic fundamentalists who we now know as Al Qaida. Bush=92s
military occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq is the Carter Doctrine in
practice, which stated in essence that the US would go to war for oil in
the Middle East.

Neoconservative militarism is the post-Vietnam foreign policy of the
corporate rulers as they reasserted their post World War II policy of
dominating the capitalist world. With the fall of the Soviet bloc, Bush
Sr. declared a New World Order in which the US would dominate the whole
world and make it safe for capitalist exploitation. The Clinton
administration continued this policy through NATO expansion and its
intervention in the Balkans without UN authorization, as well as the
complex of trade and credit policies administered by the IMF, World
Bank, WTO, and numerous corporate-managed trade agreements on the model
of NAFTA.

Both parties are committed are just as committed to economic policies of
neoliberal austerity. Again, these polices were initiated under Carter,
who slashed social programs to increase the military budget and re-
assert US interventionism with the development of the Rapid Deployment
Force, adopted monetarism as fiscal policy with the appointment of
Volker to the Fed, and began the attack on organized labor by refusing
to support the common situs picketing law he had pledged the AFL-CIO he
would support.

Neoliberalism includes cuts in social spending, hikes in regressive
taxes, cuts in progressive taxes, privatization, deregulation,
corporate- managed trade, union busting, and corporate welfare. In a
utshell, it means the stick of austerity for workers -- on the theory it
will makes us work harder and raise productivity -- and the carrot of
welfare for the corporate rich -- on the theory they will invest and the
benefits of increased jobs and tax revenues will trickle down to the
rest of us.

Neoliberal austerity is the post-Keynesian economic policy of the
corporate rulers as they ran into the internal limits to profits and
growth under the Keynesian welfare/warfare state.

The new ruling class consensus is the austerity/warfare state of
neoliberal economics and neoconservative empire.

And that ruling class consensus is the pro-war, pro-corporate bipartisan
consensus.

What is now called Bushism is not radical departure, but a continuation
of this bipartisan consensus, with the majority of Democrats in Congress
voting for Bush's key programs: the tax cuts, war budgets, war powers,
and USA PATRIOT Act.

Worried about Bush's global empire building? Empire building is a
bipartisan geopolitical strategy of using military basing and control of
oil in the Middle East and Central Eurasia to keep Western Europe,
Russia, China, and Japan from challenging US hegemony. This geopolitical
strategy is as prevalent in the pronouncements of Democratic national
security advisors like Zbigniew Brzezinski as in those of their
Republican counterparts like Henry Kissinger. The Bush administration's
particular intellectual framework for empire coming out of the Project
for a New American Century is authored by Democrats as well as
Republicans, such as Clinton's CIA Director, James Woolsey, and Paul
Wolfowitz, the former aide to the late Senator Scoop Jackson (D-WA). The
Clinton administration's imperialist motives for supporting Star Wars
were stated quite openly in the Air Force's "Vision for 2020":
"dominating the space dimension of military operations to protect US
interests and investment."

Indeed, the Democrats' unadulterated support for empire goes back before
Carter, before Kennedy and Johnson's Vietnam War, to another Democratic
administration, that of Truman, with Dean Acheson's Cold War strategy of
building alliances of US satellites to contain the Soviet bloc and make
the "free" world safe for corporate exploitation. With the demise of the
USSR's own empire, the US geopolitical strategy switched, "From
Containment to Enlargement," as Clinton's first National Security
Advisor, Anthony Lake, declared in a 1993 speech of that title, adding
in words that sound like Wolfowitz=92s that US-led alliances would
accomplish this by "Diplomacy where we can; force where we must."

Worried about Bush's militarism? Remember that the post Vietnam hikes in
military spending were initiated by Carter, taking them above the levels
Ford had projected, and that the post Cold War military spending hikes
were initiated by Clinton, taking them well above Bush Sr.'s
projections. Bush Jr.'s further hikes have been supported by the
majority of Congressional Democrats. The current mantra among the
Democratic Party political consultants and pollsters is that the
Democratic presidential candidate must be as "strong on national
security" as Bush to be competitive in the 2004 election.

The Clinton foreign policy team was frustrated by the military's
cautious Powell Doctrine. As Clinton's Secretary of State and then UN
Ambassador, Madeline Albright, angrily told Colin Powell, now Bush's
Secretary of State and then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
"What's the point of having this superb military that you've always been
talking about if we can't use it?"

What about Bush's unilateralism? Wouldn't Democratic imperialism be a
little softer, more "globalist." Not hardly. It was Clinton's Secretary
of State and Brzezinski protege, Madeline Albright, who told the UN
Security Council in 1994 regarding Iraq: "We will act multilaterally
when we can, unilaterally when we must." And thus under Clinton the US
bypassed the Security Council to impose regime change by military force
on Iraqi Kurdistan, Kosovo, and Serbia.

How about Bush's domestic repression? The Clinton/Reno anti- crime and
anti-terrorism bills instituted more than 50 new death penalties,
emaciated habeus corpus, militarized domestic policing, gutted posse
comitatus, legalized FBI and CIA domestic political spying, expanded the
drug war, and subsidized expansion of the prison/industrial complex. The
Clintonites sent in Delta Force to make sure the heads of anti-WTO
demonstrators were cracked in Seattle. The post 9-11 detention of
thousands without trial, any kind of hearing, or access to lawyers was
done under the statutory authority of Clinton's Anti-Terrorism and
Effective Death Penalty Act on 1996. The USA PATRIOT Act just expands
this repressive authority further, again with the votes of the majority
of Congressional Democrats.

Well, maybe the Democrats aren't as extreme about as Bush on domestic
economic policy? Here again there is a basic bipartisan consensus.
Carter initiated the neoliberal turn as the bipartisan consensus
switched from military Keynesianism to military neoliberalism. Though
neoliberalism is cloaked in the egalitarian sounding rhetoric of free
markets, the reality is state enforcement of greater inequality: welfare
for the corporate rich (investment incentives in theory) and hardship
for workers (to motivate higher productivity in theory).

Today's corporate scandals are a legacy of Clinton's financial
deregulation, media monopolization a legacy of his deregulatory
telecommunications act, the loss of 2 million jobs a legacy of NAFTA and
the other trade deals Clinton made that are sending US manufacturing and
backroom service jobs to cheap labor markets overseas. Bush's biggest
contribution to the neoliberal agenda has been his tax cuts for the
rich, which the Democrats enabled by declaring it a "victory" to pair
down their size somewhat.

This bipartisan consensus is forged by the corporate ruling class
through its media ownership and financing of publications, broadcasts,
think tanks, and its two political parties, Democratic and Republican.
To be sure, there are tactical differences within this consensus. No
doubt the ruling class is split about Bush. Many of them are worried
about the economic irrationality of the latest tax cuts, the
destabilizing consequences of throughout the Middle East and Europe of
the military occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, and Bush's pandering to
the domestically destabilizing social agenda of the Christian
fundamentalists. And this faction of the corporate rich will support a
Democratic version of the bipartisan consensus, the Slick Soft-Right of
a Clinton rather than the Crude Hard-Right of a Bush Jr.

But that is their fight, not ours!

Our fight is to get our alternatives into public debate in the 2004
election: -- cooperative security instead of the US as global occupation
force, -- renewable energy instead of oil imperialism, -- economic
security through national health care, guaranteed income above poverty,
jobs for all at living wages, fair trade, and progressive taxes instead
of the neoliberal regime of motivating the poor with hardships to work
harder and the rich with corporate welfare to invest, -- economic
production in an ecologically sustainable balance with nature instead of
endless growth through environmental marauding by the
military-industrial complex; -- repealing repressive laws to restore
civil liberties and dismantle the prison-industrial complex instead of
PATRIOT Acts and drug wars, -- a multi-party system founded on
proportional representation and public funding of public elections
instead of a state-sanctioned, corporate-financed two-party system with
two right wings.

Our fight is to get as many votes as we can for the Green Party
candidates for the Presidency, House, and Senate. The more votes we get,
the more seriously our alternatives will be taken by the public and the
more we will be able to further organize and mobilize around them.

One thing is certain. These alternatives will not be heard without a
Green campaign. We will not have the vehicle needed to organize people
around real alternatives. If the Left tails the lesser-evil Democrat
again, which has been the dominant strategy of what passes for a Left in
the US since most of it collapsed into the New Deal coalition in 1936,
the whole debate will shift further to the Right again.

Let us clear up some fantasies about Kucinich. The other candidates are
clearly pro-war, pro-corporate candidates. But Sharpton and Kucinich
sound progressive.

Sharpton, as we in NY know, is playing for patronage. That is what he
did with his senatorial and mayoral campaigns. He wants to be the black
political broker for patronage to the black political class. We know
from his history that he will more likely support a Republican to spite
Democrats who snub him than a Green. We should definitely keep the door
open to his supporters and even to Sharpton himself, but let us not be
na=EFve about what his objectives are in the Democratic presidential
primaries.

Kucinich sounds like Nader on his policy proposals. But he is not
running for president. He is running to build his national stature and
fund base to get ready to run for US Senate from Ohio. He will pull out
no later than Super Tuesday next March 2 in order to file in Ohio in
time to run for re-election to Congress in 2004.

But Kucinich is not like Nader in that he opposed independent politics
and the Green Party.

"I have no interest in a third party candidacy. None," says Kucinich. "I
want to do it the other way -- bring third party candidates into the
{Democratic] Party and get support in the primaries." -- Ruth Conniff,
"The Peace Candidate," The Progressive, April 2003

[Kucinich] recently told the Cleveland Plain Dealer: "The Democratic
Party created third parties by running to the middle. What I'm trying to
do is to go back to the big tent so that everyone who felt alienated
could come back through my candidacy." -- CounterPunch, April 2003

The second quote is particularly important to think about. He does not
say take the Democratic Party away from its corporate rulers. Rather he
wants to bring the wayward Greens into coalition with the Democratic
Party's corporate rulers in a "big tent." The whole point of the Greens
as an INDEPENDENT party is our independence from the corporate rulers.
We want to build a coalition of all of the popular constituencies that
are exploited and oppressed by the corporate rulers. That's a big enough
tent to win elections. But it's a different tent than the one Kucinich
wants to build.

Inside the Democratic Party, the Left enters into coalition as
subordinate partners with the very corporate rulers who are violently
committed to maintaining the system the Left presumably wants to
transform.

When the Left supports the Democrats, it commits suicide and disappears.
The Left surrenders its voice in the election to the Democrats, who will
then triangulate Right to cut into the Republican vote. The Left
surrenders its very identity as an alternative for a different world by
supporting a (hopefully) lesser evil administration of the status quo.

We cannot rely on the Slick Soft-Right Democrats to fight the Crude
Hard-Right Republicans. The Democrats haven't done it during the first
two and half years of the Bush administration. There is no good reason
to start relying on them now. The best defense against the Hard Right is
not defensive support for a Softer Right, but a strong offensive around
a real campaign for a progressive alternative.

The minute the Greens fail to mount a serious campaign (whether by
openly supporting a Democrat as the lesser evil or doing it backhandedly
by staging a "strategic" campaign of not competing in swing states) is
the minute the public will stop taking the Greens seriously. What little
leverage Kucinich and Sharpton may now have to push the debate to the
Left will vanish as the Democrats are then free to take votes to their
Left for granted.

Cynthia McKinney is the future of progressives in the Democratic Party.
She is the poster child for what Democrats do to their progressives.
When the Democratic Leadership Council and the AIPAC (American Israeli
Public Affairs Commission) targeted her for defeat because she had the
temerity to call for justice for Palestinians, the Democratic leadership
ran away from her, from Maynard Jackson, Andrew Young, and John Lewis in
her home town of Atlanta to Jesse Jackson Sr., Terry McAulliffe, and
Bill Clinton nationally. They let a Republican judge who supported
right-wing fundamentalist Alan Keyes in the 2000 Republican primaries
re- register as a Democrat and beat McKinney with Republican votes in
Georgia=92s open primary system.

The spoiler argument against a Green run for president is garbage. The
Democrats spoiled the election by, first of all, offering a phony
alternative to the Republicans. And then the Democrats spoiled their own
election by not fighting for what they had won in Florida. Contrary to
the Nader-Elected-Bush refrain of the Anybody-But-Bush Democrats, Nader
probably helped Gore beat Bush in the popular vote. Analysts as
different as Alexander Cockburn on the Left and Al From, chair of the
Democratic Leadership Council, on the Democratic Right, note that exit
polling data show that Gore did better with Nader in the race than he
would have without Nader. While From uses this data to preposterously
counsel Democrats to ignore their Left and run to the Right, Cockburn=92s
explanation is obviously more persuasive: Nader's campaign forced Gore
to articulate some populist, anti-corporate themes that brought many
disillusioned Democrats back into the fold. Without Nader in the race,
these Democrats would not have voted, and many of Nader=92s voters would
not have voted either.

A Green campaign in 2004 doesn't have to win the presidency to define
the debate, move it to the Left, and begin to undermine Bushism, which
is to say, the bipartisan policy consensus. Truman made his remarkable
comeback to beat Dewey by stealing Wallace's thunder and campaigning on
the Progressive Party=92s economic and social agenda. Perot's 19% in 1992
made budget balancers out of both corporate parties and set the course
for federal budget policies in the 1990s. To define the debate, the
Green campaign just has to be serious about getting every vote it can in
every state.

At the least, that kind of campaign makes the Greens a threat to "spoil"
the Democratic side the two-party charade and thus compels attention to
our campaign. Much better would be a double-digit vote percentage, which
could leverage some reforms during the next administration and lay the
foundation for further gains at all levels in future elections.

Nothing would be more dispiriting for progressives than a self-
defeating, defensive campaign for a pro-war, pro-corporate Democrat. And
nothing would be more inspiring than an all-out Green presidential
campaign for what we believe in. That kind of Green campaign could be a
rallying point for progressives and social movements and begin to turn
the tide against the pro-war, pro-corporate bipartisan consensus.