Norm Solomon on the Green Party’s Presidential Campaign

The 2004 Presidential Race: Green Dreams

The Green Party and the ’04 Presidential Campaign

The Green Party makes no secret that it is different and radical: a multi-decade effort to bring justice and fairness into politics and into every facet of society. Norm Solomon simply won’t admit that the Green Party is unique, growing in a new paradigm that the old decaying parties refuse to acknowledge — and missing out on this truth leads Solomon to make mistakes in his views about the Greens.

by Norman Solomon

Activists have plenty of good reasons to challenge the liberal Democratic Party operatives who focus on election strategy while routinely betraying progressive ideals. Unfortunately, the national Green Party now shows appreciable signs of the flip side — focusing on admirable ideals without plausible strategy. Running Ralph Nader for president is on the verge of becoming a kind of habitual crutch — used even when the effect is more damaging than helpful.

The Progress Report — Ralph Nader has run for president less often than Ronald Reagan, George Bush Sr., or Richard Nixon. So what? Is there a rule that says Nader is not allowed to run?

It’s impossible to know whether the vote margin between Bush and his Democratic challenger will be narrow or wide in November 2004. I’ve never heard a credible argument that a Nader campaign might help to defeat Bush next year. A Nader campaign might have no significant effect on Bush’s chances — or it could turn out to help Bush win. With so much at stake, do we really want to roll the dice this way?

The Progress Report — Who is this “we” that is rolling the dice? Each political party nominates a candidate for president. That’s their business. If you want to participate, join a party and be active.

We’re told that another Nader campaign will help to build the Green Party. But Nader’s prospects of coming near his nationwide 2000 vote total of 2.8 million are very slim; much more probable is that a 2004 campaign would win far fewer votes — hardly an indicator of, or contributor to, a growing national party.

The Progress Report — That is a reasonable point against nominating Nader, and Green Party members are taking it into consideration. Nader is not currently a Green Party member, and his selection as that party’s nominee for president is not at all certain.

It appears to me that the entire project of running a Green presidential candidate in 2004 is counter-productive. Some faithful will be energized, with a number of predictably uplifting “super rallies” along the way, but many past and potential Green voters are likely to consciously drift away. Such a campaign will generate much alienation and bitterness from natural constituencies. Ironically, the current Green party-building agenda looks like a scenario for actually damaging the party.

The Progress Report — How does Norm Solomon reach this conclusion? He does not say.

Green organizers often insist that another presidential run is necessary so that the party can energize itself and stay on the ballot in various states. But it would be much better to find other ways to retain ballot access while running stronger Green campaigns in selected local races. Overall, I don’t believe that a Green Party presidential campaign in 2004 will help build a viable political alternative from below.

Some activists contend that the Greens will maintain leverage over the Democratic Party by conveying a firm intention to run a presidential candidate. I think that’s basically an illusion. The prospect of a Green presidential campaign is having very little effect on the Democratic nomination contest, and there’s no reason to expect that to change. The Democrats are almost certain to nominate a “moderate” corporate flack (in which category Howard Dean should be included).

A few years ago, Nader and some others articulated the theory that throwing a scare into the Democrats would move them in a more progressive direction. That theory was disproved after November 2000. As a whole, congressional Democrats have not become more progressive since then.

The Progress Report — True, the Democrats have not indicated that they have learned much of anything from the 2000 or the 2002 elections. That is a rather telling point against the Democrats, not the Greens.

There has been a disturbing tendency among some Greens to conflate the Democratic and Republican parties. Yes, the agendas of the two major parties overlap. But they also diverge. And in some important respects, any of the Democratic presidential contenders would be clearly better than Bush (with the exception of Joseph Lieberman, whose nomination appears to be quite unlikely). For the left to be “above the fray” would be a big mistake. It should be a matter of great concern — not indifference or mild interest — as to whether the Bush gang returns to power for four more years.

I’m not suggesting that progressives mute their voices about issues. The imperative remains to keep speaking out and organizing. As Martin Luther King Jr. said on April 30, 1967: “When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, militarism and economic exploitation are incapable of being conquered.” The left should continue to denounce all destructive policies and proposals, whether being promoted by Republicans or Democrats.

At the same time, we should not gloss over the reality that the Bush team has neared some elements of fascism in its day-to-day operations — and forces inside the Bush administration would be well-positioned to move it even farther to the right after 2004. We don’t want to find out how fascistic a second term of George W. Bush’s presidency could become. The current dire circumstances should bring us up short and cause us to re-evaluate approaches to ’04. The left has a responsibility to contribute toward a broad coalition to defeat Bush next year.

The Progress Report — This talk about “right versus left” merely serves to divide people when they should be united. The old right-left distinction ceased to be meaningful long ago. As the Green Party of Ontario says, “Rather than Left-Right, the new axis can be described as a green-grey spectrum. Green values include decentralization, sustainability, community-control, and diversity, while grey values are centralization, unsustainable industrial processes, trans- national control, and monoculture.”

There are some Green Party proposals for a “safe states” strategy, with the party’s presidential nominee concentrating on states that seem sure to go for either Bush or the Democrat. But it’s not always clear whether a state is “safe” (for instance, how about California?). And the very act of a Green campaign focusing on some “safe states” might render a few of those states more susceptible to a Bush upset win. An additional factor is that presidential campaigns are largely nationwide.

In 2000, despite unfair exclusion from the debates and the vast majority of campaign news coverage, Nader did appear on national radio and TV to a significant extent. And of course, more than ever, the Internet is teeming with progressive websites, listservs and e-mail forwarding. It doesn’t seem very practical to run as a national candidate while effectively urging people in some states not to vote for you when they see your name on the ballot — even if the candidate is inclined toward such a strategy. And that’s a big “if.”

For all its talk of democratic accountability, the Green Party is hooked into the old-fashioned notion that a candidate, once nominated, decides how and where to campaign. It’s ironic that the party is likely to end up with a presidential candidate who will conduct the campaign exactly as he chooses, with no built-in post-nomination accountability to any constituency or group decision-making. Kind of sounds like the major parties in that respect; choose the candidate and the candidate does whatever he wants from that point forward.

The Progress Report — Whether Norm Solomon likes it or not, candidates’ campaigns are not mere puppets controlled by a centralized party.

We concur that the “safe states” strategy is a pack of nonsense — no political party should have to tie itself in knots just to be seen as nice by other political parties. Why should the Green Party cut down its own campaigns just to help the Democrats? Remember, please — the Democrats in New Mexico attempted to ban the Green Party. The Democrats in Maine attampted to ban the Green Party. You can’t get much less friendly than that. What national Democrats have deplored those attempts?

No doubt, too many Democratic Party officials have been arrogant toward Green Party supporters. “Democrats have to face reality and understand that if they move too far to the right, millions of voters will defect or vote for third-party candidates,” Tom Hayden pointed out in a recent article . “Democrats have to swallow hard and accept the right of the Green Party and Ralph Nader to exist and compete.” At the same time, Hayden added cogently, “Nader and the Greens need a reality check. The notion that the two major parties are somehow identical may be a rationale for building a third party, but it insults the intelligence of millions of blacks, Latinos, women, gays, environmentalists and trade unionists who can’t afford the indulgence of Republican rule.”

The Progress Report — Norm Solomon cannot have it both ways. Sometimes he indicates that the Green Party is a trivial band of naive idealists, but at other times he implies that it has terrific power to determine the outcome of the 2004 election. Let’s be consistent, shall we?

The presidency of George W. Bush is not a garden-variety Republican administration. By unleashing its policies in this country and elsewhere in the world, the Bush gang has greatly raised the stakes of the next election. The incumbent regime’s blend of extreme militarism and repressive domestic policy should cause the left to take responsibility for helping to oust this far-right administration — rather than deferring to dubious scenarios for Green party-building.

The Progress Report — Again with this left-right trap. Greens have said it a thousand times — the Green Party is neither left nor right, but out in front. Norm Solomon’s descriptions and criticisms are off the mark, because the Greens do not fit into his left-right paradigm. Greens have recognized the new paradigm where “grey versus green” makes sense, not “left versus right.” When Norm Solomon finally gets his hands around this concept (and he will), his remarks will be sharper and clearer.

In an August essay, Michael Albert of Z Magazine wrote: “One post election result we want is Bush retired. However bad his replacement may turn out, replacing Bush will improve the subsequent mood of the world and its prospects of survival. Bush represents not the whole ruling class and political elite, but a pretty small sector of it. That sector, however, is trying to reorder events so that the world is run as a U.S. empire, and so that social programs and relations that have been won over the past century in the U.S. are rolled back as well. What these parallel international and domestic aims have in common is to further enrich and empower the already super rich and super powerful.”

Albert pointed out some of the foreseeable consequences of another Bush term: “Seeking international Empire means war and more war — or at least violent coercion. Seeking domestic redistribution upward of wealth and power, most likely means assaulting the economy via cutbacks and deficits, and then entreating the public that the only way to restore functionality is to terminate government programs that serve sectors other than the rich, cutting health care, social services, education, etc.” And Albert added: “These twin scenarios will not be pursued so violently or aggressively by Democrats due to their historic constituency. More, the mere removal of Bush will mark a step toward their reversal.”

Looking past the election, Albert is also on target: “We want to have whatever administration is in power after Election Day saddled by a fired up movement of opposition that is not content with merely slowing Armageddon, but that instead seeks innovative and aggressive social gains. We want a post election movement to have more awareness, more hope, more infrastructure, and better organization by virtue of the approach it takes to the election process.”

I’m skeptical that the Green Party’s leadership is open to rigorously pursue a thoroughgoing safe-states approach along the lines that Albert has suggested in his essay . Few of the prominent Green organizers seem sufficiently flexible. For instance, one Green Party leader who advocates “a Strategic States Plan” for 2004 has gone only so far as to say that “most” of the party’s resources should be focused on states “where the Electoral College votes are not ‘in play.’” Generally the proposals coming from inside the Green Party seem equivocal, indicating that most party leaders are unwilling to really let go of traditional notions of running a national presidential campaign.

I’m a green. But these days, in the battle for the presidency, I’m not a Green.

The Progress Report — Sorry, Norm Solomon, you are not a green or a Green, because you insist on seeing Greens as just a bunch of forward-thinking sincere Democrats. You need to open up a new space in your mind where the Greens fit. It is not convenient nor easy to do this, but more and more Americans are doing it each day.

Here in the United States, the Green Party is dealing with an electoral structure that’s very different from the parliamentary systems that have provided fertile ground for Green parties in Europe. We’re up against the winner-take-all U.S. electoral system. Yes, there are efforts to implement “instant runoff voting,” but those efforts will not transform the electoral landscape in this decade. And we should focus on this decade precisely because it will lead the way to the next ones.

By now it’s an open secret that Ralph Nader is almost certain to run for president again next year. Nader has been a brilliant and inspirational progressive for several decades. I supported his presidential campaigns in 1996 and 2000. I won’t in 2004. The reasons are not about the past but about the future.

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Norman Solomon is co-author of “Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn’t Tell You.” For an excerpt and other information, go to: www.contextbooks.com/new.html#target

We are Hanno Beck, Lindy Davies, Fred Foldvary, Mike O'Mara, Jeff Smith, and assorted volunteers, all dedicated to bringing you the news and views that make a difference in our species struggle to win justice, prosperity, and eco-librium.

I think that Ralph Nader should run again. I mean there’s a chance that it might take away votes from the democratic party and give more to George Bush. But even the democrats have taken actions against the greens. Norm Solomon shouldn’t think of greens as naive, he is not a green, so he should just accept the greens as not being just another democratic party but a party of their own.

Solomon is right. We can’t afford a Bush victory in 2004. There is a time for plurality, and there is a time for concensus. If Bush wins the next election, all HELL is liable to break loose before 2008. It is imperative that we (and here Fred, I am referring to moderates, liberals, and progressives alike) temporarily abandon our differences, and unite to GET BUSH OUT OF POWER.

If we don’t, we and the whole rest of the world are in for big trouble. The leaders of the Green Party know this, or at least they should know it. I don’t see how they can in good conscience run a candidate in competition with Bush’s opposition, no matter how unsatisfactory that opposition might be.

The Greens are long on ideals, and short on strategy. Good strategy for them at this point, would be to endorse wholeheartedly the Democrats’ Kucinich; to publicly avail Kucinich of all the Greens’ considerable resources of PR and enthusiasm. To make a Kucinich nomination the condition for Green support of the Democrats. This would put both Kucinich AND the Greens in the media spotlight, which is exactly where they both need to be. Also, it would exert considerable pressure on the Democratic nominating process.

Then, even if Kucinich loses the nomination to Dean or Kerry (which he probably would), a broad and ideologically cogent coalition will have been formed. And the Greens would still be free to, at the last moment, urge their supporters to vote for WHOEVER is opposing George Bush.

I like your call for unity and consensus. You remark that the Greens don’t seem to be very interested in that, but my question is, are the Democrats? The Democrats have a much larger political party, and so far, there has been no “unity” talk emanating from them to the Greens — instead there has been continued scolding, threats, inaction on issues such as instant runoff voting, and — worst of all — attempts to ban the Green Party outright.

Dennis Kucinich is the best member of Congress and the best of the announced Democratic candidates for president. It would be very reasonable for Green Party members to support his campaign, except for one thing. The Green Party is a political party, not a pressure group. Can you name some occasions when the Democratic Party officially endorsed a non-Democrat? Or when the Republican Party officially endorsed a non-Republican? Each of those parties has had more than 100 years to set such precedents. But, whether we like it or not, the business of a political party is to promote its own candidates. If the Green Party has the right to exist at all, then it has the right to nominate a Green for president. More than a right, in fact — an obligation, to its own members and to the future of the world.

If the Democrats want a different arrangement, they’d better change their behavior and sit down at the bargaining table. But I don’t expect that.

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Arts & Letters

Geonomics is …

a POV that Spain’s president might try. A few blocks from my room in Madrid at a book fair to promote literacy, Sr Zapatero, while giving autographs and high fives to kids, said books are very expensive and he’d see about getting the value added tax on them cut down to zero. (El Pais, June 4; see, politicians can grasp geo-logic.) But why do we raise the cost of any useful product? Why not tax useless products? Even more basic: is being better than a costly tax good enough? Our favorite replacement for any tax is no tax: instead, run government like a business and charge full market value for the permits it issues, such as everything from corporate charters to emission allowances to resource leases. These pieces of paper are immensely valuable, yet now our steward, the state, gives them away for nearly free, absolutely free in some cases. Government is sitting on its own assets and needs merely to cash in by doing what any rational entity in the economy does – negotiate the best deal. Then with this profit, rather than fund more waste, pay the stakeholders, we citizenry, a dividend. Thereby geonomics gets rid of two huge problems. It replaces taxes with full-value fees and replaces subsidies for special interests with a Citizens Dividend for people in general. Neither left nor right, this reform is what both nature lovers and liberty lovers need to promote, right now.

shaped by reality. In the 1980′s, the Swedish government doubled its stock transfer tax. Tax receipts, however, rose only 15%, since traders simply fled to London exchanges. Fearing a further exodus, the Swedish government quickly rescinded the tax altogether. (The New York Times, April 20) That willingness to tax anything leads us astray. Pushing us astray is that unwillingness to pay what we owe: rent for land, our common heritage. Assuming land value is up for grabs, we speculate. We cap the property tax on both land and buildings and the rate at which assessments can go up; while real market values rise quicker, assessments can never catch up. Our stewards, the Bureau of Land Management, routinely sell and lease sites below market value, often to insiders, says the Government Accounting Office. Once we grasp that rent is ours to share, we’ll collect it all, rather than let it enrich a few, and quit taxing earnings, which do belong to the individual earner. That shift is geonomic policy.

the study of the money we spend on the nature we use. When we pay that money to private owners, we reward both speculation and over-extraction. Robert Kiyosaki’s bestseller, Rich Dad’s Prophecy, says, “One of the reasons McDonald’s is such a rich company is not because it sells a lot of burgers but because it owns the land at some of the best intersections in the world. The main reason Kim and I invest in such properties is to own the land at the corner of the intersection. (p 200) My real estate advisor states that the rich either made their money in real estate or hold their money in real estate.” (p 141, via Greg Young) When government recovers the rents for natural advantages for everyone, it can save citizens millions. Ben Sevack, Montreal steel manufacturer, tells us (August 12) that Alberta, by leasing oil & gas fields, recovers enough revenue to be the only province in Canada to get by without a sales tax and to levy a flat provincial income tax. While running for re-election, provincial Premier Ralph Klein proposes to abolish their income tax and promises to eliminate medical insurance premiums and use resource revenue to pay for all medical expense for seniors. After all this planned tax-cutting and greater expense, they still expect a large budget surplus. Even places without oil and gas have high site values in their downtowns, and high values in their utility franchises. Recover the values of locations and privileges, displace the harmful taxes on sales, salaries, and structures, then use the revenue to fund basic government and pay residents a dividend, and you have geonomics in action.

close to the policy of the Garden Cities in England. Founded by Ebenezer Howard over a century ago, residents own the land in common and run the town as a business. Letchworth, the oldest of the model towns, serves residents grandly from bucketfuls of collected land rent (as does the Canadian Province of Alberta from oil royalty). A geonomic town would pay the rent to residents, letting them freely choose personalized services, and also ax taxes. Both geonomics and Howard were inspired by American proto-geonomist Henry George. The movement launched by Howard today in the UK advances the shift of taxes from buildings to locations. A recent report from the Town and Country Planning Association proposes this Property Tax Shift and their journal published research in the potential of land value taxation by Tony Vickers (Vol. 69, Part 5, 2000). (Thanks to James Robertson)

a new field of study offered in place of economics, as astronomy replaced astrology and chemistry replaced alchemy. Conventional economics, in which GNP can do well while people suffer, is a bit too superstitious for my renaissance upbringing. If I’m to propitiate unseen forces, it won’t be inflation or “the market”; let it be theEgyptian cat goddess. At least then we’d have fewer rats. Meanwhile, believing in reason leads to a new policy, also christened geonomics. That’s the proposal to share (a kind of management, the “nomics” part) the worth of Mother Earth (the “geo” part). If our economies are to work right, people need to see prices that tell the truth. Now taxes and subsidies distort prices, tricking people into squandering the planet. Using land dues and rent dividends instead lets prices be precise, guiding people to get more from less and thereby shrink their workweek. More free time ought to make us happy enough to evolve beyond economics, except when nostalgic for superstition.

of interest to Dave Lakhani, President Bold Approach (Mar 8) and Matt Ozga (Jan 29): “I write for the Washington Square News, the student run newspaper out of New York University. Geonomics seems like it has great significance, especially in this area. When was geonomics developed, and by whom?”
About 1982 I began. Two years later, Chilean Dr Manfred Max-Neef offered the term geonomics for Earth-friendly economics. In the mid-80s, a millionaire founded a Geonomics Institute on Middlebury College campus in Vermont re global trade. In the 1990s, CNBC cablecast a show, Geonomics, on world trade as it benefits world traders. My version of geonomics draws heavily from the American Henry George who wrote Progress & Poverty (1879) and won the mayoralty of New York but was denied his victory by Tammany Hall (1886). He in turn got lots from Brits David Ricardo, Adam Smith, and the French physiocrats of the 1700s. My version differs by focusing not on taxation but on the flow of rents for sites, resources, sinks, and government-granted privileges. Forgoing these trillions, we instead tax and subsidize, making waste cheap and sustainability expensive. To quit distorting price, replace taxes with “land dues” and replace subsidies with a Citizens Dividend.
Matt: “This idea of sharing rents sounds, if not explicitly socialist, at least at odds with some capitalist values (only the strong survive & prosper, etc). Is it fair to say that geonomics has some basis in socialist theory?”
A closer descriptor would be Christian. Beyond ethics into praxis, Alaska shares oil rent with residents, and they’re more libertarian than socialist. While individuals provide labor and capital, no one provides land while society generates its value. Rent is not private property but public property. Sharing Rent is predistribution, sharing it before an elite or state has a chance to get and misspend it, like a public REIT (Real Estate Investment Trust) paying dividends to its stakeholders – a perfectly capitalist model. What we should leave untaxed are our sales, salaries, and structures, things we do produce.

more transformation than reform; it’s a step ahead. Harvard economics students this year did petition to change the curriculum, in the wake of the English who caught the dissension from across The Channel. French reformers, who fault conventional economics for conjuring mathematical models of little empirical relevance and being closed to critical and reflective thought, reject this “autism” – or detachment from reality – and dub their offering “post-autistic economics”. Not a bad name, but again, academics define themselves by what they’re not, not by what they are, unlike geonomists. We track rent – the money we spend on the nature we use – and watch it pull all the other economic indicators in its wake. We see economies as part and parcel of the ecosystem, similarly following natural patterns and able to self-regulate more so than allowed, once we quit distorting prices. To align people and planet, we’d replace taxes and subsidies with recovering and sharing rents.

an economic policy based on the earth’s natural patterns. Eco-systems self-regulate by using feedback loops to keep balance. Can economies do likewise? Why don’t they now produce efficiently and distribute fairly? The answers lie in the money we spend on the earth we use. To attain people/planet harmony, that financial flow from sites and resources must visit each of us. Our agent, government, must collect this natural rent via fees and disburse the collected revenue via dividends. And, it must forgo taxes on homes and earnings, and quit subsidies of either the needy or the greedy. As our steward, government must also collect Ecology Security Deposits, require Restoration Insurance, and auction off the occasional Emissions Permit. And that’s about it – were nature our model.

a manual. The world did not come without a way for people to prosper, and the planet to heal and stay well; that way is geonomics. Economies are part of the ecosystem. Both generate surpluses and follow self-regulating feedback loops. A cycle like the Law of Supply and Demand is one of the economy’s on/off loops. Our spending for land and resources – things that nobody made and everybody needs – constitutes our society’s surplus. Those profits without production (remember, nobody produced Earth) can become our commonwealth. To share it, we could pay land dues in to the public treasury (wouldn’t oil companies love that?) and get rent dividends back, a la Alaska’s oil dividend. Doing so let’s us axe taxes and jettison subsidies. Taxes and subsidies distort price (the DNA of exchange), violate quid pro quo by benefiting the well-connected more than anyone else, reinforce hierarchy of state over citizen, and are costly to administer (you don’t really need so much bureaucracy, do you?). Conversely, land dues motivate people to not waste sites, resources, and the ecosystem while rent dividends motivate people to not waste themselves. Receiving this income supplement – a Citizens Dividend – people can invest in their favorite technology or outgrow being “economan” and shrink their overbearing workweek in order to enjoy more time with family, friends, community, and nature. Then in all that free time, maybe we could figure out just what we are here for.

a discipline that, compared to economics, is as obscure as Warren Buffett’s investment strategy, compared to conventional investment theory, about which Buffett said, “You couldn’t advance in a finance department in this country unless you taught that the world was flat.” (The New York Times, Oct 29). The writer wondered, “But why? If it works, why don’t more investors use it?”
Good question. Geonomics works, too. Every place that has used it has prospered while conserving resources. Yet it remains off the radar of many wanna-be reformers. Gradually, tho’, that’s changing. More are becoming aware of what geonomics studies – all the money we spend on the nature we use. Geonomics (1) as an alternative worldview to the anthropocentric, sees human economies as part of the embracing ecosystem with natural feedback loops seeking balance in both systems. (2) As an alternative to worker vs. investor, it sees our need for sites and resources making those who own land into landlords. (3)As an alternative to economics, it tracks the trillions of “rent” as it drives the “housing” bubble and all other indicators. And (4) as an alternative to left or right, it suggests we not tax ourselves then subsidize our favorites but recover and share society’s surplus, paying in land dues and getting back “rent” dividends, a la Alaska’s oil dividend. Letting rent go to the wrong pockets wreaks havoc, while redirecting it to everyone would solve our economic ills and the ills downstream from them.
People must learn to stop whining so much and feel enough self-esteem to demand a fair share of rent, society’s surplus, the commonwealth.