UPDATE, 12:15 a.m., 9/6/12:  The Green Party presidential ticket of Jill Stein and Cheri Honkala will be on “Moyers & Company” this weekend. Follow this link for the production company’s preview of the segment. 

Original post:

Now here’s a political spot the American electorate deserves to see:

Google initially refused to run it but relented (what with censoring political speech being illegal and all). Here’s more from the Stein campaign:

You can see all four of our ads, beginning with “Enough!” and then continuing with three distinct versions of “What Green Means” by clicking here. But we still need your support to keep them on the air.

The timing is vital. The primary season ends this Thursday, September 6th. This means that you only have until this Thursday to get your contributions matched, dollar for dollar, up to $250, with federal matching funds. And this means that you only have until September 6th to donate the maximum allowable contribution of $2500.

Time is running short for another reason. Federal law requires that our matching funds monies be used in the primaries, by Thursday, and this means that we must pay for our cable and TV ads right now.

We’ve raised $40,000 for these ads. If we succeed in raising another $40,000 (for a total of $80K) by Thursday, our ads will run in college town media markets from the Pacific to the Mississippi to the Atlantic. If we raise another $80,000 (for a total of $120K), we’ll have viewership in medium sized cities of population 500,000 to 2 million. And if you help us raise another $160,000, we’ll be on in at least a couple major metropolitan areas. The more money we raise, the higher chance that YOUR community will see one of these ads.

To date, Jill Stein, Rocky Anderson, and 43 other candidates in 21 states – running for offices ranging from United States President to Monroe County, Florida District 1 Mosquito Control Officer - have endorsed the Unified Platform, an amalgam of the work of two legacy and four current Progressive organizations.

A note to the reader:

Though she calls it her “Labor Day Message,” Jill Stein might just as well have titled the below, “How the Democratic Party Killed the American Labor Movement.” All who push the (patently false) “fact” that workers benefit from supporting these corporate colluders should pay particular attention to the second set of bullets. It details the selling out of Labor by every Democratic administration since Truman – despite majorities in both houses of Congress.  (A PDF version of Stein’s message is available here.)

-agn 

Many here at the Lake went a little (more) crazy when 350.org founder and much-admired climate expert Bill McKibben folded on Keystone XL’s Tar Sands pipeline.

After staging a memorable protest outside the White House last fall, McKibben went inside – and has since loudly applauded Barack Obama’s “threats” to veto any legislation that included the approval of the pipeline’s construction, and his rejection this spring of Keystone’s permit for the cross-border section of the oil-queduct.

McKibben has cheered these developments though the only real question is which happens first: Romney’s concession speech or Obama’s approval of Keystone’s re-application to connect the pipeline at the U.S.-Canada line.

A far pithier poser: Is McKibben – whose organization is (for the moment) an ally of the New Progressive Alliance – so new to activism that he’ll believe whatever a Democrat In A Suit tells him? Or has he cashed in his activist chips for a cushy job working for Democrats In Suits?

I hate to call McKibben out publicly… okay, no I don’t.

I tried keeping it private with Cornel West. Didn’t work.

An erstwhile member of the NPA steering committee, West’s comment earlier this year that there are no realistic alternatives to the major parties was more bullshit than I could take. I told him so in an email, and suggested that if he was unwilling to even acknowledge the existence of Jill Stein and Rocky Anderson, he might not be a good fit with the NPA.

West replied with an obtuse reference to perhaps having Stein and/or Anderson on his radio show, righteous upset at my “threatening” tone, and a request that he be removed from the steering committee.

Subsequent emails between us have resulted in nothing more concrete than a pep talk (“Keep up the great work, Brother Anthony Noel”) and scrupulous avoidance of my earnest inquiry as to whether the good doctor is planning to put his money where his mouth has been for lo, these past three years.

So, until we know for sure that Dr. West really wants to create electoral alternatives and agrees that putting off doing it for one more election – because, it is, after all, the most important of our lives! (just like all the others…) – only deepens the crisis, he is listed thus on our steering committee page: Dr. Cornel West

Alas, this tale, and, I fear, Mr. McKibben’s, are object lessons in how highly effective, loudmouthed activists – people who could foment and lead movements which forever banish self-interest and greed from the equation that dictates policymaking – routinely fold up their podiums and head for the hills at the critical moment: Election time.

I’d planned to contact McKibben privately as well, to ask what the hell he’s thinking. Until, that is, I heard him shilling today on Sirius XM Left. (Even for a stalwart hockey fan like me, six weeks of listening to the reactions of the Los Angeles Kings play-by-play guy to the team’s finally winning the Stanley Cup over on XM 92 is about five weeks too many.)

Leveraging this 6,000-plus word article in Rolling Stone, McKibben is promoting 350’s consciousness-raising tour with Naomi Klein. It begins – wait for it – November 7. The day AFTER we (again) elect a greed-enabling corporatist, rather than a people-supporting activist. Regardless which party wins.

And that’s when it (finally) dawned on me: Publicly ambushing say-one-thing-do-another “progressives” is no more unfair to them than what they do to those who have supported them, when they publicly renege on the stated beliefs that garnered them or their organizations our moral – and more tangible – $upport.

(And let me just add, Ms. Klein: You are fast becoming a former heroine of mine, particularly since you hail from Canada and know what’s possible. Think about what you are doing, for chrissakes. Hunter S. Thompson is spinning in his grave.)

Though it surprised me, considering both the network and the show (Ed Schultz), stand-in host Mike Papantonio did a nice job of pressing McKibben, who attempted to push the (bullshit) line that blame for our still-deepening allegiance to fossil fuels has nothing to do with politicians and everything to do with the oil companies themselves.

Papantonio asked McKibben (paraphrasing from memory, here): “If I wanted to figure out who has been responsible for the continued power of the oil companies, who would I go looking for?”

McKibben: “That becomes about vengeance, and that’s really not going to solve the core problem.”

Papantonio: “But surely there are particular lobbyists who have pushed the lie about how we are not even close to climate crisis…”

McKibben: “If you want to use names, use the logos of any of the big fossil fuel companies.”

Translation: It’s not Obama’s fault, nor the lobbyists. The president didn’t have the votes in Congress anyway. (Indeed, McKibben at one point said as much.)

If it isn’t sufficiently telling that McKibben has chosen to delay his tour until the day after the election, ask yourself this: Why would a self-described climate activist not use an election, held at a time that record numbers of Americans are self-identifying as Independents, to help point voters away from the Big-Oil-bought-and-sold “leaders” who have already signaled their intention to perpetuate the climate mess?

I wrote to Dr. West, “You could be America’s Tommy Douglas.”

The same goes for you, Mr. McKibben. And like Dr. West, you have a decision to make.

350.org has done some great work, but you are putting it all at risk by kowtowing to this – or any corporate-owned – White House.

And we think you know it.

Thirty-five candidates running for everything from school board to the presidency have followed the lead of 350.org and the NPA’s other allies in endorsing the Unified Platform.

Why would you turn your back on them, Bill?

Unless, of course, you’re okay with 350 becoming another MoveOn, or PCCC, or PDA, glad handing Democrats In Suits and taking their money, despite mounting proof that they are not friends – of you or the planet.

Anthony Noel is a facilitator of the New Progressive Alliance.

He was embraced by Italians as a change agent, much as Barack Obama was here in the U.S.

Appointed to replace maximally corrupt, ethically clueless, egotistically overwrought, picture-of-him-in-the-dictionary-next-to-the-word-“elitist” Silvio Berlusconi, Mario Monti surely seemed like a knight in shining armor: Here was a respected economist calling for reforms including higher tax rates and strong efforts to combat tax evasion.

Upon becoming prime minister, he even gave up his own salary.

But Monti also proposed pension reform and, backed by his technocrat cabinet – no member of which had ever been elected to public office – advocated “austerity” measures including the weakening or outright repeal of key labor laws. One ensured high levels of competency for cab drivers, pharmacists, doctors and lawyers. Monti’s reform, which was overwhelming approved by parliament, made it easier for less qualified people to attain licenses in these professions. It was done in the name of “increasing competition.”

Another reform targeted a longstanding law requiring employers to re-hire workers found to have been fired without cause.

Seems reasonable, right? If a company can’t say why someone is being let go, that person shouldn’t lose their job. Days ago, despite widespread worker and labor union opposition, Monti pushed the reform through, albeit a somewhat weakened version.

He argued that allowing companies to lay workers off more easily would open the door to more long-term work contracts.

(Individual workers negotiate contracts with their employers in Italy. Since the global financial crisis hit, companies have drastically cut hiring, and in the rare cases when a worker is added, market uncertainty coupled with the requirement to give cause when laying a worker off has led firms to commit to the shortest contracts possible. Still, Monti’s reasoning – that abolishment of the fire-for-cause requirement will somehow encourage employers to hire long term – is suspect at best, and makes contracts worth less than the paper on which they are printed at worst.)

Another Nude Emperor

You may have a hard time finding it in the mainstream American media (seeing as it’s duty-bound to continue tripping over itself in trying to convince us that our upcoming presidential erections elections have any bearing on national policy) but this weekend is shaping up as a big one for the future of – well, the world as we know it.

Photo: Maged Helal / Flickr

Yesterday, Egypt’s Supreme Constitutional Court, which is packed with military leaders from the ousted Mubarak regime (you know, those nice men who only stopped cracking heads in Tahrir Square when the U.S. finally agreed Mubarak had to go) set the stage for a GENUINE (as opposed to Facebook/Twitter) revolution in that country. It ruled Mubarak lackey former prime minister Ahmed Shafiq could stand for president in this weekend’s runoff election.

The “court” so ruled despite a law forbidding members of the deposed government from seeking office for 10 years, a thorny little chunk of reality neatly circumvented when the (surprise! Mubarak-era) “judges” also decreed Egypt’s first freely elected parliament in decades, seated in January, be dissolved.

In case all that wasn’t enough to scare the bejesus out of Egyptians who fought so doggedly last year to rid the country of Mubarak and his cronies, the court’s rulings were accompanied by another ominous announcement. The ruling (supposedly interim) Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (sure sounds like a peace-loving, for-the-good-of-all-Egyptians kinda org to me, how about you??) says it will now oversee the drafting of the country’s new constitution.

Oh, and this: One day before its rulings annulling Parliament and boosting Shafiq toward the presidency, the court ruled Egyptian citizens could be indefinitely detained at Guantanamo by the Egyptian army.

Al Jazeera’s Evan Hill reported the sequence of events “immediately raised fears of a thinly veiled military takeover.”

Ya think?

How stupid do our DoD, Joint Chiefs, State Department, and Commander in Chief think we – let alone Egyptian citizens – are? Call me a conspiracy theorist, radical, paranoid, whatever. But if you actually have doubts of America’s involvement here, ask yourself which, in each of the following two-part scenarios, seems more plausible, based on what we know about how our government operates:

Our local political group features little wrangling, so unified are we against the big, dumb, gold ol’ boys who for years have been destroying our downtown.

They’ve done it (mostly unwittingly – and that’s the scary thing) by loading up the Planning and Zoning Commission with developers and their lackeys (real estate agents, construction contractors, etc.).

If you’re feeling like you’ve missed something – like this diary starts in the middle, somehow – forgive me. When one lives this kinda shit day in and day out, one tends to begin with ranting and add context as one goes.

The context here is not so much frustration with the good ol’ boys (bless their pointed little heads) as disbelief when a member of “our side” seems to justify their arguments for growth…

(Eeeeesh, I really have dug myself a contextual hole here. Back up, Tony.)

So, our little group devised a strategy for winning businesses over to the notion that growth for growth’s sake in our town is not good. Called “the business memo,” it’s a flyer citing (with footnotes) the unsustainability of unbridled growth, when the cheap (once farm)land on the edges of town is sold to commercial developers, who in turn build WalMarts, Targets, frozen yogurt shops, etc. We take the flyer to businesses we patronize and talk to the owners.

The response has been wonderful; increasing numbers of local merchants are seeing that adding automobile trips to an already overburdened road system is not as likely to get more customers into their stores as it is to discourage people from “going out” at all. And they already knew that big box stores – offering only part-time jobs (to dodge paying overtime or providing benefits) – are not the “job creators” the good ol’ boys paint them to be.

So imagine my surprise when one of our group began sounding like a good ol’ boy herself.

I’d floated the notion of “steady state” economies, and she (tried to) really let me have it: “We need to promote growth lest we be slammed as anti-growth by our opponents! It’s all about the way we are perceived, the facts are secondary!”

Her rationale was just soooo… well, Democratic Party.

So now I’m sending her this book.

In case you haven’t noticed, the realization is spreading that a return to self-contained, regional economies is inevitable. Heinberg’s book explains why – and why, as this occurs, we will become healthier, happier, more engaged people.

You can hear Heinberg speaking about his book here.

His thinking is also summarized in the video below, produced by the Post Carbon Institute, where Heinberg is Senior Fellow:

Anthony Noel is a facilitator of the New Progressive Alliance.

It had such a bright future.

It enjoyed luminous media coverage, from such equally luminous visionaries (or is it visionless luminaries?) as Tom Friedman, and news organizations like Nice Polite Republicans (NPR).

But in the end, Americans Elect – the supposed online “movement” toward a centrist third party – became exactly what it deserved to become, and, I contend, what its founders always meant for it to become: Dead.

Maybe it’s because the Democrats readily fill the need for a centrist party.

Maybe it’s because Nutty McNutt nuts like Ron Paul and Buddy Roemer were among those drawing most of what precious little interest AE’s “nominating process” was attracting.

Or maybe it’s because the shady organization refused to reveal its funders.

Of course, AE mentions none of this in its online death notice:

“Americans Elect, from the outset, has been a rules-based process…”

Yeah – so rules-based, the founders made damn sure it was set up to legally avoid fiscal disclosure.

As the autopsies roll in, what I find most striking is what’s not being said: That it is entirely possible – nay, likely – that AE was never intended by its founders as anything but Internet-enabled veal-penning.

Think about it. If you’re a one-percenter – say, a junk-bond financier bent on protecting your liveilhood, like AE founder Peter Ackerman – what better way to maintain the status quo than to get a few friends together and pitch $35 million into a carefully orchestrated strategy for doing so? In the grand scheme of things, isn’t that a small small price to pay in ensuring the happy continuance of politics as usual? Sure it is.

And guess what?

It worked.

Despite its claims that participation in its online “nominating process” never reached the thresholds AE established, the organization claims about 4 million Americans chimed in on their Web site in one way or another since its founding. Even if this number is inflated – and given this “rules-based” organization’s aversion to disclosure, it likely is – it was worth their funders’ investment.

AE’s “failure” after all, has surely convinced many who visited the site a year ago, at the height of its hype – brimming with enthusiasm and that four-letter word (hope) – that resistance to the corporate parties is just plain futile, darn it all!

How sad is that, in terms of Americans’ political intelligence?

Those who believed AE would even put forth a candidate in the first place apparently never considered that people with $35 million to pour into such a dog-and-pony show could also afford research and surveys. Research and surveys which were crucial in ensuring the organization set a participation threshold that could not be met – even if we leap off the cliff and believe the numbers AE reported were real.

So, where does AE go from here?

Who the hell cares?

What matters is whether the carp who took their bait have learned from the experience.

Learned what? you might ask.

It’s simple, really: The last thing America needs is more centrism. We are already, and quite literally, too centrist for our people’s own good.

As the Occupy movement shows, Americans are responding in greater and greater numbers to the plight of real people – a plight created almost entirely by venture capitalists and financial industry types like those who set up AE.

The notion that an electoral effort – let alone a self-described “centrist” one – created by the vulture class would have any positive impact for working people at all was laughable when AE’s media onslaught first hit.

It is – but for the early AE enthusiasts who are now even more hopeless about creating an alternative to our corporate UniParty – all the more laughable now.

The model we need to follow is easy enough to find: Canada’s NDP has shown us the way.

Yes, it’s a huge mountain to climb, and that runs strongly counter to our immediate-gratification mindset.

But if we refuse to follow the trail the NDP has blazed, we have only ourselves to blame.

Anthony Noel is facilitator of the New Progressive Alliance.