From counterpunch.com. Jeffrey St Clair discusses how bad Trump will be judging from his cabinet picks. People like me who hoped that he would be less of a threat to the world than Clinton may have been horribly, horribly wrong.
Well, I didn't vote for Trump. I voted for Jill Stein. About her, St Clair writes:
What in the world is Jill Stein up to? She is trying to raise more [than] $2 million for recounts in WI, Michigan & Penn, recounts that presumably aren’t about getting a bigger vote total for the Green Party, but trying to find “lost” votes for HRC. If HRC isn’t willing to stand up for her own voters (assuming there are lost votes) why the hell should the Greens? What’s the goal? To be able to say: “I didn’t cost Hillary the election, I tried to win it for her?”
This smells of Stein’s campaign manager David Cobb to me, who in 2004 really wanted the Greens to run a stealth campaign so as not to be tarnished by reelection of Bush. (Indeed, the Wisconsin recount has nothing to do with the Green Party itself. The executive committee voted 5-3 to reject Stein and Cobb’s request that they sponsor the recounts.) Shortly after the 2004, elections Cobb spear-headed an audit of the returns from Ohio, the state that sank John Kerry. Many of the Greens are simply disaffect liberals, who really want to be teleported back to the Democratic Party of the 70s and 80s.
Nearly 100 million eligible voters didn’t vote. Stein would be better served spending some of the $2 million turning them Green, organizing their own party, providing legal support for Standing Rock protesters, investing it in the Powerball lottery or almost anything other than auditing the vote for Hillary. But if, as with Sanders, Stein uses that $2 million (or even $200,000 or $20,000 or $2000 or $200) to help the candidate she rightly assailed as a threat to peace, the environment and working people during the campaign, then Stein will have defrauded the very people who supported her.
The end result, even if successful in revealing some hijinks in the voting machines, as in Ohio 2004, will be to make more “legitimate” the very electoral process that kept the Green Party off the ballot in many states and locked it out of the debates. I don’t see that as any kind of win for independent parties. It will only serve to improve and restore confidence in the two-party system that crushes every aspiration of the Green Party’s own members.
If Stein/Cobb recount initiative is really about preserving integrity of the democratic process, why only investigate states HRC narrowly lost and not the ones–NH, MN–she narrowly won?
No comments:
Post a Comment