2004 ELECTION WATCH:

Green Party Makes Strides in Organization, Ballot Presence

David and Pat during the "A Green World Is Possible" event during protests against RNC.

Eight years ago, the Greens had organizations in only ten states. Today, the party claims about half a million members, with a formal presence in 44 states. The party has made rapid strides at the grassroots level, with 207 elected offices held by Green Party members--over five times more than in 1996. The highest US office held to date by Greens is in state legislatures in New Jersey, Maine and California.

The party has a national office in Washington, sustained by individual donations averaging $25, according to David Cobb, who was recently in Baltimore for an interview. "We're ordinary people trying to do something extraordinary." The Greens, he said, are seeking a "general systemic change" in government.

Cobb doesn't expect to win, but rather to use his candidacy "to grow and build the Green Party." "At the end of this campaign," he predicted, "we'll have more registered Greens, more skilled citizen-organizers, and a growing genuine social movement that's poised to challenge the entire social, political, and legal system of this country."

Cobb and LaMarche are running on a nine-point platform that calls for ending the US occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan; universal single-payer health care; a living wage; building schools instead of prisons; developing clean and sustainable energy sources; dismantling "the military-industrial complex"; switching to publicly-funded elections using proportional representation and instant run-off voting; ending the "War on Drugs," which the Greens view as "racist," and repealing the USA Patriot Act.

Cobb acknowledged that the Party is running against the odds. "We are excluded from debates and marginalized. I know if seems impossible, and it's not going to be easy, just like the anti-slavery and women's rights movements. But we're not going to succumb to cynicism. We're going to build support."

He believes the Greens can succeed in influencing US politics because its message appeals to disaffected citizens. "Most people don't vote," he points out. "They have deduced it doesn't matter. We're in a system right now that forces people to vote against what they hate, instead of for what they want." Tuned-out potential voters, once activated, could have a significant impact., Cobb believes.

Whether one votes or not, Cobb asserted, "We're all complicit in this society every day." The Green Party alternative, he believes, offers citizens an opportunity to voice their desire for a significantly different national agenda.

"The most dangerous threat is to acknowledge that we don't have a democracy," said Cobb, charging, "The media manufacture consent."

Asked to back up this assertion, he offered, as an example, that the media have fostered the impression that the great majority of the approximately 500,000 Green Party members are former Democrats. In fact, he said, many Greens are former Republicans, "and the biggest percentage [of Greens] are those who have never been involved in any party at all."

Because the Greens view "corporate media" as a major factor in retaining the status quo, they are also fostering the creation of what is being called "the media democratization movement," a growing citizen-backed effort to assure that independent citizen-based media voices are available to the public.

The Greens' environmental platform has particular urgency, Cobb said, because continuing unabated environmental degradation may lead to catastrophe. "If there's going to be a future [at all], it's going to be a Green one," he said. "We have to work toward environmental sustainability, in common with other countries."

Cobb calls himself a "nonviolent social justice revolutionary." The word "revolutionary" might seem scary to some, he acknowledged, but he pointed out that the US itself would not have come into being had it not been for revolutionaries. He stressed that being a revolutionary does not mean one is violent, or necessarily a communist or socialist; indeed, in his view, the US economic and political system is itself operating under a system of "corporate socialism." "The truth is that 'we the people' don't control our own government," he said.

Such a message is not one the "corporate media" wish to convey, he charged. To reach the public, the Green Party is getting out its message through word-of-mouth and the "noncorporate media."

The sort of nonviolent revolution the Greens envision will take time to evolve. "Systemic change has always followed a pattern," Cobb said. "You need ordinary citizens who converse regularly and organize, and then go to their elected representatives seeking change. They're always told 'you're naive' or 'you're dangerous,' and to 'go away.' Well, the groups before us didn't 'go away'--they created their own parties with their own agendas."

Achievements of such "third parties," he pointed out, have included, in the US, the abolition of slavery, women's suffrage, the establishment of the Social Security system and workers' compensation insurance, the Pure Food and Drug Act, and the abolition of child labor, among others.

"The establishment does not want change," he said. "The public has to push for it. And the courts are only as good at upholding our rights as the people are at hitting the streets demanding those rights."

Cobb sees "an ever-tightening fascism" in the US. Factors that are engendering this trend, in his view, include "the corporate media, the disempowering of the electoral system, the flawed campaign finance system, and a legal system that protects the property rights of the wealthy elite."

Cobb does not much like John Kerry ("he's a corporatist and a militarist who voted for [the invasions of] Afghanistan and Iraq and Nafta and No Child Left Behind and 'Three Strikes and Out,' and against universal health care"), but supports Kerry as opposed to George W. Bush, whom he characterizes as "the worst president in the history of the United States, and a genuine threat to the planet. He's declared 'war without end'."

"People deserve much better," Cobb concluded. "They need a future."

Cobb denied that the Greens' presidential ticket, and Ralph Nader's bid for the presidency as an Independent candidate, are "spoilers" in the 2004 election. "No," he insisted. "We're participating--and if we're spoiling something by participating, then maybe our 'democratic' voting system needs to change. The rest of the industrialized world uses proportional representation and instant run-off in their elections. It's simple and easy."

Such a system calls for many candidates to be on a ballot, representing multiple parties ("We need a multi-party system to reflect our pluralistic society," says Cobb). Instant runoff voting (IRV) asks the voter to rank candidates in order of preference. If no candidate gets more than half of the first-choice votes, the last-place candidate is removed for an instant runoff, and the ballots cast originally for the removed candidate are then counted for the second choice on each ballot, repeating the instant runoff process until someone gets over half. "Even the Utah Republican Party uses it for their primary," points out Cobb.