WHY RUN?

The following is an interview with Michael Albert editor of Z Magazine and David Cobb of the US Green Party. For more from Z go here.

ALBERT: David, you are running as a Green for president of the U.S. Why run for that office at any time? Why do it now? Why run as a Green Party candidate?

COBB: If you want systemic change and all you do is vote, you are wasting your time. If you want systemic change and you fail to vote for candidates calling for change, you are wasting an opportunity. If you want systemic change and you vote for candidates opposed to change, you are working against your own goals.

Positive systemic change requires both a social movement advancing a progressive agenda and a political party running candidates on that agenda. Readers of Z Magazine are aware of and actively participate in the growing movements for peace, racial and social justice, real democracy, and ecological protection. The Green Party is poised to serve as the electoral arm for these movements.

There must be a political party running a presidential candidate opposing the invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, calling to end our addiction to fossils fuels (which is driving these wars and global climate change), and demanding clean, safe, renewable, energy.
The movement needs a party that will demand universal single-payer health care and a living wage for all, call to end the racist war on drugs and to repeal the so-called Patriot Act, and demand that we build schools instead of prisons. The Green Party is the only party running candidates on this agenda.
The Cobb-LaMarche Green Party campaign is running to provide the voters with a genuine alternative, to help strengthen the social movement, and to grow the Green Party. We’re running to support local Green Party candidates, to elect more Greens, and to register more Green voters. We’re running to qualify for and to maintain as many state ballot lines as possible.

There is considerable debate about the impact of third candidates on the choice between Democrats and Republicans. What are your views on that issue and on its implications for campaign strategy?

Let us agree that votes cannot be “stolen.” Candidates must earn votes. What some call “spoiling,” Greens call participating. We will continue to exercise our fundamental right to participate in elections.
Our campaign recognizes that the progressive community is deeply concerned about the prospects of four more years of the Bush administration. We also recognize that John Kerry is a corporatist and a militarist who has supported the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Patriot Act, and NAFTA, who also supports the corporate globalization agenda. He has opposed single-payer universal health care and a living wage and he voted for “No Child Left Behind.” Only by comparison to Bush does Kerry look even marginally acceptable.

We need genuine electoral reforms such as Instant Runoff Voting and Proportional Representation so that people can vote their hopes and not their fears. Instant Runoff Voting allows voters to rank candidates in order of preference and ensures that the winning candidate earns a majority of votes. The last three presidential elections in a row were won with less than a majority of the popular vote.
We don’t have a problem with too many candidates running for office. The rest of the industrialized world uses majority-rule voting systems while we labor under an antiquated, anti-democratic electoral system which can’t accom- modate more than two candidates.
Free and fair elections should be about having the freedom to choose, but most people don’t feel as though they have a real choice on election day.

How will you campaign in safe states? How will you campaign in contested states? Are you behaving differently depending on where you are campaigning?

I have and will continue to tell the truth in every state. In other words, I do not and will not “behave differently” depending on what state I am in, although my message is slightly different. Here’s why: in the neglected, or safe, states, the election has already been decided. Those states will either go Democratic or Republican and the corporate parties will only put their resources heavily into the contested states. The neglected states are ripe for reaching voters who feel left out of the process.

Progressives in neglected states who are concerned about Bush can vote for the Cobb-LaMarche ticket without fear that their individual vote will help keep Bush in the White House. In the neglected states, our message is “Don’t Waste Your Vote.” If the election has already been decided in those states, voters can send a powerful message that they support the Greens and our platform of peace, racial and social justice, real democracy, and ecology.

I have already campaigned in heavily contested states and I will continue to go to any state where we can help Greens with ballot access or to support local candidates. Our campaign understands that some progressive voters in heavily contested states won’t support the Green presidential ticket this year. That’s okay. We’re in this for the long haul. What’s at stake is more important than any one candidacy or any one election. Those people will appreciate our respect for them and they’ll support the Greens in other ways. We hope that people who won’t vote for our ticket will support their local Green candidates and will support them and us with their time and money. Most importantly, our campaign will convince progressives to join the Green Party.

What outcome would make your investment in time and energy in this campaign worthwhile?

I have already seen indications that the work of this campaign is successful. I know in some places that Greens would not be on the ballot if it weren’t for the Cobb-LaMarche campaign coming to their state.

We’ve also already created a new model of how to run a cooperative campaign. We work in cooperation with state and local Green parties and with the national party as well. We’ve pledged to share our lists of donors and volunteers with the national party. This is unprecedented. Even within our core campaign committee, we’re creating a new, Green model.

Insofar as part of your goal is to help raise consciousness in the electorate—what ideas and values and views are you attempting to communicate? Are you going to talk about what is wrong with capitalism
and what might replace it, a better world, or only about short-term reform goals?

The most important thing to talk about right now, which I am doing at every opportunity, is ending the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan and bringing our troops home now. Related to this issue is the repeal of the so-called Patriot Act; as well as the other issues I mentioned earlier.
Democracy also is a centerpiece of this campaign. And the most dangerous threat to democracy in this country is the mistaken assumption that we have it. If we want genuine democracy in this country, we have to create it ourselves. Women weren’t just given the right to vote. African Americans in the South weren’t able to just go and freely cast their votes once they supposedly had the right to vote. These were genuine progressive reforms brought about by activists struggling and fighting for freedom and democracy. And we have to continue the struggle.

We need to open up the debates and take it out of the hands of the corporately funded and controlled commission which conspires to keep third party candidates out of the presidential debates. We need to reclaim the public airwaves. We own them and all ballot-qualified candidates should have free media time. A number of other countries do this. We need publicly financed campaigns, not ones privately financed by a very small select group of wealthy donors. We need Instant Runoff Voting; we need proportional representation; we need to make sure that electronic voting machines have paper trails.
We need to re-engage the citizens of this country and I don’t think that will happen until we have a real democratic electoral process where people know that their votes count and that their votes will be counted. Voter registration should be easier, too, and you should be able to register right up until Election Day. Most states have restrictions where you can’t register in the last few weeks of the campaign, which is when most people start to pay attention to them.

At the end of the day, the Green Party is calling for economic democracy in addition to electoral democracy. As such, we go beyond a critique of corporate capitalism. The real problem is the social, political, and economic system that is literally destroying the planet, driving the engine of empire on behalf of transnational corporations, and creating an unjust, oppressive and unsustainable world with the plunder. The Green Party is very supportive of small businesses, cooperatives, and community economics. It’s all related. I personally support the principles of participatory economics as a more just system.

Ralph Nader ran in the last election as a Green. What was wrong with Nader’s last campaign and his activity in the period since to make Greens want to run someone different. And in what ways are you, in fact, different than he is?

Ralph Nader is running as an independent and it is his right to do so. The tactics used by the Democratic Party leadership to try and keep him off the ballot are disgusting but not altogether surprising. The Democrats and the Republicans have already made getting on the ballot in the first place a near impossibility in many states by enacting restrictive and unnecessary ballot access laws.
I am running to build the Green Party. I am not very concerned with my vote total and I’m even less concerned with how many votes Nader earns. If we help local candidates, if we register more Green voters, if we help achieve and maintain ballot access, if we’re out there every day presenting a genuine alternative for peace, social and racial justice, a healthy environment, and grassroots democracy, then I consider our run a success.

Do you have any plans for after Election Day?

After the election, I will focus on grassroots organizing with Democracy Unlimited of Humboldt County (www.duhc.org). At Democracy Unlimited we educate citizens about the illegitimate seizure of our authority to govern ourselves, and we design and implement grassroots strategies that exercise democratic power over corporations and governments. I will continue to work with the Green Party as an organizer, legal advisor, candidate trainer, lecturer, and fundraiser.

What do you consider the main weaknesses of the Green Party? What are the main weaknesses of your campaign to date? What are the strengths of each?

The Green Party is not sufficiently diverse. We will not succeed unless and until people of color and working class people join the party, and run (and win) as Green Party candidates. Our campaign strives to centralize issues of race, gender, and class oppression.
Another weakness of the Green Party is that we’re a values-based “third” party in a money-drenched, corporately-run two party system. The Greens in Europe, particularly in Germany, are known for their successes, yet Greens in the U.S. often earn greater vote percentages. They have proportional representation in Europe and most industrialized countries have public financing and free media and that makes all the difference.

If we didn’t have to spend so much time complying with arcane ballot access rules, if we had free media and public financing, if we were in the debates, we would get our message out and we could win. At the least, we’d be very competitive.

This is a very unusual election cycle. We not only have to deal with being a third party in a two party system, but we’re operating under the shadow of the stolen 2000 election, the danger of a second term for the worst president in U.S. history, and, if that wasn’t enough, whatever support and media coverage might be available for the Green Party is being divided by our campaign and the Nader campaign.

I think the strengths of the Green Party and our campaign is that our politics are values-based. We are running a positive, issue-based campaign and that resonates everywhere we go. We also have a tremendous group of dedicated volunteers and a fantastic staff which is working incredibly hard.

What do you consider to be the greatest needs of the progressive community in the U.S.?

In the short term, progressives need to get Bush out of office. I don’t think a Kerry administration is going to be much better, but we have to be mindful of the long-lasting effects of the presidency in terms of things like judicial appointments. Bush is a problem. He isn’t the only problem, but he has to go for a start.

In the long term, we need to build the Green Party. This campaign is doing that, particularly at the local level where it counts. We have to work for serious democratic reforms like Instant Runoff Voting and clean money elections. And we have to control corporate power or else transnational corporations will continue to control the global economy and the U.S. government.
The long term goals—creating real democracy and reigning in corporate power—are major campaign themes and throughout the campaign we’ll be staging events to highlight these issues and focus more attention on them.

In the next year, we will elect more Greens to office and we’ll see more democratic reforms. San Francisco will begin using Instant Runoff Voting for city elections. Other municipalities, newspapers, and organizations will express support for Instant Runoff Voting, Clean Money elections and other electoral reforms. I hope that we’ll be able to exert enough pressure to bring the troops home from Iraq.
Within the next ten years, I think we’ll see widespread democratic reforms and we’ll see the Green Party transform U.S. politics and policies. The two party system and its corporate system of financing will be permanently changed. Within the next ten years, the Green Party will usher in a new era of multi-party democracy