62% of US Wants Third Party NOW

Support for Third U.S. Political Party at High Point

Jill Stein: Smear Machines, Integrity Initiative, Atlantic Council, Target Corbyn & Sanders

McCarthy Lives: ThinkProgress (sic) Attacks | #Propaganda

 

“Green New Deal?” or New Green Con?

Corporations See a Different Kind of “Green” in Ocasio-Cortez’s “Green New Deal”

 

If you suspect I don’t entirely trust Miss Cortez, you may be onto something.

 

Building a Grassroots Party 2.0

A Strategy to Grow

Joe Giambrone

I’ve written previously about a three-pronged strategy to increase numbers by creating tools to empower the base. Without these numbers the party will remain stagnated and ineffectual. That is the project. That is the task at hand.

My suggestions related to the US Green Party, but as Abby Martin pointed out to me, future change may need to come from another party altogether. The organizing principles are the same, to establish a grassroots party online, which is relatively cheap, efficient, and able to grow exponentially as needed.

While the current President received 63 million votes last November, the Korean Youtube music video Gangnam Style has “been viewed over 2.75 billion times.” Who could have predicted that before it happened?

Jill Stein appeared on many television screens in 2016, but one message was missing from most of her appearances:

Go and Register with the Green Party

Presidential campaigns focus on personalities and on transitory issues, but the simple call to recruit new people gets lost in the noise. That is a strategic blunder. All publicity should include a call to recruit the viewers.

A second important point to make is that registering does not mean one has to vote that way. It’s not mandatory, but it does send a message to the competing parties when one party’s affiliation grows (or conversely shrinks). This act is arguably as important as voting because it signals to the political class, to the ruling class, what America currently cares about.

The existing national Green Party infrastructure must put all of its attention and all of its resources toward building a viable party, which means millions—and then tens of millions—of new Greens. This goal is so obvious and vital that it seems to be routinely overlooked.

How to Drum Up New Members?

Before moving forward, it is imperative to study the competition. Here are three highly relevant websites:

https://www.gop.com
https://democrats.org
https://go.berniesanders.com

These should be mined for ideas, as they are well-designed and professional, and they appear to be winning the race.

But grassroots alternatives do not come with money, or checkbook activism, and so important differences must be acknowledged in terms of available resources. The only resource, which a grassroots movement can bank on today, is people power. Committed members are the strength of the party, but commitment without the tools to succeed is futile. This is already proven in election after election defeat.

Building Tools to Compete

Three tools need immediate implementation:

1. A landing page (much like the three websites listed above) will collect email addresses and names and help new people register with the party and join a community to leverage their efforts. People want to help, and they should be assisted. The website must aid with networking and provide information and high-quality content for the new members to share easily with their own circles.

2. A message forum can allow the entire party to communicate with itself in local groups, and additionally organized by issues and campaigns. In order to be effective the party must be organized in some kind of cohesive way. It is not today. A message board forum is a cheap, easy, proven mechanism for achieving this.

3. A media library is vital in today’s environment of flowing video, audio and images. It’s not enough to type text. Greens need the audio-visual content of the Party at their fingertips in order to create new content, be that videos, audio podcasts, graphic memes, or articles. The Party should be putting its best face forward and archiving all the quality imagery and other content that sells the Party to strangers.

Further, the landing page can be as bold as a complete reinvention and makeover of the Party: Green Party 2.0, for example. I lean toward the Greens because they have ballot access across the country—a huge hurdle overcome—as well as local-level victories to cite.

These three prongs of the larger strategy to recruit millions are easy to digest, logical, and bullet-proof. The only problem I see is that they are not being implemented. We cannot wait for a savior to come along some day but must act to defend our interests today by organizing.

The failure to offer viable progressive alternatives has allowed the United States to drift rightward, and now toward open fascism. Only by creating a movement that moves will we reverse this pendulum.

As the current regime destroys the last century’s progress, people will be motivated to resist. They need a place to resist, a real resistance that will not sell them out to the next corporatist warmonger who comes along from the DNC.

#

http://www.joegiambrone.us

Jungle Kingdom

WI Voting Machines Tampered

Wendy, St. Croix County

Five of the nine machines being used in the recount have tampered seals. Photos of two are attached. Photo of seal, followed by photo of serial number.

 

Ralph Nader: Why Trump Won

 

 

Green Carnage

 

 

Green Carnage

JOE GIAMBRONE

Does the Green Party exist in the U.S. today?

After a shockingly ineffectual performance on Election Day 2016, the reality should be sinking in over at Green central. In a different context heads would roll. New blood would move in, new strategies the only issue, the only concern, the wake-up call to end all wake-up calls. The US Green Party faces an existential crisis today. This is the fork in the road. The current organization has failed spectacularly (yet again). Forget 5%, they couldn’t reach one and a half.

We cannot fault Jill Stein, who did the best she could and campaigned tirelessly. She appeared on more television screens than any other US Green in history, and yet votes did not materialize. One-percent stunts are simply not worth the effort, and they are not changing the world.

In 2011 I tried to alert the Party (repeatedly) that they were stuck in a failed cycle that needed drastic changes in order to succeed. The main points of my strategy proposal were as follows.

Objective

The only goal is to recruit tens of millions of Americans into the Green Party, to register them “Green,” and thus to build a credible alternative that Americans may trust to not be a “wasted vote.”

This requires a national effort, not ad-hoc state by state randomness. Nor city by city, nor Facebook group nor Twitter account. This mishmosh of random efforts is completely uncoordinated and redundant. Efforts are limited and wasted, and the advantages of the digital world are not exploited to their fullest potentials.

In any accounting of strengths, weaknesses, and available resources, we must be realistic. Greens are not the party of money, but of people power. Motivated members: their time and labor are the main available resources, not expensive TV commercials.

When I wrote the original document I had been a Green for over a decade, and since I’d moved to Northern California and re-registered the Party had not contacted me at all. I had nothing to do, no interaction, no initiatives to join in: nothing. No mojo. Plus Northern California is where the party supposedly began!

Greens are sitting around with nothing to do. That’s not how you build a party. You build a party by recruiting new members, and getting them to recruit new members, and so on, and so on, and so on. That should be the main concern of the national party structure, the only real concern. They should be providing tools to their own members to empower and assist them to organize and communicate with one another.

Infrastructure

The party must immediately create infrastructure to help its own members organize.

1. A place to communicate, share ideas and to link up, such as a message board forum. Why this doesn’t exist already is beyond belief. Are you a party or a collection of whoevers, whenevers?

2. A media library to store photos, videos, audio, and text. There is no central depository for people to take the raw materials and build new projects. This ignoring of the modern age and its digital offerings is another fumble by a party that doesn’t seem to care if it loses.

3. A landing page to send new people in order to convince them to register Green. Take five minutes and actually put together a professional presentation to attract independents and disgruntled Democrats and talk to them.

Those are the bare minimum requirements for the party to actually exist. It does not exist at this juncture, sorry.

Dependable places for people to use and to build will demonstrate that the party is here and is active all year long, all the time.

Currently, it is mostly random and centered around a star presidential run. In 2011, when I first wrote the proposal, the Green websites were even more crude and off-putting. Some improvements have come around, but not the centers of activity that would provide a place for members to interact and spread important information virally among them: at the local level, the regional, and national levels. Good ideas are not being passed on to those who need them most because of disorganization. This hobbles the people you expect to be building the party and to recruit new members.

GP members are left to flounder in random Facebook or Twitter encounters. No central hub can be identified to check for news, media and initiatives to participate in. Without a centralized library, good content it is quickly forgotten and lost.

Now an anecdote to demonstrate the point. Over the past few months in a ‘Jill Stein Activists’ group on Facebook I began making graphic memes to promote her and the party, as well as to knock the competition. I made at least 47 images (gallery), and they were passed on by hundreds of people, very popular in fact, some of the most active content going around there.

Four days before the election I was suddenly kicked out of the group. No explanation. No rhyme nor reason. Was it related to an argument over the pervasive fake “news” (disinformation) littering the group? Probably.

So that was that. I’m out. The most productive member of the group tossed out without explanation. These groups are random, run by whomever at their own personal whims, and the Green Party has no oversight, investment, nor commitment to fairness or procedures.

That’s not a serious party in my book. Those are junior high school shenanigans masquerading.

The party insists on trying to compete in the national leagues, but continues to play in the Pee Wee league. In 2016 they still haven’t stepped up and invested in their own members and given them… anything that I can see.
Maybe some of its members will simply cease investing time and sweat in them?

Joe Giambrone

http://www.joegiambrone.us

Jill Stein op-ed: In praise of WikiLeaks

 

Jill Stein op-ed: In praise of WikiLeaks

 

Hedges Endorses Stein?

Just today???

I wonder if my harassment had an effect?

 

 

Sarandon for Jill Stein

“Fear of Donald Trump is not enough for me to support Clinton, with her record of corruption…”

Hollywood Reporter covers.

Susan Sarandon Endorses Jill Stein for President