All posts in the topic Neither Democrat nor Republican (Short link)
Summary
- There are 11 posts — by 5 authors — in this topic.
- Latest post made by Michael Cavlan at Jul 23 14:09 UTC
I am rejoining the Minneapolis discussion list after an absence of about a year and a half. A reason is that I have recently filed to become a candidate for Congress in the 5th District with the Independence Party of Minnesota. Hopefully, issues related to the Congressional race in Minneapolis and surrounding suburbs will be considered “local” rather than national or statewide. That used to be true but, judging from the nature of recent postings, I’m not sure what is the current understanding of this forum’s scope. Keith Ellison, the incumbent member of Congress, enjoys both strong DFL and community backing. So why am I running? Why run under the banner of the Independence Party? Both good questions. Rep. Ellison began his political career as a fierce opponent of private-sector landlords and, like many DFLers, was especially antagonistic toward a group, Minneapolis Property Rights Action Committee, to which I belonged. I therefore supported the opponent in his first race for state representative, Duane Reed. As a member of the Independence Party, I supported his IP opponent in the race for Congress two years ago, Tammy Lee. Having said that, I would also say that I have no bone to pick with Ellison’s record in Congress during his first term in office. His stance on the Iraq war and on the impending war with Iran accords with my views. U.S. militarism is a terrible thing and Ellison knows it. On C-Span recently, I watched Ellison question some of the administration’s pro-torture lawyers and felt he took a suitably harsh tone. So if Rep. Ellison gets reelected, it will be with some degree of merit. Even so, the nation is facing multiple problems that amount to a crisis of almost unparalleled scope. It’s fair to say that the Republican Bush administration has been one of the worst in U.S. history. But the Democratic Congress is no shining example. What vision have they other than to cling to stereotyped ideas and service their special-interest constituencies? Public opinion polls show that both the President and the Congress are held in low esteem. Many people, including me, are waiting for something new to come along that will shake Washington out of its comfortable bipartisan rut and begin representing the people’s interest. Jesse could have done it but he decided to go another way. The country is going broke. It has chronic budget deficits and a trade deficit running around $700 billion a year. Does anyone in Congress have an idea what to do? Instead of getting our economic house back in order, we’re throwing our weight around militarily, invading other people’s countries or threatening to bomb them. We need to abandon ideas of empire and tend to business. We can’t afford this costly “war on terror” any more. We can’t afford the war on drugs or any kind of war because we’re running out of money, resources, and good will. Bush spent our wad. Turn some of these security problems over to the United Nations and hope for the best. The issue now is the economy. It’s jobs. We need to talk about that sort of thing. The trade deficit especially needs attention. We as a nation can’t continue to run up debts indefinitely. How can we bring the deficit down? Currency adjustments haven’t done it. High graduation rates from college haven’t done it. I have another answer: tariffs. We need to protect our high-priced labor by imposing tariffs, at least temporarily, on goods imported from low-wage countries. That, in turn, means that we need to scrap free trade regimes established by quasi-treaties, unratified by the Senate. Scrapping free trade does not necessarily mean trade wars between nations. I think the world’s nations can agree on an alternative system that respects developmental needs. A system of “employer-specific tariffs” would allow government to gain some measure of control over the multinationals with an eye to improving wages and living standards around the world. Imported oil is another component of the trade deficit. Clearly our nation needs to push alternative sources of energy, especially with respect to automobiles. A consensus seems to be emerging that wind power is a promising source of electricity and that automobiles powered by electricity offer a way to wean ourselves off gasoline. But instead of supporting that option, the Congress failed to renew the 2% tax credit for wind energy (while renewing subsidies for gas and oil production). Dick Cheney’s type of lobbyist seems to have gotten to members of Congress from both parties. Our best hope of leadership to solve the energy problem is a former oil man, T. Boone Pickens, not Congress or the President. Anyhow, I want to run for Congress to raise some of these long-term problems and propose solutions. My entire program is contained in an article, “Manifesto of our Future Possibilities” on a campaign website, http://www.newindependenceparty.org. When you cast your ballot for Congress in November, you will have three choices: the DFL candidate, probably Keith Ellison; the Republican candidate Barb Davis White, and me. Regardless of the outcome of this election, the important thing is that we recognize and discuss the real problems that will be facing us and begin to craft an intelligent response before the pain sets in.
Have you been endorsed by the Independence Party of Minnesota as a
congressional candidate? If yes, when? If not, are you asking for endorsement?
Personally, I find Bill and all the others that joined any of these
races at the last minute to be serious candidates that I should waste
any time on at all. Get in the race and be seen before your parties
convention.
I like the Independence and Green parties, they are forcing the Dems to
get back on track of representing the people again, something they have
been slacking off on for too long now.
Just my humble opinion
Ron Leurquin
Nokomis East
Barb asked:
Have you been endorsed by the Independence Party of Minnesota as a
congressional candidate? If yes, when? If not, are you asking for
endorsement?
No, I have not been endorsed for Congress by an Independence Party endorsing
convention. However, I am the only Independence Party person who filed for
that seat. From my standpoint, I'd like a formal endorsement but it will be up
to 5th District party officials to decide what, if anything, will be done.
Ron Leurquin wrote: “Personally, I find Bill and all the others that joined any of these races at the last minute to be serious candidates that I should waste any time on at all. Get in the race and be seen before your parties convention.” I think he meant to write: “Personally, I find Bill and all the others that joined any of these races at the last minute to be unserious candidates on whose campaigns I should waste no time.” This implies that I and others waited until the last minute to file and, seeing that no one else had done it, decided to become a candidate for the heck of it.” For the record, I filed for 5th District Congress on the afternoon of Thursday, July 10, just in time to catch the tail end of Al Franken’s filing and press conference. Two days earlier, I had written letters to the Independence Party state chair and the 5th District chair announcing my intention to run for Congress. The 5th District Independence Party convention would be the proper body to endorse a Congressional candidate. The last such “convention” was a subcaucus of the state convention held in Bloomington on June 21st whose purpose was to endorse a candidate for U.S. Senate. At the time, I was one of three candidates seeking the IP Senate endorsement. So I, of course, did not seek an endorsement for Congress at that time. The IP state convention endorsed Steve Williams for U.S. Senate. He had been campaigning for that endorsement for quite some time. There was a push for “no endorsement” with the idea that all three of us - Williams, Kurt Anderson, and I - would compete in the primary and take our chances as to whether Jesse Ventura would enter the race. Asked on the floor if I would run in the primary without endorsement, I said I would not. In fact, I withdrew as a candidate after the first round of voting. Steve Williams was endorsed on the second ballot. I had not given running for 5th District Congress any thought until an email arrived from Jordan Kushner on the state discussion list asking if the IP had endorsed anyone for that position. Since my purpose in running for Senate was to raise certain issues - mainly related to trade policy - that were not being addressed by the other candidates, I thought this could also be done, with somewhat less visibility, as a Congressional candidate in the 5th District. My campaign website at http://www.newindependenceparty.org , constructed over a number of months, should give assurance that my decision to file for Congress was not the result of a last-minute whim.
I prefer my initial comment.
Thank you very much.
I do thank you on your elaboration of how you came to this race at such
a late date though.
Ron Leurquin
Nokomis East
Bill attempted to interpret:
I think he meant to write: "Personally, I find Bill and all the others
that joined any of these races at the last minute to be unserious
candidates on whose campaigns I should waste no time." This implies that
I and others waited until the last minute to file and, seeing that no
one else had done it, decided to become a candidate for the heck of it."
Bill
Good luck. There will be no Green on the Ballot.
The person who was endorsed was unnable to get enough help to gather the needed
signatures for Ballot Access.
Likewise, I was also unable to get enough help to get on the ballot for US
Senate.
I guess the progressive community are quite happy with Keith Ellison and Al
Franken.
C'est la Vie. We get the government we deserve.
Michael Cavlan
Powderhorn
Thanks, Michael Cavlan, for your comments. The Greens are rather unique among
parties in leading with a focused vision of the future. Our democracy would be
improved if ballot access for all political parties were eased and instant
runoff voting were adopted so that supporters of the Democratic and Republican
parties could not use the “spoiler” argument to squelch candidacies from other
parties. They offer the voters stones for bread and then complain that we are
stealing their votes.
In the early ‘90s, I had the privilege of submitting articles on international
trade to a national Green Party publication, Synthesis/Regeneration. One,
titled “A Labor and Environmentally Oriented Trading System” appeared in the
spring 1993 issue of that publication; the other, “A Search for Trade Standards
to Protect Labor and the Environment”, appeared in the winter of 1996. Today,
the concepts developed in those articles are the heart of the program that I am
proposing as a Congressional candidate.
Locally I was involved with a group of landlords called Minneapolis Property
Rights Action Committee which played a part in the Greens’ amazing victories in
two Minneapolis City Council races in 2001: Natalie Johnson Lee’s victory in
the 5th ward and Dean Zimmermann’s victory in the 6th ward. To date, these two
elections represent a high water mark in my experience of citizen activism
going up against an entrenched structure of political power in what is
basically a one-party town.
The Independence Party has a rather different focus. It began in Ross Perot’s
presidential campaign in 1992 and the subsequent organization of the Reform
Party. In my views, the Perot campaign consisted of three issues: (1)
opposition to perpetual federal budget deficits, (2) opposition to NAFTA with
its “giant sucking sound” of jobs going south, and (3) sympathy for the
forgotten victims and veterans of the Vietnam war. As the Reform Party changed
into the Independence Party, it dropped its opposition to free trade. I would
say it lost its focus. Instead, it has adopted a platform consisting of 70
plus planks which individually are commendable but collectively amount to a
blur. I want to narrow the focus so that, in this campaign at least, voters
have a clear idea of what I stand for as an Independence Party candidate.
If the Republican Party were what it was 50 or 60 years ago, I might belong to
that party: a bunch of “old fogeys” who believed in balanced budgets, free
markets and business promotion, and “isolationism” (which I would call “minding
your own business” internationally) while also producing reformers like
Theodore Roosevelt and visionaries like Harold Stassen, one of the persons most
responsible for the creation of the United Nations. I would gladly accept a
president such as Dwight Eisenhower who liked to play golf when he might have
been shuffling through papers in the Oval office or Calvin Coolidge who in the
summer of 1928 took an entire month off to go fishing in northern Wisconsin -
provided that the country was prosperous and peaceful.
Instead, the years of the Bush-Cheney administration have been pure hell.
Whether it’s the disastrous Iraq war, the neglect of our veterans, the
foreclosure crisis, the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the $900
billion budget deficit and the $700 billion trade deficit, the costly
prescription-drug benefit, the “no child left behind” program, the torture
policies and violations of civil liberties, the lucrative no-bid contracts in
Iraq, etc. etc., it seems that everything Bush has touched has turned to ashes.
You know something is seriously wrong with this Republican presidency when
Julie Nixon Eisenhower contributes thousands of dollars to Barack Obama’s
campaign.
I continue to support free markets and economies regulated primarily by the law
of supply and demand. At the same time, government needs to regulate the
economy by impartial laws. As economic growth butts up against finite natural
resources, government needs to intervene in the free market by giving tax
incentives and subsidies to support renewable energy while imposing an
additional tax burden on consumption of petroleum and other nonrenewable
resources. If the government can get its act together, this would be the time
to push wind and solar energy and invest in battery technologies and
people-moving systems of public transportation in congested urban areas.
As a party which supposedly believes in the free-market economy, the current
Republican administration was run by three individuals who got rich through
their contacts with government rather than through honest free-market
competition: Bush himself who sold his interest in the Texas Rangers at a huge
profit after getting the Texas legislature to build that baseball team a new
stadium; Dick Cheney, formerly of Halliburton, who led the charge on the
wasteful privatization of U.S. military operations in Iraq; and Donald
Rumsfeld, who became CEO of the Searle drug company by virtue of his ability to
convince the FDA to approve its medications. This is corrupt capitalism. As
a pro-capitalist party, the Republicans need to come to grips with who they
have actually become.
If the Democrats were an effective “loyal opposition”, they would be
aggressively challenging all this in Congress instead of complaining that Ralph
Nader or someone else was on the ballot stealing their issues. When I listen
to the nominating conventions of the Green Party or the Libertarians, I hear
earnest proposals for government being discussed and not just vague references
to “health care”, “transportation”, or “education”, as if that covers it. So,
standing on the back of past Independence Party candidates such as Tim Penny
and Peter Hutchinson who exceeded the 5% vote requirement, I’m proud to be
someone out there in the political wilderness running for Congress at a time
when our country desperately needs to change its politics.
Michael Cavlan: "I guess the progressive community are quite happy with Keith
Ellison and Al Franken. ... We get the government we deserve."
This is the quip always applied when third parties cannot muster the signatures
or votes to go through the elimination games/election process. To a certain
extent, it is true. But in the principle way, it is entirely false.
I think it was George Washington who warned that a two party system is not all
it's cracked up to be. The two party system is divisive on its face. Any third
party has to garner enough support to overthrow the smallest of the two
parties, thus becoming the very enterprise they railed against. We have spent
the last quarter century watching that happen on the national scene. The
religionists and right-most rapacious fringe took over what was once the
Republican Party to disastrous effect.
These instances, Al Franken and Kieth Ellison, are two different cases, neither
one of which warrants the quip. Kieth Ellison has had two years to get his feet
on the ground in Congress. For a freshman member of Congress, he's done fairly
well. He's an intelligent man with a good grounding in logic. He's also a DFLer
in a system which allows for only two parties. (Even the architecture of
Congress screams TWO PARTY!)
For the people of Ellison's district, he probably is better than whatever
opposition presents itself because of his two advantages, DFL endorsement and
incumbency. He now gives his constituency a leg up. If he were a disaster as a
congressman, his constituency would make short work of him, theoretically.
Al Franken, apparently, has out politicked his first opponents, Ceresi and
Nelson Pallmeyer. While I would have preferred either Nelson Pallmeyer or
Ceresi, the tyranny of the majority prevails. After watching a couple of
Franken commercials post convention, I've decided his face is what gives him
the edge. Franken has a comfortable face to look at, neither threatening nor
beguiling. He's also tall, which definitely helps in the world of instant film,
and he's mildly amusing. Luckily, he's way smarter than, say, Sonny Bono, who
was merely amusing and largely ignorable as a senator.
In the Franken case, we may be getting the the government we deserve although
he does present himself as adhering to the old-fashioned DFL values (when the
farmers and laborers were still prominent). But I would also argue that we are
getting television government and we seem to want that. (Think about Thompson,
who dropped out of the presidential race a few months ago. Even Reagan thought
he was dumb, yet he could get enough people on recognition of his bit part
face.) In truth, your Senator is not in his position to entertain you. He's
there to squeeze the federal treasury for goods and services for you. If you
are lucky, he/she will have sense enough to ask you what you want instead of
assuming you had agreed to want what he/she wants.
Franken's opposition within the DFL has faded. Ceresi, not a stupid man by any
measure, dropped out when he realized that he could not compete for the
attention of the electorate against Franken. Ceresi is a very button down
figure on the television, whereas tv is Franken's metier. Nelson Pallmeyer did
not have the money to compete against Franken, even though he was the most
progressive of the three. (This is the argument for government supported
elections. It allows the best and the brightest to at least be equally heard.
It gives the electorate an opportunity to think and evaluate.)
But it does sound like sour grapes, Michael, coming from someone who just
failed to make the playoffs. The Green Party hasn't been able to garner enough
members to invade the DFL successfully. It has not even kept what it once had,
the magic 5% to warrant state recognition. Mind you, the DFL is the larger of
the two parties, so it's going to take more to overthrow than it took Ronald
Reagan and subsequent tv owned no brains to swamp the GOP. Welcome to Orwell's
1984 (a.k.a. The Reagan Revolution), me hearties, it came right on time.
Second Attempt to Post
Minneapolis Specific comment.
Bill, I obviously agree with what you say.
The obvious gerrymandering of Dean Zimmermannn and Natalie Johnson-Lee and
then the obvious set up of Dean Zimmermann was and still is, one of the
most shameful moments in Minneapolis political history.
If we had a paper that was worth a damn, these issues would have been
addressed.
However, the Start Tribune has proven to be the corporate friendly piece of
garbage
that many os us progressives have charged for decades.
Which is why it is a Democratic Party mouthpiece. With the credibility of say,
Cable
Fox News. Or indeed Air America radio.
Thank you Bill, you have given myself and others someone to vote for.
Jussie Ventura was right about what he said on Larry King. It is staged. The
entire
political process. The sooner people wake up to that reality, the sooner we can
start
to take our country and democracy back.
From the corporate crooks who have stolen it and corrupted the media to the
extent
that it is.
Good luck and give them hell.
Michael Cavlan
Powderhorn
OK THIRD Attempt to Post. For over a week now.
Minneapolis Specific comment.
Bill, I obviously agree with what you say.
The obvious gerrymandering of Dean Zimmermannn and Natalie Johnson-Lee and
then the obvious set up of Dean Zimmermann was and still is, one of the
most shameful moments in Minneapolis political history.
If we had a paper that was worth a damn, these issues would have been
addressed.
However, the Start Tribune has proven to be the corporate friendly piece of
garbage
that many os us progressives have charged for decades.
Which is why it is a Democratic Party mouthpiece. With the credibility of say,
Cable
Fox News. Or indeed Air America radio.
Thank you Bill, you have given myself and others someone to vote for.
Jussie Ventura was right about what he said on Larry King. It is staged. The
entire
political process. The sooner people wake up to that reality, the sooner we can
start to take our country and democracy back.
From the corporate crooks who have stolen it and corrupted the media to the
extent
that it is.
Good luck and give them hell.
Michael Cavlan
Powderhorn