So you have a choice.  You can take an hour to watch the video and then read my critique, or read my rant, with all the second-hand info about what’s in the video, and then watch it to see whether I’m full of it.

Let’s start with the fact that Chris Hedges obviously knows a lot, and has done some very good things, notably a good lawsuit against the feds, and much verbal defense of the Occupy movement in the media.  He’s visited a lot of places, and interviewed lotsa remarkable people, of which he doesn’t fail to remind us in his talk.  Such namedropping gets more frequent toward the end of the talk, as you’ll see.

Large parts of his talk are very worth hearing, for anyone who might not yet be quite aware of the authoritarian kleptocracy we live under and its shock-and-awe-inspiring power.  It’s when he tries to tell Greens what to do….

Right away, I was reminded of an event we local “progressives” put on many years ago.  We had a very distinguished speaker invited to address the crowd, and he asked me what we most wanted to hear from him.  I told him we’re most interested in what we can do to help the particular situation that he came out of.  (I don’t want to be too specific here with names & such.)  When he got to speaking, all he could come up with was “Talk to your political leaders and tell them to…”  Yeah, well, we were very much honored to have him there, but we had been doing that for quite a while.

So what did someone tell Chris that the Greens wanted to hear from him?  Maybe it was whatever tactical advice he might give us.  Fair enough, but Chris seems to have felt he had to editorialize about what’s wrong with the GP, though by his own admission he had very little exposure to it.  Geez, Chris, I know you’re not stupid.  Why did you have to be one more person who knows nothing about the Green Party telling us what’s wrong with the Green Party?

Let’s start with:

“…the failure of the Green Party is that it continues to play by their rules..uh… it continues to uh…put far too much energy into electoral politics.  That doesn’t mean that the Green Party shouldn’t field candidates, but that should be a very tangential part of what this party is about”

Notice the word “Party” in the name.  That means we’re a political party.  The job of a political party is to provide a ballot line and other support for candidates for office.  You’re tellling us to do less of what we exist for.   Everyone in the Party, or nearly everyone, knows that the GP is meant to be the electoral expression of a movement, not the movement itself, and most of those involved in Party business participate in some kind of activism outside Party business.

For instance, in the anti-war movement in my locality that started after 9/11, at least half the organizers were Greens.  Though the Party joined it, the organizing couldn’t be done under the Party banner much because every time I mentioned to a non-Green that I was a Green, the discussion quickly turned to “It’s all Nader’s fault!” and nothing could get done.  Do you really think there were no Greens in Occupy?  No, later he says he assumes there were.

“…and so my energy uh… was put into the Occupy movement rather than the Green Party uh… because it was a movement and uh… I think if the Green Party has any hope of becoming a credible plan uh… it better do a complete about-face and begin to focus uh… the kinds of logistics that made resistance possible.  Long discussions about the evils of corporate capitalism or showing another film at a college campus I think is an utter and complete waste of time.”

I don’t know whom he’s talking about here with the long discussions and showing films.  It’s been a few years since anyone I’m involved with held video showings, mainly because it’s all on the web, and we can just send out links.  Very little time involved.  As for long discussions….

“I think part of the problem… I have very limited exposure the Green Party but I’ll just… from my limited exposure, it’s just too many chiefs.  Everybody wants to be a chief and I think again, what I liked about the  occupy movement is that it tested that hierarchical form of power  which sucks the life blood out of organizations. I’m sure there’s some people here were in the occupy movement, a seven-hour general assembly drove me nuts uh… and yet, when the occupy movement made a decision they abided by that and i think that uh… hierarchy which again is emblematic within the Green Party is uh… if it’s a failure is it is a grafting of traditional structures of power onto a party for which it is incredibly unfit”

So Chris LIKED those long discussions, seeking consensus, in the Occupy movement.  Where does he think that custom came from?  Haven’t Greens been doing this for 30 years or more?

“Hierarchy” is a complete shot out of the blue.  “Emblematic within the Green Party”????  I really, really don’t know which Greens he’s talking about here.  If anything, people complain that they can’t get authoritative pronouncements out of us.

“Hierarchy” is, however, occasionally used as a general-purpose perjorative by anyone who doesn’t like a decision that’s been made.  More of that later.

“You have fast-food workers in New York City just walked out of jobs uh… and boy, you know when something like that happens, that’s where you should be.”

Not much in the way of strikes in my own locality, but I do recall Greens standing with striking grocery workers in 2004, and buying them pizza.  That’s seven years before
Occupy.

As we move on to questions from the Greens in the audience, about things that Greens are doing, we begin to get things like this from Chris:

“uh… that’s exactly what I’m saying:  that every organizational effort to be built around action that is focused on something concrete. Another meeting about uh… you know uh…  “Here’s our position and why can’t you understand how enlightened we are?”  is a killer so I think what you’re doing is exactly what im advocating.”

He says something similar when someone brings up Cheri Honkala’s long work among the poor and homeless.  Being reminded that Greens are doing exactly what he just said Greens are NOT doing obviously bugs him a bit.  He starts name-dropping more, starts talking more about “the left” than “the Green Party”, as a sort of retreat.  Maybe he’s just talking to his cronies over at the Nation now.  He also starts the “Keep it short, I have to go.”

And way toward the end of his talk, we finally get this:

“Part of my frustration with the Greens is that I remained true to Nader in 2008.”

So he thinks we’re wasting our time running candidates, but stayed with Nader in the most NOTHING campaign he ever had.  Then he goes on to quote a policy suggestion Nader made at that time about reforming the financial system.  This is after saying how useless policy pronouncements are.

So the fact that he was involved with the Nader campaign might explain some of the unexplainable:

I’ll tell this story as I gathered it from the scuttlebutt among Greens at the time. No citations, I’d have to dig up old emails, and I’m too lazy for that.

Back in 2003, as Greens started to think about the 2004 presidential election, Nader, or his people, met with Green “leaders”, such as they were, and some of them were very much opposed to having Nader run again on our ticket.  The main reason seemed to be the stigma attached to him by the Dems’ interpretation of Florida’s results in 2000.  That’s a whole long story that I’m not going to spend time on again.

Nader, or his people, asked for some assurance that if he ran for the Green nomination, he would get it.  No one could give such a guarantee, obviously, because candidates for the nomination have to run in the primaries.  The Green voters will decide, and no one can guarantee results a year ahead of time.  In other words, Nader, or his people, were assuming that we had leaders who could deliver the delegates for the nomination.  I have no idea where they got that idea, but there might have been a few people who opposed him and bragged that they could block his nomination.  This is the only explanation I can think of for some “hierarchy” pejorative applied to Greens, and it probably would have existed only among Nader people.

So most of Chris Hedges’ knowledge of the Green Party is filtered through the Nader campaign.  Really, Chris, that’s not a good source.  If you spend too much time with Nation staff and wealthy, high-profile activists you’re going to get a pretty distorted view of the Green Party and any number of other grassroots organizations.  That’s exactly what you seem to be warning the Greens against in much of your speech.  Physician, heal thyself.

My alert readers (both of them) will recall one of the evil effects of Prop 14:  that it eliminates one of two ways for a small political party to keep its access to the ballot.  We now, effectively, have only one:  to maintain a number of registrants above 1% of the number of voters that voted in the last gubernatorial election.  That’s currently a number a touch above 100,000.

Green registration in California, at last report, was about 113,000 and has been slowly dropping for the last few years.  This is a cause for concern.  To some people, it might seem to be a “Drop everything!  There is NO OTHER PARTY BUSINESS!” concern.  I’ll try to put it in perspective, for any noobs out there.  Vets are welcome to comment on anything I’m missing here, of course.

The last thing I would try to discourage anyone from is hitting the street to get some new Greens registered.  No organizing or authorization of any kind is required, just a person with some time.  There’s no need for Greens to even talk to each other about this much.  They just have to do it.  I’ve written about this before.

 It also might help to hit up
any friends you have who thought it was so all-frakking-important to vote for Obama or Kucinich or whatever in long-ago primaries to COME HOME, ALREADY and register in the only way that sends a message with your registration.

I would, however, question any panic reaction.  10-15% isn’t what I’d call a comfortable margin, but it’s not dangling off a cliff with the villain stomping on your hands, either.

To give you a broad overview, here’s a table of Green registration in California, with some prominent events marked on it in a timelineish way.  Click on it to view it larger.  It only goes back to 1999 because that’s what was obviously available on the Secretary of State’s site, and I was too lazy to look up earlier numbers.  You see a slow decline in Green registration since our peak in 2003.

Just to get this out of the way, there are three other “third” parties in California that are in worse trouble:

Americans Elect – Qualified for the last primary by petition, not registration.  They have a negligible number of registrants, as this party was negligible from the start.  It was a silly idea, period.

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Libertarian – Hovering much closer to the cutoff number than the Greens.  But they have money.  They’ll probably pull through with some well-paid registration drive.  Only guessing here, though.  I don’t keep up on what they’re doing.  If they WERE to drop off the registration forms, I’d expect a few refugees to go Green.  Don’t laugh.  Most of their registrants (as with most of ANY party’s registrants) have vague ideas at best of what the party stands for.

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Peace & Freedom – The Cool Hand Luke of political parties (“keeps comin’ back with nuthin’”).  We got quite a few refugees from them when they dropped off the ballot in 1998.  If they do so again, it could gain us some.  They are far below the required number of registrants.
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Let’s look at that handy-dandy table & timeline I gave you, hit a couple of high spots that stand out, and I’ll draw some conclusions that have all the authority of being pulled directly out of my…sleeve.
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First off, the two periods of fastest growth in our numbers were during the Nader 2000 campaign and the 2003 recall election, when Camejo actually appeared in a tv debate.

Conclusion:  There’s nothing like being talked about in the mass media, for good or ill, and being treated like a somewhat serious player.  No surprise there.

Our period of fastest decline was 2007-2008, a time when Obama was talking like a real “progressive”, and looking like a serious “real Democrat” as opposed to Clinton’s “triangulation”.

This is one of those facts we’ve been living with for decades now:  Whenever it looks to some people like they can make a difference with their vote in the Dem presidential primary, they go register Dem or DTS so they can do so.  It’s not a huge part of our registrants; maybe only 10 or 15 percent, but when we’re hovering just above the cutoff for ballot access it means something.

Conclusion:  Some people will keep on going back to the abusive spouse no matter what.  Maybe a counselor can advise us about breaking this cycle.

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Let’s look at the whole period chronologically now.

My evidence that we gained refugees from Peace & Freedom when they lost ballot access and no longer had their name printed on the registration forms is purely anecdotal.  You won’t see evidence for it in my table, probably because it was overwhelmed by other events.

The rapid-fire arousal of grassroots organizing in the late 90s, early noughties, from Seattle through the early antiwar movement, was a long surge for us. I believe our early adoption of internet communications played a part in this, giving almost-free communication to groups that had previously been hampered by lack of money just for the most basic exchange of information within a group.

Conclusion:  Take advantage of any free communication as much as possible.

The “Blame Nader” nonsense that started after 2000 does not seem to have affected our registration numbers, and might have even helped.  This might have been an instance of “no such thing as bad publicity”.

Conclusion:  “Spoiler” propaganda might work on how people vote, but not on how they register.  Not in the short term, anyway.  This might be an instance of actual awareness on the voters’ part of how the elections work.  I’m shocked & amazed.

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The serious decline in our numbers began in 2004. Three things were working for this at the time:

(1)  Noobs who had confused Nader with the Green Party from the start lost interest or ragequit when they saw that the Party was waffling over nominating someone who didn’t want our nomination.

(2)  The ever-hopeful blue/greens got interested in the Dem primaries, since Kerry had some moth-eaten old antiwar credentials from his foolish youth, and the mirage appeared
of defeating Bush and thereby getting something, anything, different.

(3)  The following, probably related to #1, but not exactly the same thing.  Be patient.

I once did an analysis by county of our declining numbers, for the period 2003-2006.  Here are links to:

The raw numbers

Basic explanation and conclusions

…if you’re interested.  After some dialogue with other Greens in certain counties, it was apparent that a large part of the loss was simply from registrations that were “soft” to
begin with.  Let me explain.

When you’re tabling or whatever for voter registrations, college campuses are prime territory, for some obvious reasons.  They’re full of young people who just reached voting age, just moved away from home, are probably a little more politically aware than most people, etc.  Great place to get new registrations.  It’s also a great place to get registrations that will fall off the rolls within three or four years.  If they’re not constantly replaced with new soliciting, your numbers will fall back toward what they were before.  In this 2003-2006 period, we identified some hotspots of large losses that we could easily blame on campus soliciting from around 2000 that was discontinued later.

Conclusion:  For soliciting to make a difference in registration numbers, it must be sustained.  There is no such thing as “finished the job”.

Notice that Roseanne’s announcement of her candidacy shows no effect on our numbers.  This would generally contradict the notion that ANY publicity is good, but the impression she gave in the media might have been just a little too comical.

Our numbers might have actually picked up a little due to Stein’s nomination and the subsequent campaign, or that little jump could just be statistical noise.

Also likely to be statistical noise is the slight drop in absolute numbers that might happen (in the absence of strong influences) in the February odd-numbered year report, which often includes results of a lot of roll-cleaning.  Small parties are likely to show a bit more drop from roll-cleaning because of #3 cited above, but it’s usually not a big deal by itself.

Y’all are welcome to point out any historical events I’ve forgotten in that chart, of course.  I’m not aware of everything going on in the state at all times, to say the least.  I suspect that there were candidate campaigns that came and went, influencing these numbers.  There are some things I’m pretty sure of, though, from what I’ve seen:

(1)  As good as it is to have people hitting the street soliciting registrations, my own county has had little of this over the years. Certainly such activities do not account for the jumps of 30-40% that occurred in 2000-2003.  Without any strong registration drives, my county followed roughly the same pattern as the state overall in registration stats. I therefore conclude that the “air war” of broad attention in the media is far more important for getting people to register with one party versus another.

(2)  The msm really learned their lesson after Nader 2000 and Camejo 2003.  Never again will they give a “third” party free publicity in ways that they control easily.  Ever since the last gasp of “spoiler” talk in 2004 died out, mentions of “third” parties on tv have been scarcer than hand-written letters or news anchors who know what they’re talking about.

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(3)  Wherever possible, free noise on the internet should be tried for, as I pointed out long ago.  It’s the mass medium that is least controlled by our rulers, which we can’t afford not to use to the max.

It’s a whole, lengthy subject in itself, and I’m really not the answer guy on this, but I’ll restate the obvious here anyway:

The internet is likely to make as big a change in our society as the printing press did centuries ago, and we’ve only seen the beginning of it.

A little more of the obvious:

As soon as our rulers notice something influential, they take control of it if they can.  They nearly always can.  It usually takes only money to do so.  If you try to solicit in the town square, they privatize the town square.  They can buy up all the major media.  If you actually prove to be effective with a popular web site or twitter feed, they have dozens of ways to pressure you or your host.

There’s something special about the internet, though.  Its anarchic nature is its attraction.  It would be useless if content were too restricted.  So they can kill it if they want to, but they can’t control it all.  Killing it doesn’t seem like a real option, since it’s very useful for banking, selling, and all those things our rulers love.

They can, however, identify certain hosts, certain applications, where rebellion might be beginning, and shut them down.  The answer is to keep moving, and keep it simple, so it’s easy to move.  Don’t get tied to one host, such as Facebook or Twitter, and keep what’s worth preserving on your own computer, and backed up.  Dependence on someone else’s server or software means you’ll lose it.

And don’t follow fashion.  Make your own fashion.  This will involve a lot more misses than hits, of course, as I’ve observed about genetic mutation and innovation in language.  For an analogy, let me take you back to pre-2007.  Remember how the crescendo of “reality” shows along the lines of Flip that house, plus general house porn, reached a peak just before the housing bubble burst?  Remember when it seemed like half the people you knew had a real estate license, almost as a fashion accessory?  My crystal ball (pulled directly out of my… sleeve) says that Facebook and Twitter are approaching that point.  If everyone’s doing it, that’s not the thing to invest your time in.  So what is?  The crystal ball is foggy there.

We filled up the Orange Circle for a while, adding a couple of thousand people to the millions protesting that day.  Here’s to all of you, remembering better times.  Some are no longer with us.

Y’all remember?

blogs about writing
books about literature
songs about music
movies & plays about show biz
PhDs in education

I got to this subject by writing about political activity; just trying to encourage my associates to think a little more about how to communicate effectively.  To that end, another rant.  But first I’ll try to cover some principles about the “descriptive” vs “prescriptive” non-war.  Let’s see how fast we can get through the obvious stuff.

(1)  There is no “original” form of any language (except an artificial one, like Esperanto).  There was no Englishman at the Tower of Babel who originated his language.  There was no Adam or Eve speaking some “original” language.  Those are fables, and not very good ones at that.  If you don’t accept this, go read your fundie tracts.  You won’t like my blog at all.

(2)  Languages in use today all evolved from earlier languages, seamlessly.  There was no defining moment between Latin and Italian, or Middle English and modern English.  Reading anything written 200 years ago, or even watching a film made 80 years ago, should make it fairly obvious that language is always changing.

(3)  All the older languages were quite diverse.  What you see in one ancient book, like the Iliad or one of the Vedas, is a snapshot of one dialect, as written by one writer or group of writers, frozen whenever people began preserving manuscripts of it.  Every pattern of speech habits common to some group that has been named as a “language” has presumably taken many forms, whether examples of them survive or not.

(4)  As more gets recorded in a language, and more people view what is recorded, it changes more slowly.  I’m told that a modern Greek reading Homer is about comparable to me reading Chaucer.  One is 2,800 years old, the other is 600 years old. Greek has had a
sizeable body of literature and literate people much longer than English, hence the slower change.

(5)  With sound recording, and easy access to it, language should be changing even more slowly now.  With mass communication, the general trend is toward more uniformity.  Much as some writers decry diversity in language, they would have had to put up with far more of it in earlier times, once they wandered 30 miles or so from their home villages.

Item #4 above is just a corollary to a general principle in anthropology that education stifles innovation.  This might seem counterintuitive to someone who has swallowed propaganda from “entrepreneurs” who want us to worship their kind of “innovation” (“Let us destroy natural systems and societies to make money.  It’s PROGRESS!”), and thinks of
“innovation” as something always good, always showing skill or savvy of some kind.

It’s important to remember just how many things the word “innovation” can cover.  A new way of whistling, tying a bundle, or making soup is innovation.  It might be a random variation, showing no skill at all, and it’s like genetic mutation:  There are millions of “failures” for every “success”.

Just google for a list of slang from the mid-20th century.  You’ll see tons of linguistic innovations that have died quiet deaths, and a few that have survived 50 years or so.  Just to make it onto a list like this, for instance:  http://www.fiftiesweb.com/fashion/slang.htm , a word had to be used by a few hundred people at least.

Most linguistic innovations die long before that;
whenever a five-year-old finds out a more effective way to say something, or what the word he just used in an odd way means to other people.

There’s where the “descriptivist” and “prescriptivist” points of view can arise.  Is the five-year-old using the word WRONG, or just using it in a new way?  Let’s take a trivial example.

If I call a dog a “cat” in the fifties slang sense, is that an error, or am I just recognizing him as a personality anthropomorphically?  It depends on how the hearer understands it, of course.  That can depend on context, perception of the speaker’s attitude, whether the hearer is aware of that bit of slang, all kinds of things.  The “prescriptivist” is more likely to point out the confusion such a usage can make, and mention an old editor’s rule:  “Don’t use slang.”  The “descriptivist” doesn’t point to any old rules, but just records the fact that someone used that word in that way.

When the “prescriptivist” says “This is against the rules!”, the “descriptivist” says:  “But there aren’t any rules in how people use language.  All we can do is look for patterns in what we observe.”  The two have very different purposes in mind.  The “descriptivist” is a linguist who wants to understand how language works.

The “prescriptivist” is not playing around with theories (if smart), but wants to get the job of communicating done.  The “prescriptivist” is, most emphatically, NOT a linguist.  It’s the difference between a climate scientist and a sailor:  It’s not that a certain wind or current doesn’t exist, it’s just not very smart to ride it if that’s not where you want to go.

Between the linguist and the user of language might lie the lexicographer and grammarian, who make reference books and explanations to inform users of what seems to be common, or uncommon, practice with a language.  Such books change a great deal every 50 years or so, and always have.

I love to read about what linguists study (when it’s accessible to the layman), but it doesn’t get my flyers or emails written.  It doesn’t make any new converts to my political beliefs.  To communicate with people, you need to use a language that is already understood by large numbers, in a way that makes the listener identify with the speaker. Avoiding distraction in what you say or write is a big part of that.

To illustrate, let’s take a couple of examples from this phony war:
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DECIMATE

Y’all know my opinion of this from an earlier post.  I know of one lexicographer who wants to allow the “completely destroy” meaning into the dictionary, based on how commonly it’s used.  That is, of course, the arbiter of inclusion in a dictionary.  But for the time being, as long as there are minimally educated people around, the “deci” in that word will always remind us of its primary meaning, and make dissonance whenever we hear it used otherwise.  It distracts people from whatever point you’re trying to get across.  What is your reason for using “decimate” rather than “destroy”, anyway?  If all you mean is “destroy”, why not use the much more common, easily understood, “destroy”?
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IRREGARDLESS

This is one where the “prescriptivist”, or a troll playing one, might say, “It’s NOT A WORD!”  That’s ridiculous, of course it’s a word.  It’s a silly word, that marks the user as a silly person.  A composite of “irrespective” and “regardless”, it might have originated as a joke, a deliberate malapropism.  Enough people didn’t get the joke that it became common for a while, and now the user makes himself a joke.  It’s part of the language, but that doesn’t mean you should use it if you want to be taken seriously.

With all that in mind, here are some additions to my list of things that might send a different message from what you want to send with your language.

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Message #1:  “I’m using weasel words to sell you something”

The ad biz has made more innovations in language than I care to count, some of which have gone mainstream, but it’s not good to sound like a slick salesman when you’re trying to sell serious ideas.  It’s really best to avoid weasel words of quantity like:

“use up to four times less” (from a Charmin commercial)
(WTF is that supposed to mean, anyway?)

“98% fat free”
(How is this different from “2% fat”?)

“up to 70% off!”  (“Up to” of course specifies only an upper limit, not a lower limit.  Zero is included in that range.)

“as little as..”  (likewise, specifies a lower limit, but no upper limit)

“upwards of…”  (trying to give the impression that the number continues on up for some distance, when it might actually stop just the tiniest bit above the number specified)

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Message #2:  “I want to sound enthusiastic and supportive of something, or want to emphasize something in my speech, but I don’t have the wit to do so.”

“So” has several uses in our language.  For some people, it ends every declarative sentence.  For some, “about so” accompanies a gesture indicating dimensions.

Probably related to the latter, it’s also used as follows:

“I am SO proud to be here with you today.”  “It was SO good of you to invite me.”  “This issue is SO important.”

How important is it?

The grey among us remember this as one of Johnny Carson’s stock routines:

Those with less wit are unable to complete the routine.  Don’t start what you can’t finish, ok?

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Message #3:  “I am trained in the pretentious, bullying, deceptive ways of management.

Much has been written about management speak.  Like five year-olds, business managers are a rich source of innovation in language.  You can explore it here:  http://unsuck-it.com/  If you want to avoid sounding like the guy who laid people off or that HR manager who thinks you go to the bathroom too often during work, you might want to take note of the general characteristics of their language use:

(1)  Nonsense, but it sounds forceful:  “giving 110%”

(2)  Using more words than necessary (a habit probably formed by trying to look productive):  “at a rapid pace” rather than “fast”.

(3)  Making a new word, or a new meaning for an old word, when completely unnecessary.  This might be done for several reasons:

●  Ignorance:  using “impact” as a verb because management clowns could never figure out how to use “affect”.

●  Attempt to appear to have esoteric knowledge:  “disincentivize” for “discourage”,

●  Attempt to glorify something:  “proactive” and “dynamic” sprinkled randomly, “personal growth” for taking on more duties.

(4)  This might not be any more common with management types than elsewhere, but beware of using “get” for “understand”. It’s often used in a bullying way.  This use of “get” has been around much longer than I have, as in “get the joke”, but it seems to have exploded in recent times.  Maybe it began with ESTies back in the 70s, and expanded from there.  Anyone who disagrees with you or doesn’t understand your nonsense doesn’t “get” it.  Such usage will not get you any friends.

A nice essay about how people in power communicate is here:  http://nancyfriedman.typepad.com/away_with_words/2012/05/speaking-truth-about-power.html

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Message #4:  “I don’t know what I’m saying.”

●  I subscribe to what is generally a very good lefty newsletter, and was very disappointed to read this in it a while back:

“Egyptian women involved in the struggle to break away from the Mubarak client state of the Empire, are now rebelling from bullies who sexually harass them in the streets.  This is a welcome sign, women having suffered more as a consequence of their appearing in public to protest, finally receiving the support of many Egyptian men, with whom they’ve stood toe to toe in the democracy struggle.”

I’ll ignore, for this bit, whether “from” is the right preposition to follow “rebelling”, and the superfluous comma.

When people are “toe to toe”, they are in opposition.  The writer was probably thinking of “shoulder to shoulder”, but that’s such a tired cliché that it might have been purged from the writer’s conscious vocabulary.

●  I’ve seen more than one person use “in lieu of”  when they must have been thinking “in view of” (“lieu” is the French word for “place”.  Really, really not the same thing.)

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●  “…much less…”  in a place that really calls for “…not to mention…”:  .
“To change our Country, much less the World, we must first change ourselves.”

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●  “At any rate..”
Yes, it’s a very well-established practice to use “at any rate” for “anyway”, “at least”, or “in any case”.  That doesn’t mean it’s right.  A “rate” is a speed, price, or some quantity linked to another quantity.  If that’s not what you’re talking about, it’s not the word to use if you want to avoid dissonance.  The following example, stolen from somewhere, is one that I would call “wrong” though the whole world might be against me:  “You live and learn. At any rate, you live.”

●  “disingenuous” for “lying” (and generally overusing the word)
Look it up.  It’s not exactly the same, but some people think the two are interchangeable.  A “polite” way of calling someone a liar, as if you come from a culture where too much candor would be cause for a duel.  There’s enough lying that needs to be called out nowadays that you may as well clean up your chosen weapons and keep them handy.  I keep a pair of banana cream pies in a nice mahogany case just for that.

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None of this, of course, should be cause to suppress any creative impulses you might have in your language.  Euphemisms and malapropisms are harmless ways of joking around, if they’re original, but repeating the same old figures of speech, especially malapropisms, gets old.

Much-circulated quote, probably not from Descartes, but often attributed to him:

“Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they’re in good company.”

Happy bantering, all.

I’m the contracted “kitchen curmudgeon”.  I don’t often do unicorns and rainbows, to say the least.  But there IS an upbeat message here.  Gotta be patient.

You’re undoubtedly sick of seeing Dem triumphalism in post-election posts as you browse.  You won’t get that here.  You’ll also get no respect at all for the Reps.  You’ve learned that by now.

Let’s get the Captain Obvious stuff out of the way.  First,  Steven Hill wrote a pretty good editorial here:  http://www.sacbee.com/2012/11/16/4990045/california-electoral-reform-fails.html that bears out what I’ve been saying about the Prop 14, “top two”
primary.  The short version:

(1)  Was supposed to make “more moderate” office holders.  We now have a two-thirds Dem legislature in both houses.  (Historically, this consistently leads to the Dems becoming more “moderate”, i.e., Republican.  Just what everybody wanted, right?  For more on this, see The Ratchet Effect:  http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org/stopme/chapter02.html)

(2)  Was supposed to lead to “more choice” on the ballot in some way as yet unexplained.

(3)  Has led, as predicted, to vote-splitting, making bizarre, random results in the primaries.

If there are any Prop 14 believers left out there, you have my unqualified contempt.

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For the second bit of obvious, click over to Ian Welsh’s bit here:  http://www.ianwelsh.net/some-personal-thoughts/

The short version:

The people who sadden me are left-wingers who carried Obama’s water, who I know know better.  I know they know his record.  I know they know where this is all leading.

In Welsh’s essay and the comments that follow, there is a nice expression of disgust with single-issue mercenaries and assorted other sellouts that I can parphrase thus:
“As long as His Majesty mouths the right words about gay rights, women’s health, or immigration, he can prosecute as many whistleblowers and kill as many civilians in Pakistan as He pleases.  I’ll be happy in Guantanamo, as long as abortion is legal.”

I’ll just leave this here:

I’ve covered a lot of obvious here before, and it doesn’t take much to get me sympathizing with people who don’t vote at all, considering it hopeless.

But here’s the but…. at the risk of, oh just a BIT of exaggeration, I HAVE BEEN TO THE MOUNTAINTOP, AND I HAVE SEEN THE PROMISED LAND!

This vision didn’t come in the presidential election, that’s for sure.  It didn’t come in any reform to our laughable body of election laws.  It didn’t even come in anything that won on the ballot.  It certainly didn’t come in anything that I voted on myself.

It came with seeing the result, in the vote count, in an election that I worked on myself.  I didn’t do a lot of work, and there weren’t a whole lot of votes produced.  On the face of it, my candidate’s tally was unimpressive.  But if you know the story behind it, it’s something different.

My candidate came in sixth out of twelve candidates, running for three seats.  Now most of you know who I’m talking about.  If you look at that list of twelve candidates, and remove all the ones who were bankrolled by either Chevron, the police union, or a couple of deep-pocketed developers, my candidate finished first.  As it happened, she wasn’t a whole lot behind the winners, considering how many votes per dollar she got versus the others.

It means that something is within reach.  You won’t get there from just voting (Voting is irrational, anyway.  See:  http://warisacrime.org/content/case-irrational-voting)  You won’t get there from watching the media or just reading about candidates who are already campaigning.  You won’t get there by just donating to what sounds like a good cause.

You get there by acting like a citizen.  You step away from the keyboard and go to SOME kind of community meeting with SOME kind of regularity.

You get acquainted with the people who might care about what you care about.

You get to know the candidates years before they emerge as candidates.  “The world is run by those who show up.”  If you’re active in your community, you’ll eventually see candidates for local office emerge from among the people you know.  Some will be ignorable, so ignore them.  Once in a while, a good one comes along.  Your job is to encourage that occasional good one.

You’ll know a candidate because you know the person.  There won’t be anything magical, or much that’s “charismatic” about the person.  That’s generally true of honest people.  It might make you do something crazy, like give up an afternoon walking along a street handing out paper.

Money can buy commercials on tv, and thereby bribe the media. It can produce glossy mailers.  It can buy flashy web sites, and analysts to slice & dice every issue to choose the most popular angle to take on it.

But it can’t buy people who’ve been inspired, disillusioned, impressed and jaded so many times, back & forth, up & down, that they’ve found a balance and just trudge along, doing some little job to the end of the next block, but doing it right.  That’s me, and that’s not for sale.

Sure, they can hire people to do it, but the ones they hire won’t care.  They might put the flyers on mailboxes and get the campaign in trouble.  They might dump the flyers in the trash and just tell their handlers they distributed them.  They might leave paper flying around on the ground as loose litter.  They can’t hire people who will believe, without any hyperbolic nonsense, that this candidate is the best they’ve seen for a long time, and deserving the best from every little bit of work they can do, and then will just do the work, without doing anything embarrassing..

You don’t always win.  Far from it, but you’ll see results in your work.  If nothing else, that not-too-impressive vote total will remind those who bought their offices that somebody is watching while they’re up on the dais.  It just gains a little respect for your cause, and that’s the beginning.

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Continuing is up to all of us.

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“Great!… but wait…”, I hear you say, “Didn’t we eradicate evil back in the 90s after the Three Strikes law was passed?  Aren’t all the career criminals who were trying to kill Batman and Superman locked up to watch color teevee in our luxurious prison system?”

Ah, naïve little voter, didn’t you watch Dirty Harry?  Criminals have all kinds of legal technicalities that help them evade the law at every turn.  We need MORE LAWS, HARSHER LAWS!

Even with the NDAA allowing the gummint to lock up anyone, at any time, forever, without showing evidence to anyone, there still is evil afoot on a massive scale.  It’s called “Human Trafficking”.

Apparently, there is a large trade in people being kidnapped, beaten, extorted, defrauded, and generally abused by their tormenters, in order to sell their services, including sexual services, and often the victims are underage.  So forget about Bankers that own the government and rob you, mortgage scammers that have destroyed the economy, warmongers, and fossil fuel industries that keep us addicted to destroying the planet.  This one involves CHILDREN and SEX, so it must be the GREATEST EVIL IN THE WORLD.

They must be Satan-worshippers like the McMartin and Little Rascals convicts who got off on technicalities years ago.  And much of it is done by foreigners, violating immigration laws, so you KNOW it must be super-evil.

Yes, children and sex, “some as young as four years old”, we are often reminded, citing one case in Cambodia.  There must be a massive market for this in California.  How many of you would jump at a chance for sex with a four-year-old, if the price were right?  Yeah, I know my readers.

So here’s the real problem:  When California prosecutors come across someone who has kidnapped, beaten, sometimes murdered, extorted, blackmailed, intimidated, probably handled illegal drugs in the process, to engage in human trafficking, our poor prosecutors can’t think of any serious crimes to charge them with.

All they have, under California law, is a wimpy “labor trafficking” or “sex trafficking of a minor” to get them for, with a weak 5 to 8 years of color teevee, depending on the circumstances.  The feds, of course can hit them with life sentences, depending on some variables, and it’s usually the feds that prosecute them, but what are our state and local prosecutors to do?  Shouldn’t they get their piece of the political grandstanding chance to fight evil?

Oh, and there’s something else:  sexual predators USING THE INTERNET!

You’ve seen To Catch a Predator, so you know all about this.  Thank God for reality tv.  The truth might never get out there without it.

So here’s where you come in, brave voter:  This November, you’ll see Prop 35, the “Human Trafficking Penalties Initiative Statute” on your ballot.  You know by the title that it must be something against human trafficking, so it must be good.  No need to read any more.  Of course it will pass, since hardly anyone reads more than the title.

But if you want to be one of those super-sophisticated voters who look into it a little more, it’s all on the web here:  http://vig.cdn.sos.ca.gov/2012/general/pdf/text-proposed-laws-v2.pdf (Scroll to page 100.)  You’ll see that its real name is the “Californians Against Sexual Exploitation Act (CASE Act)”, which I’ve already translated for you in the title to my post.  It fights evil, that’s all you need to know.  Ok, ok, you want to know more?  Sheesh.  Ok, go to the title & summary here:  http://vig.cdn.sos.ca.gov/2012/general/pdf/35-title-summ-analysis.pdf.  I KNOW you’re not going to read the actual text of the law.  Major provisions are listed:

(1)  Increases penalties for Human Trafficking

(2)  Collects fines into a fund that will mostly go to people who provide, or pretend to provide, victim services (don’t know one way or the other), who clearly are agitating for this new law because they can’t get any tax money out of the legislature.  (This couldn’t possibly give them a financial incentive to coach witnesses for the prosecution in the course of their work.  They’re professionals, just like the child counselors for the Little Rascals kids.  You can trust them.)

(3)  Requires a sex trafficker to register as a sex offender

(4)  Requires registered sex offenders to inform authorities in writing about their internet activity (new email address, for instance) within 24 hours.

(5)  Prohibits certain kinds of evidence from being used against victims

(6)   Requires human trafficking training for police officers (provided, no doubt, by the corporations involved in #2).

Now, you know how something like this gets on the ballot, right?  In California, it’s usually one or two big donors who pay the signature-gathering industry a million bucks or more.  In this case, the guy with the deep pockets is Chris Kelly, Facebook’s chief privacy officer during its rise to world dominion, so you know he’s a guy who really cares about privacy rights, and all kinds of human rights.  That wouldn’t have anything to do with item #4, would it?  Yeah, this is a guy who really knows about people’s behavior on the web, how many people have a dozen or more email addresses that they forget about, how many facetious conversations happen online, how hard it is to find anything incriminating on anyone online unless they’re truly a dangerous criminal.

Notice also how #4 doesn’t specify “sex traffickers”, but ALL registered sex offenders.  It includes that guy you knew in college who got caught streaking across the quad.  If he lets more than 24 hours go by before informing the police about his new email address, or the new alias he chose for playing WOW, he’s going into the pokey.  But that’s ok, you didn’t like him anyway.  Then there’s the drunk who relieved himself in an alley because the line at the rest room was too long.  Oh… that was you?  Well, better keep those form letters handy, for whomever you’re supposed to report to for the rest of your life.

You KNOW this is going to pass.  Dontcha love democracy?

Yeah, yeah, there’s that great Emma Goldman quote,

“If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.”

but if you accept her hypothesis, recent attempts to supress voting in some states are strong evidence that voting DOES accomplish something.

Then there’s the fear that registering to vote will make one subject to jury duty.  MYTH EXPLODED:  If you’re a U.S. citizen, they can get your name from any number of places for jury duty.  In California, they use DMV records, among other things.  I’ve known non-citizens who got jury summonses (and easily got out of them, of course).

No, I think it’s the lameness with which voting gets promoted in some circles.  Some people really give voting a bad name.

Most of you know by now that I do a lot of random surfing, just to see what’s out there.
My browser has a large collection of bookmarks about politics, language, personal blogs, all kinds of crap that I look through every so often.  Yes, much of it is stupid. Once in a while, the stupid is so dazzling and intense, so deep and unfathomable, that one must step back a bit, lest the abyss look back into you.This is from an Orange County fundie who seems to fancy herself a political blogger.  She is encouraging her readers to register and vote:

“In this world, there are few nations that allow their
people to vote as we are privileged to do so in this
blessed Republic of ours.”

Would I be taking a great leap to conclude that she’s homeschooled?

If the only encouragement to vote that I got were from someone who thought “few nations” in the world allowed people to vote, yes, that would work to discredit the idea to me, too.

Now, about the Tasmanians in the title…

We Mercans have some things to be proud of in our history, but most of it is long ago.  200 years ago, letting ordinary people vote to elect their nominal rulers was a pretty radical idea for most of the world.  No more.  Nearly every country has some kind of elections from time to time, and in most of them, they have about as much meaning and effectiveness as they do here, which is not saying much.

But SOME of them have better ideas.

I bugged you all recently about reading up on the situation in Anaheim,
and it really ties in with this.  Very closely.  Anaheim holds City Council elections in the usual way for most cities in the U.S.:  at-large, first-past-the-post.  It means that if there are five seats on the Council and 30 candidates, the top five get seated, even if those five might get a tiny percentage of the votes overall.  It lends itself very well to vote-splitting.  “Conservative” interests, for instance, can put up extra fake “liberal” candidates to split the vote, making a majority “liberal” city elect all “conservative” Council members.  Easiest thing in the world, if one has a good political machine.  (The old “spoiler” possibility that Greens are often accused of.)

If you read much about the current troubles in Anaheim, you’ll notice that people tie the lack of police accountability to the fact that Anaheim elects most of its City Council members from the wealthy hill country, far from the bulk of the city.

The only solution to this that’s been put forward (by an ACLU lawsuit and a possible charter amendment) is to elect them by district, rather than at-large.

Is that really the best anyone can come up with, if you’re going to go through all the trouble of amending the city charter?

Yes, it might make some improvement in the system, but it would be no less subject to the vote-splitting described above.  No one seems to be talking about anything better than first-past-the-post.

While election by district might assure that someone from a given district gets elected, there is no assurance that it would be someone with opinions representative of a majority of the people in that district.  Even if residency in a district coincides with opinion today, it
might not tomorrow.  And districts can be gerrymandered.  And even if they’re not, there’s no way you can draw a district such that there won’t be someone who THINKS it’s gerrymandered.  And what of points of view that represent a substantial, but non-majority fraction of the people, if those people are spread evenly across several districts?  Shouldn’t there be ONE seat out of five, six, or eight for someone representing that point of view?

Oh yeah, the Tasmanians…

Greens in California have prescribed a different system for electing their county councils (what other parties call “central committees”), called “single transferable vote” (STV).  It’s a way of getting something like proportional representation without regard to party affiliation in a multi-seat election.   It’s written into our bylaws, but the Secretary of State has exercised her option to ignore our bylaws.  I don’t know the excuse that was given, but the usual excuse for not implementing any electoral reform is that it’s “too complicated”.  (The software for counting STV votes is already written, free and open-source, downloadable here:  http://www.openstv.org)

Here’s the text to which our bylaws refer, taken from the International IDEA Handbook of Electoral Design:  http://kitchenmudge.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/stv.pdf
and here’s the basic Wikipedia page about STV:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_transferable_vote

Yes, hard reading for some of you, isn’t it?  I’ve often found it a chore to explain to people, but it can be done.  I once prepared a 20-minute lecture with visual aids to do it, which I won’t duplicate here, but the salient points are:

- Votes for losing candidates are not wasted much, since they will be transferred to the …second or third choice on a voter’s ballot, and are more likely to ultimately count for a …winning candidate.

- Excess votes are not wasted, since they are also transferred to lower-ranked choices.

- The result is a pretty good representative cross-section of preferences among the whole ….electorate.

Now, how many of you even knew where Tasmania is before reading those descriptions of STV?  The Tasmanian House of Assembly has used this method for its elections since 1896.

Are we proud to be dumber than Tasmanians?

For a little history of STV in the U.S., see:  https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/polit/damy/articles/Brief%20History%20of%20PR.htm
The short version:  Quite a few cities in the U.S. adopted it in the early 20th century, with good results.  It was abandoned later when the political machines mounted major offensives to regain the monopolies it broke up.

Well, not exactly.  It might be my wisdom, but that doesn’t mean you should expect a helluva lot, ok?

About a year ago, the last time I wrote much about internal operations in the GP (Chickens and Eggs), I said in an offhand way:  “There ARE ways of boosting our registration and participation with small, local groups, but that’s for another discussion.”

If you’re not a Green, and you don’t have any particular cause that you like to accost strangers on the street about, you’ll be bored with this.  Go to Uncategorized Humor.  I’ve
added a few things there recently.

For the rest….

Someone recently remarked, on gpoc_discuss, on how voter turnout among registered Greens is especially low, even compared to those registered with other “third” parties, not to mention the big ones.  This comes up from time to time, whenever someone bothers to look at those numbers who didn’t before.

The turnout numbers in the last primary, from my own county:

Overall ………………………… …..26.5%

Republican …………………. …….34.5%
American Independent …. …..27.7%
Democratic…………………………27.5%
Libertarian ………………………..20.2%
Green ………………………………..14.7%
Peace & Freedom ……………….13.7%
Americans Elect …………………..8.1%

They don’t seem to give turnout numbers for NPPs (“No Party Preference”, what they used to call “Decline to State”), but I’d expect them to be not far from the turnout for AI, since most of the people registered with “American Independent” thought they were registering “Independent”.

There are several things that might explain these numbers, but I simply don’t know which ones have the most weight.  I’ll just list them quickly and then get on with what I really want to write about.

(1)  Notice that Reps had the highest turnout.  It’s a big party, with lotsa media attention, and though Romney had the nomination pretty well wrapped up by the time California held its primary, there were still people who wanted to register an opinion about it, or didn’t understand their own party processes enough to know that it was a done deal.

The Dems, of course, didn’t have a contested presidential primary, so their turnout was even lower than with the faux party AI.  I’ve remarked before on how many dumbass Americans can only think “presidential election” whenever they hear the word “political”, as if the thousands of other things that people vote on every year, and thousands of non-electoral things people do, aren’t political.

(2)  AI, which is a stand-in here for NPPs, had higher turnout than the Dems.  This shows how more & more people with enough interest to vote are turning away from the big parties, but haven’t yet caught on to the potential value of “third” parties.

(3)  The four remaining “third” parties had much lower turnout than Reps, Dems, or AI, with the Libertarians on top among the four, and American Elect on the bottom.  The Libs are a rather old and well-established party with some money behind them, and have a little more enduring prominence in people’s consciousness.  Americans Elect was a silly flash in the pan that probably dredged up a lot of very unengaged people to register with them.

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Some features of most “third” parties:

a.  Our registrants tend to be younger on average.  This means that they move around a lot more, and don’t necessarily keep their voter registration up-to-date.  So there will be a larger number than usual who are on the registration rolls but don’t live there any more.

b.  Our candidates, even when we have a contested presidential primary, just don’t get any publicity to speak of.

c.  A certain unknown number of voters simply mark the wrong party by mistake, or mark a party at random, or mark a party as a joke, on the registration form.  If such things are evenly distributed among the parties, they will show up as MUCH larger, percentage-wise, with the small parties.  These are likely to be unengaged people who are unlikely to vote.

d.  I guess, but don’t have any way of knowing, that many people register with a “third” party just as a gesture of protest, and are not really interested in participating in the electoral system.  How many this profile might fit is a complete unknown, but I suspect
that it’s significant.
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ONWARD…

Ok, that’s my explanation of the turnout numbers.  Let’s get on with what might be done about them, and about a few other things.  There’s a reason for giving this the “Why don’t the Greens…” title.  If you read my original post of that title from years ago, it’s mainly an explanation, aimed at noobs, but a review for anyone else, about people expecting us to perform like a well-funded, professionally run org, and what a joke that is.  In a similar vein, much of this post might be a list of what we don’t do, but COULD, if we just had some more resources to play with.  Maybe this is what it feels like for one of those academics who end a research paper with:  “We don’t really know anything, this is just a teaser, and my only conclusion is that more research is needed here, here, and here, so please give me some funding.”

…except that I’m past wanting to pursue any projects myself.  I’ve done most of this, and rarely participate much now.

So this is about all those projects that come up from time to time as ideas for raising GP registration, participation, candidate recruitment, generally getting the good name of the Party into people’s heads, etc.

I’ve made a list of what we’ve done locally, what we haven’t done, what they seem to require, and my observed or imagined results from each.  If any of my readers are really interested, maybe it could spark some discussion.  Comment freely.  Especially, remind me of what I’ve forgotten to include.

Here’s a crude table of all this.  Click on it to view it full-size.  The activities listed in the left column are in no particular order.  A lot of the numbers I’ve assigned are pretty arbitrary and open to discussion.

First, I’ll explain the “Requirements” along the top.

Money – Duh.  The amount required can vary widely with some of these activities, depending on lotsa variables.  Think of a number I put here as a multiple of the integer below it: “1″ can be tens of dollars, “10″ can be tens of thousands or more.
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Specialized Labor – By this, I mean labor from people who have a talent or skill commanded by a pretty small minority of people.  The smaller that minority, and the greater the number of hours required from such a person, the larger the number assigned here.
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Less-Specialized Labor – Labor from people who probably can be trained to do the task in an hour or less, though greater skill might be desirable.  This is a broad generality, of course.  It might be the common, but not universal, skill of talking to people without alienating them, ushering, or the simpler aspects of food service.  Maybe just folding and envelope stuffing, or getting a sticker on straight without smearing the print.

Infrastructure – This is a general requirement that the org have its doodoo together, especially in communication matters.  Does someone answer the phone and check the PO Box regularly?  Do you have a sizeable, well-maintained mailing list?  Do people actually read the emails that come from other members?  Does the web site get updated regularly?  Do the people answering communications know where to refer people for answers about the project?  Can you raise some funds, and do you have a clear, efficient decision-making process for spending them?  The more an activity relies on such things, the higher the number I’ve put here.

Prep Time – Pretty self-explanatory.  How much time does it need from the idea to its material manifestation?

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Leadership – Regardless of how major decisions are made, to what degree does it require a single go-to person to decide a million details that MUST be decided immediately, before the project stalls?

Presupposed Literature – This is simply a notation that, in addition to other require-ments, It’s assumed that some hand-out literature has been produced for the activity.  Something that tells basically who you are, what you’re about, how to find your web site, contact info & such.
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Now, the rant.  One thing at a time:
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Big Show – By this I mean something that an unusually large venue needs to be secured for.  Something that you’ll want to draw a big crowd to, in the hundreds, at least.  The GPOC has done this a couple of times on its own, for visiting presidential and statewide candidates, and a couple of times in cooperation with a coalition for a collection of speakers from various orgs.  It means a snailmailing, and probably a phoning, to your core list of a few hundred, at least.  You might need a talented graphics person to make something attention-grabbing for the mailer.  Broader advertising might be called for if you can do it.  You want the crowd as large as possible because you’re hoping for some media attention, not to mention donations for the cause.

Refreshments might be served.  A program of entertainers might be scheduled.  It’s a big deal.  You need a leader to settle all kinds of questions quickly.  It needs to be someone with a talent for coordinating and dealing with people.  You also need a few less-skilled volunteers to handle setup, food, phoning, envelope stuffing, etc.  You also need money for the venue, liability insurance, maybe rental of furnishings, maybe to pay some of the performers.  It demands a lot, which is why we haven’t done it very much.

Success, by various measures of funds raised, media attention, info added to mailing list, building personal acquaintances, etc. has been widely variable with Big Shows.  Much depends on timing, such that the topics addressed are hot at the moment and people will want to show up (Also, see My Holiday Post about timing.)

(Hosting GPCA assemblies and gatherings is almost a Big Show, but without the broad local advertising, and not so much worry about entertainment or public attention.  Much of the format is cut & dried at the state level.   It’s still a helluva lot of work.  We’ve done this four times that I can remember.)
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Demo – Though I’ve rarely heard of a political party, just as such, organizing a demo, the GPOC has participated in single-issue demos in coalition with other groups a lot.  Maybe I should call this the “Little Show”.  Usually no venue to rent, no big star making an appearance (though that’s always welcome).  Sign-making might be the only preparation, though costumes and more elaborate props can be good.  We all do it from time to time.  Participants are usually gathered by email and “social media”, which requires some infrastructure.  Some small bit of leadership is required to take responsibility for the where, when, and theme of the demo, and to be a “for more info” contact in the announcements.

I consider literature a requirement, though many people don’t seem to agree with me on this.  Casual passers-by usually don’t know how to interpret your signs and appearance, and will make up their own stories just to fit you into their own worldviews.  You need something you can easily hand them.  If you’re disgruntled, explain in your flyer what your gruntles are, who has them, and how you expect your rightful gruntles to be restored to you.  Otherwise, you’re leaving it entirely to the observer (and the godawful media) to explain who you are and what you want.

Success is usually difficult to measure for a demo, unless you get some media attention.  Demos succeed at that only when there’s something really attention-grabbing about them, either some disorder that would make the news by itself, or timing with a big deal going on elsewhere in the world that the media would still want to report on without the local demo.

What’s not measurable is the effect it might have on passers-by.  That all depends on how good your theater and handouts are. I have an impression, which you all might or might not share, that any demo with less than about 20 participants just looks pitiful, and can be counterproductive.

What’s sometimes possible with a well-targeted demo is effect on a nearby occupant of the site of the demo.  When we wanted people to boycott Shell, we gathered around Shell stations, obviously.  How much news of our demo got back to muckamucks at Shell is unknown, but you get the idea.

A minor objective for demos is building the mailing list and personal acquaintances among those who show up.  Even the smallest can have some success in those ways.
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Direct Action – Often confused with a demo, but very different in purpose.  At the least, it’s meant to force some media attention, but beyond that, it usually means helping a friend or hurting an enemy in a very direct, material way.  It often means breaking some kind of “rule” and/or getting arrested.  Examples might include:

- the above-mentioned demo around a Shell station, if it actually reduces their sales

- feeding the poor, legally or not

- going into a debate or conference where one was not invited

- blocking people engaged in a nefarious activity (such as a trade conference or eviction)

Locally, we haven’t done this much, as the GPOC, though some of our members have acted this way under other banners.  It happens more in other places.

It usually means having some kind of plan, so there’s some leadership required.

Literature is good to have, just so the media don’t have any excuses for getting your message wrong.  Other requirements vary widely with the exact nature of what’s planned,
right on up to hospital bills for getting beat up and extensive legal support.
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Tabling – The GPOC has done this a lot in the past, and still does.  It can be a very big deal, where you have to pay for a booth and worry about staffing it for days, or it can be a quick grab-my-box-of-crap-and-show-up thing.  It requires not only literature, but maybe some eye-catching props.  Someone in the org normally needs to see that tablers are supplied with current literature.  This is the minimal leadership that it will require.  The maximal leadership it might require is scheduling many volunteers to staff it for a long time, and negotiating with the hosts for getting a booth, paying for it, what rules to observe, etc.

It’s purposes are

1… to get your cause, whatever it is, out in front of people
2… to BUILD YOUR MAILING LIST

Tabling is one of very few situations in which you meet people who might come from anywhere, who might show some interest, AND there’s a table with pen and paper right there that you can stick in front of them.  Every table needs a mailing list signup sheet.  This is a big deal, if you’re an ongoing project.  Email and the occasional bit of snailmail or phoning are the only ways to stay in touch with people who might participate later:  the only way to recruit new people, unless they’ve already come to a meeting.

Often, you need to be invited to the events where tabling is appropriate.  That’s where the infrastructure comes in.  The public needs to know how to contact you.  Someone needs
to take such invitations and refer them to people ready to table.

Often, you need to inquire about whether tabling is welcome at a gathering that you know about.  More infrastructure and leadership.  I once tried to maintain, and gave away several times, a list of recurring local events where tabling might be welcome.  I’ve heard nothing about this list for several years, and stopped maintaining it because no interest seemed to be shown in it.

Success at tabling is measured in how many people took your handouts, registered to vote, or signed onto your mailing list.  Results can vary widely.  When thinking about whether it’s worth the bother, gotta consider both the size and the interests of the crowd that will be there.
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Sidewalk soliciting – Can be done by one person who simply has some time, a little literature, some voter reg forms, and a general knowledge of what the party and/or candidate concerned is about.  Any public property with foot traffic can be the venue.

I did this a couple of times, targeting possible new voters at one end of a major crosswalk near a campus.  It was getting near the deadline to register to vote in a coming election, so that was my obvious pitch:  “Are you registered to vote?”  From there, I could register them, or explain the big “G” on my t-shirt, or hand them some literature about the party or candidate.  Pretty effective for the amount of time involved, but it needs to be getting near an election to give you a good opening line.

Never heard of anyone else doing this solo, locally.

We have done similar things in small groups at other times, taking sidewalk spots where people are going in toward a big gathering of some kind, but not lately.  We might still have a couple of those green vendor aprons for literature floating around.

Notice that I said “public property” above.  A visiting candidate from up north was once surprised at getting kicked out of a mall for soliciting there.  The local culture can vary a lot about how Pruneyard gets interpreted,
and property managers around here aren’t very friendly to us.  That’s a whole can of worms that I’ve written about elsewhere.

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Door-to-door – two kinds:  Either you just leave literature on or near the door (Not the mailbox!), or you actually ring the doorbell and try to talk to someone.  The latter is very intrusive, and probably should only be done to a targeted list of people more likely than others to be interested.  It also demands personalities that can handle making people get out of the shower and hold the dog back to answer the door.  Kinda dicey.

Gathering the volunteers for walking is where infrastructure comes in, as with calling for a demo.  Producing literature suitable for the situation and targeting the people or neighborhood are where leadership comes in here.  We’ve done this for candidates and issue groups in the past, and presumably had SOME effect, but it’s difficult to measure.
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Speaking to groups – We had this as a major ongoing project at one time, years ago.  One of our members with telemarketing experience looked up all the high school social science teachers he could find and called them, offering to send speakers about the Party, political issues, whatever we could handle.  We had a few fairly competent speakers, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we generated some number of Green registrations in 2004 that way.

It fell apart as the people involved became largely unavailable, but was good while it lasted.  Success was limited by the number of decent speakers available during the business day, and somewhat by the non-computer capabilities of our telemarketer, who was also in poor health.

If we ever have such a combination of talents again, it could be a very worthy project.

It’s been a couple of years since the last time, but speaking opportunities can also happen at random.  A teacher or representative of some group might actually look us up and invite us to send a speaker to a classroom, club meeting, rally, or whatever.  This is where infrastructure really comes in.  How easy is it for someone to look us up and get a timely
response?
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Snailmailing – Lotsa variables in this one, in how many people you want to target, how much you know about their potential interest in what you’re pitching, how much money you want to put into it.  What’s probably NOT variable is that you need a pretty good degree of literacy and compositional understanding for producing the mailing piece.

Targeting the mailing list is where a high “infrastructure” requirement comes in.  A little general data processing knowledge is needed, and someone who reallly understands the nature of the list.

Maybe you’re only interested in raising money with the mailer, so you target past donors and others who’ve shown a lot more interest than most.

Maybe you want to advertise very broadly and don’t mind losing money on the mailing, hoping the response in other ways will make up for it.  Something like “all registered Greens” is a sure money-loser and will result in many postal returns, but “all registered Greens who voted in the last two elections” would be a fraction of that and generate
a much higher response rate, for instance.

Leadership is required.  Writing a timely mailing piece that will make people want to read it should be done by a very small committee.  If you do regular mailings, someone needs to keep a handle on fulfilling the conditions for keeping a bulk mailing license.

We’ve done this, in various ways over the years, with varying results.

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Phoning – no general-purpose literature to hand out here, but someone needs to compose a script for the phoning, and explain it to the people doing it.  The list needs to be targeted, just as with a mailing.  Bad phone numbers found in the course of the project need to be marked,
along with other notations, and sent back to the list keeper for coding.  This avoids wasting time in future mailings and phonings.

Phoning is second only to knocking on doors for its intrusiveness, so pleasant, stable personalities must be employed.

We’ve done this, again, in varying ways, with varying results.
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Web presence – Whole e-books are written, and whole courses taught, about promoting one’s brand on the web.  I suspect that much of what’s taught is nonsense, and a great deal depends on luck.  Do you have a slogan, graphic, or video that for inexplicable reasons people find entertaining enough to pass on to their friends?  That’s when something really catches fire on the web.

One thing that I know will NOT get attention on the web, except negative attention, is just someone standing in front of a  mic speaking for more than about three minutes, with very rare exceptions.  It would have to be an exceptionally talented speaker, with something really rare to say, and good production value.  I’ve seen far too many YouTube videos posted just for the sake of posting that will never get a broad audience because they are painful to watch, regardless of how well- intentioned the speaker might be.

Failing any viral luck, just having a web site at all obliges you to keep it current, and post new content once in a while.  Otherwise, no one has a reason to look at it more than once.  That can be one more damn thing for someone to keep track of from week to week, one more chore for someone to do.  We’ve often been very short of people for mudane chores like this.
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Some kind of forum for discussion among members can
be useful.  We have this in the form of a Yahoo group.  Other kinds of arrangements all have their pros & cons.  There’s also the broad announcement list for anyone who cares to subscribe.  I’ve written about this elsewhere, focused on listserves, but one can make a forum or bulletin board pretty easily, with a choice among many hosts.  What’s crucial with any such thing is that someone needs to take responsibility for it.  Look at it every day.  Police the spam and rudeness.  Help noobs with how to use it.  Hassle with the host when it screws up.  Who wants one more daily task?
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TV & Radio advertising – This might be a lot easier to arrange than many of us imagine (See How I Ran an Ad on Fox News), but we’ve never done this locally.

Someone would need to look up all the particulars and get acquainted with putting audio or video files in the format that the broadcasters like (probably with software most of us have already), as well as the process for buying time.  There might be many options.

Most important is having a good script that will get attention, send a message suitable to the audience being targeted, and be entirely within the image that the party, candidate, or whatever, wants to project.  The quality of the production is everything here.
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Print advertising – We’ve occasionally done this in the past, with no particular rate of success measured.  No money has been available for any big-circulation publications, but
there were occasions in the past when we got comped an ad (coalition projects).

Again, someone needs to specialize and pay attention to this.  Composing a nice graphic is a more common skill than composing a nice video, but it still takes some savvy.  When in doubt, it can be kept very simple, like “Contact your local Green Party here”, but that’s not much of an attention-grabber.  The possible effect of different words needs to be thought about carefully, and the attitude of someone flipping through the publication needs to be considered.
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Activism in other groups – This is an indirect way of building our good reputation among people who might be opinion leaders in their own groups.  Simple enough:  whatever you do in your community, do it well, and at some point break it to people that you’re a Green.  It can help the Party’s reputation and maybe gain us a few registrants and voters.  Many of us have done this for some years, and no approval from the Party is needed.  It’s a very freelance kind of activity, where each person finds a suitable niche.

One thing such activity probably WON’T  gain us is any volunteers working for the Party or its candidates.  If you’re mainly hanging with fellow activists, they probably have plenty on their plates already without trying to attend to internal Party matters.  On the extremely rare occasion, it might convince a fellow activist to run for office as a Green.

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Conclusion

What I’ve tried to do here is just make it clear to people who might propose the things above what they’re proposing.  Where leadership is required, you, the one proposing it, are likely to be anointed.  Lotsa potential for discussion and telling me I’m wrong here.  Have at it.

Orly Taitz came in fifth out of 24 candidates in the top two/jungle primary, or fourth out of 14 Republican candidates.  A good showing, certainly, but not as good as I was guessing a month ago.

Probably the biggest factor that I wasn’t considering at that time was the extremely low turnout.  Statewide figures don’t seem to be available yet, but in my own county (heavily Republican), turnout was about 26.5%.  This means that party regulars, frequent voters, would have been an unusually high proportion of the voters, and would lessen the effect of broad name-recognition, which I was expecting to work in Orly’s favor.

We can see the effect of the jungle primary, though, in contrast to the claims of Prop 14′s proponents:

(1)  that it would produce more moderate candidates in the general
…….(November) election

The second-place winner, who will go one-on-one against Feinstein in November, was Elizabeth Emken, promoted by the Rep Party machine, apparently, with an impressive mandate of 12.6% of the vote.  From what I see on her web site, the verbiage is pretty generic Rep Party stuff:  nothing moderate about it, unless your idea of “moderate” is “not wishing to completely abolish Social Security”.

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(2)  that it would increase voter interest and turnout

Tell me about the rabbits, George.

Look at the candidates for U.S. Senate on your sample ballot for the June primary.  24 candidates.  The same 24 are all on your ballot regardless of your party registration:
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14 Republicans
6 Democrats
2 Peace & Freedom
1 American Independent
1 Libertarian

This is sort of a condensed version of the Gubernatorial recall election that we had back in 2003.  Remember that?  Of course, not.

60% of the voters don’t even remember their own zip codes.  How could they remember the names of any
politicians who aren’t blasted all over the tv every day?

Back in 2003, as the remarkably unpopular Gray Davis was being recalled, we had well over 100 candidates running to replace him.  Who won?  The movie star.  The guy with overwhelming name recognition.

So what will be the result this June, as only the top two vote-getters will be chosen for the general election in November?  Democrats will, for the most part, just scan for Dianne Feinstein’s name, the incumbent, the ONLY Dem on the ballot with any name recognition to speak of.

The only well-known name among the Reps is maybe Orly Taitz.  Remember her?  Google her if you don’t.  Really.  Stop reading right now and Google her.

The smaller parties’ candidates will get their usual 1 or 2%, maybe a little more, because there’s no Green running and the Greens will probably vote for P&F, but there are two of those.  No chance at all that a “third” party candidate will make it into the #2 spot.

It’s possible that, among the non-Feinstein candidates, no one will get more than 20% of the vote.  Do you understand what kind of nutjob could get 20%, if the nutjob has just the slightest bit of name-recognition against a bunch of unknowns?

Do I need to remind you that about 30% of Americans STILL think
Saddam Hussein planned 9/11?  There is a decent chance that we will see Orly Taitz vs Feinstein in November..

This is exactly what I was trying to tell everybody when the “Open Primary” thing was on the ballot.  It really should have been called the “Top Two” initiative.  There was also something glaringly missing in the summary given for it.  It DID say:.

…only the two candidates receiving the greatest number
of votes in the primary will appear on the general election
ballot regardless of party preference.

Here’s what it did NOT say:

…only the two candidates receiving the greatest number of
votes in the primary will appear on the general election ballot
regardless of HOW FEW VOTES THOSE TWO CANDIDATES
RECEIVE.

If there were 1,000 candidates, and no one received more than 1% of the vote, only someone receiving 1% and someone receiving 0.9% would move on to the general election ballot.  That’s what Prop 14, which I know some of you voted for, says.  That’s the law in California.

Congratulations.  You got what you voted for.

If anyone really wanted a better election system, they would propose IRV, but there aren’t any big money interests that want a better system.  They want one they can control, and that means making sure only the best-known candidates, those with the most advertising behind them, even get onto the ballot in November.  That was the intent of Prop 14 from the start.  But they just might get an Orly Taitz out of it.

“But we’ve seen crazy nominees among the Reps in all kinds of elections.  How is this any more likely than under the old system?”

…I hear you say.

a couple of differences:

(1)  Crossover sabotage.  I have no doubt that many Dems, confident that Feinstein will end up in the “top two”, will vote for Orly just for the fun of it.  Under the old “closed” primary, only people registered with a given party could vote on that party’s candidates.  People connected to the party are more likely to listen to whatever they have in the way of leaders, who might have a clue who the non-crazies are.  With an “open” primary, active party members are more easily overwhelmed by votes from outside the party.

(2)  No “third” parties appearing on the November ballot at all, ever.  Under the old system, there was usually one candidate nominated by each of five or six parties on the ballot in November.  Now, there will never be more than two, and they might be from the same party.  Two things about this:

- Some day, both the Dems and the Reps are likely to come up with an Orly, or there could be two Orlys on the November ballot from the same party.  You might think all “third” parties are crazy, but Orly puts most of them to shame.  The chances of getting a non-crazy from among five or six is much greater than between only two.

- One way that a party maintains its ballot access is by receiving a certain percentage of the vote in a general election.  Primaries don’t count.  With no “third” party candidate ever being listed in a general election ever again, they’re left with only one way to stay alive, under the Elections Code:  registration numbers.

That last item is likely to have been a major motive for Prop 14 to begin with.

But what’s most important to remember, though I know voters won’t, is that Prop 14′s proponents told us that it would lead to “more moderate” candidates on the November ballot.

Yeah, we’ll see.

So comment.  Tell me I’m wrong.