Debate Proceeds Despite Green Party Lawsuit – Hear Jill Stein On Defense Here
Well at least my favorite candidate is not handcuffed to a chair for tonight’s debate. Tonight’s debate is proceeding in the wake of a court challenge by Green Party Candidate Jill Stein. Here is the latest from her campaign:
Last week Green Party presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein was arrested, along with VP candidate Cheri Honkala, attempting to get into the presidential debates in Hempstead, New York. This week her fight continues with a lawsuit filed today against the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD), claiming that the CPD, Democratic National Committee, and Republican National Committee, together with the Federal Election Commission and Lynn University, had deprived her of her constitutional rights to due process, equal protection, and free speech, as well as her statutorily protected civil rights.
Read full article and comments.
Steele Comments at Forbes (Click Above); Safety Copies Below the Line.
Click for Personal Web Page
First Comment:
Jill Stein is the best of a sorry lot that is so totally clueless about how lost we are they think that being allowed to do the wrong thing with the sponsors of the wrong thing is progress. We live in a two party tyranny with ZERO integrity in our electoral process. This particular election, if Greg Palast has equaled his pre-election investigation in 2000, has already been “won” by Romney through nine different strategies–Obama of course is receiving the “offer” to accept this “reasonable dishonesty” and retire quietly to Chicago to count his gold certificates.
I ran for President as an Reform Party candidate for the nomination, for two reasons: first, to put all the good ideas from many others in one place, We the People Reform Coalition (http://bigbatusa.org); and second, to personally engage all the other Presidential candidates to see if they would come together with me and Occupy and the Independents to demand an Electoral Reform Act of 2012 (crowd-sourced to good effect). All of them, without exception, failed the test. Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich proved to be, as others had predicted, “controlled opposition” whose sole purpose was to keep the honest fringe engaged. Rocky Anderson, Gary Johnson, and Jill Stein are all on varying ego trips with them as the “smartest person in the room” and absolutely no open mindedness about creating a coalition cabinet and a crowd-sourced balanced budget and an end to all taxes substituting the APT Tax…..every single one of these people — all of whom I would be glad to have as part of a big tent coalition — is stuck in the past.
There is only one way we are going to get the USA back on track — organized people are the only thing that will beat organized money. Since labor and religion have betrayed the 99% and sold out as cheerleaders and apologists for the 1%, this is on us — on all of us.
The Pirate Party is now in the USA (this party went from zero to 50+ countries in 3.5 years). The Pirate Party stands for integrity, transparency, and dignity for all. It stands against everything we have become: a corrupt cheating society of mindless drones who have forgotten what it means to be part of America the Beautiful.
Jill Stein’s lawsuit, to be included in the debates, is a very stupid validation of the debate commission, which is a terribly unethical endeavor that displaced the League of Women Voters (who themselves lost their integrity in allowing this to happen) so that the questions could be controlled and rigged, and third parties excluded.
I will not be voting this year, the first time in my 60 years that I do not vote. To vote is to deny the reality that the US electoral process is criminally flawed and a disgusting example of how far down our country has gone in simple moral and intellectual terms. To think that a vote between two evils is anything other than evil is to be infantile, and to enable four more years of what Matt Taibbi calls “Griftopia.” I will not vote for Griftopia. I want my country back, nothing Rocky Anderson, Gary Johnson, or Jill Stein are doing is helping. They refused to come together, now they will hang separately. And rightly so.
Peter J. Reilly (Original Author) Invitation:
Given your background I would appreciate whatever comments you might have on Jill Stein/Green Party defense stands. I noted that you reserve your email address for clients. You should be able to find mine if you would like to contact me off-line.
Thank you for your comment.
Second Comment:
First, am truly delighted you see value in my comment and have called it out for Forbes readers. I was published once before in Forbes, on Open Source Intelligence.
My email address is robert.david.steele.vivas [at] gmail.com. My primary personal web site where I also host 25+ other contributing editors is Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog (http://phibetaiota.net), and my only political site, really more of an ideas site for the public good, is We the People Reform Coalition (http://bigbatusa.org). Put simply, one third of our public, including young people denied the vote, could produce $1 billion for a Pirate Party war chest, overnight, at $10 each. We do not lack for ideas or money, we lack for public imagination of how easily we can restore America the Beautiful.
Jill is not the Green Party and vice versa. In my view the Green Party is the ONLY party that has a thoughtful coherent platfrom, given that the Reform Party, old people clinging to the past and risk averse in the extreme, declined to adopt the platform I put forward. I respect the Green Party enormously, and consider them more earnest and thoughtful than the Libertarians, which is the largest small party, but it runs on fumes and is way too ideological.
Jill Stein as a person I respect and appreciate, but when I too the trouble to seek her out at one of her local fund-raisers, she was a deer in the headlights. She just could not think on her feet or contemplate the reality that there was a presidential candidate from another party that did not really want to be president, just wanted to bring all the small parties together. I left her little fund-raiser as a courtesy, she blew it (as did Gary Johnson when I let him drive my MGB in New Hampshire, and as did Rocky Anderson when he called me — and I liked how he sounded) and then went back to trying to beat the two-party tyranny using old wrong methods.
The two party tyranny can only be beat by a national uprising that includes Occupy in every HOME office of every Senator and every Representative. They need to be literally terrified of having their homes burned to the ground (not that I advocate such extreme actions, I am actually about Truth & Reconciliation instead of vengeance and violence).
Congress has the power to pass a law that puts every validated national party (thus including Green, Libertarian, Natural Law, Reform, and Socialist) on every state ballot for FEDERAL elections, and also mandating they be included in all debates. This law has been introduced to Congress NINE TIMES and each time been laughed out of the room by the two-party tyranny.
I credit Theresa Amato with bringing the term “two-party tyranny” into the mainstream, her book 2009 Grand Illusion: The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1595583947/ossnet-20) is a book every American should read. I am the #1 Amazon reviewer for non-fiction, reading in 98 categories, all visible here: http://phibetaiota.net/reviews/ where Forbes readers can also find my two master lists of reviews organized as an adult primer on reconnecting to intelligence and integrity.
For many years I have been the proponent for public intelligence in the public interest, something our government does not offer. Now, looking back, I see that the US Government has taken three wrong turns: 1) accepting a central bank that is a front for private wealth; 2) allowing Carnegie and Rockefeller to close down all public transportation as part of their strategy to push the car and oil, at the same time they turned schools into advanced child care prisons; and 3) letting private wealth and private crime in collaboration with selected Cuban exiles and CIA officers get away with murdering JFK. From that point on every President has been a puppet.
There is good news. For that see my positive list of book reviews. I am available for extended interaction with Forbes readers if desired. Right now I am looking for work, see my complete personal web page (Wikipedia sucks), for a full view see http://tinyurl.com/Steele2012.
My signal national offering, apart from my books, is the concept of an Open Source Agency that would nurture an “all in” approach to all the opens, see my book at Amazon, also in Kindle, THE OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING MANIFESTO: Transparency, Truth & Trust (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1583944435/ossnet-20) and my long-standing digital file, Open Source Agency Executive Access Point at http://tinyurl.com/OSA2011.
Restoring America comes down to one word: INTEGRITY.
Semper Fidelis,
Robert David STEELE Vivas
Third Comment:
Afterthought: I tend to scare people that do not have the broad intellect or solid ethical grounding needed to actually think through what I am saying. Since Forbes is ostensibly a rag read by the rich, let me reiterate what I have said many times before: reform should not and must not seek retribution against or confiscation of the assets of the 1%. [Similarly, I have learned the hard way that government spending reform must be job and revenue neutral district by district].
The ONLY sustainable path into the future is one that combines Truth & Reconciliation (one cannot achieve reconciliation without getting the truth on the table) with the elimination of all of the obstacles to the education and empowerment of the 99%. The single most brilliant treatise I have read on the latter point is Will Durant's original 1916 thesis, now available as Philosophy and the Social Problem (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0973769866/ossnet-20).
The single most relevant work in modern times is in my view that of C.K. Prahalad, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0137009275/ossnet-20). I have been astonished to see most completely miss his core point: the five billion at the bottom have an annual aggregate income of four trillion, this is four times that of the annual aggregate income of the one billion rich–but the poor need $2 ceramic fridges buried in the ground, not $2000 sub-zero units.
My greatest concern is that humanity will self-destruct before our inner angels can come to the fore. 2012 is year one in Epoch B, the era of bottom-up collective intelligence, long-term thinking, and full openness — closed systems are inherently corrupt and make bad decisions. The greatest moment in American history in terms of the rich having a brain was in New York in 1920 when they realized they had to institute public health for the poor because disease does not play favorites. Health cannot be bought, it must be earned. The Earth is now like the ghettos of New York, and except for Dick Cheney's bunker in Dubai, every person, every place, is in the same closed space.
I will end with my favorite quote while nodding toward Buckminster Fuller, Medard Gabel, and Herman Daly, three of my heros. This is from a paper by Dr. Russell Ackoff, one of the pioneers of reflexive thinking:
“The righter we do the wrong thing, the wronger we become. When we make a mistake doing the wrong thing and correct it, we become wronger. When we make a mistake doing the right thing and correct it, we become righter. Therefore, it is better to do the right thing wrong than the wrong thing right. This is very significant because almost every problem confronting our society is a result of the fact that our public policy makers are doing the wrong things and are trying to do them righter.” (Ackoff 2004)
My next book is tentatively titled Public Governance in the 21st Century: New Rules, Hybrid Forms, One Constant – The Public. A link to its starting point, and other seminal chapters and articles of mine, can be found easily by looking for 21st Century Intelligence Core References 2007-2013.
If anyone out there wants to orchestrate funding me for a year to write this book and help bring us all together around the core concepts of public intelligence and universal integrity, I am available and globally mobile.
